Initiation into Doktorhood

To see the rest of the photographs from graduation, click here.

The last day I had my graduation regalia, Dear Husband and I went to campus to take some informal photographs. One of those became my "graduation portrait." Here are two more.

1) The line stretched around the corner in front of the Alma Mater, but on a tip we went to the art and design school, whose students had created a paper-mache replica. DH took the photo as if I had climbed onto her pedestal and he were standing below. I don't know whose head you can see under her arm.

2) I have always liked the statue in front of the Krannert Art Museum, because it reminds me of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (1920), which Walter Benjamin described as the angel of history in "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).

Image credit: Wikicommons

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."


So it's not supposed to be an Alma-Mater pose I'm doing but rather angel arms (or wings). The statue's name is really "Initiation," which is also appropriate for marking my initiation into the storied realm of doktorhood. That's Frau Doktor to you!