Faculty Remarks:
Dear Alice:
I see something of our friend Brennen–who must write and I hope profess–in you. Like him, you will create, as you are a force of nature in intellect, in gathering together, and in an art-turned, art-tuned Emersonian insistence on life well lived—that is, beautifully so. For where did “Long Way Home” come from? One answer, apropos of the fact that you had never taken a creative writing course, is from hard work, including the will to revise, and excellent 11thhour guidance by Professor Maren. The other is that it came out of the ferocity with which you read and listened among 70 others as a first-year Electrical Engineer in “The Novel, Live!” and then course after course, coffee house session after coffee house session, circle after circle, went after what was in your soul. Earlier this spring, when the fearsome foursome gathered for senior talk, you announced a conflict and then somehow made it anyway, in flying colors! So Dai-like, I must say. – Tom Ferraro
Verlyn Klinkenborg sent Alice to see me in the spring of 2019. Already then I learned something important about Alice, namely that she is interested in everything. As a result, she has the most crowded timetable I have ever seen. In spite of our best efforts we simply could not find a time to meet at the end of last spring. But in August she turned up in my office, to talk about writing, and existence. Alice is that rare person who loves the sciences as much as the humanities. It was such a pleasure to haveher in my class on Existentialism this spring. After a few weeks, I came to take Alice’ strong understanding of philosophy as a given. But her capacity to respond with finesse and nuance to poetic language never ceased to surprise me. Alice saw not just what our writers said, but what they were doingwith their words. I hope she will continue to express herself in writing, for the world needs her voice, needs her attempts to make us see what she sees. –Toril Moi
I remember vividly the day Alice Dai first appeared in my office at Duke. It was January 2019.She was simply seething with questions, and the questions—the artesian force of them—seemed to do away with any sense of physical self-consciousness, though the nimbus of meta-self-consciousness that always surrounds Alice never abated. Soon, she was resting her elbows on my desk with her head in her hands, as if, really, it was just too much head to carry around unsupportedby anything except a neck. They were good questions. Some were very deep, and even the ones that felt a little shallow were still terribly wide. Some were technical. Most were existential. I felt like I was being given a free-form test on the nature of life and writing and Alice Dai. I hope I passed.Alice came to see me almost every week that semester, and I quickly learned that questions tend to be cyclical in her mind, spiraling round and round, queuing up to be asked again in hopes of finding a better, or at least different, answer. I don’t mean to say that she asked the same questions each week. But because any series of Alice-questions, asked in any order or from any direction, led inevitably to the foundation of existence itself, and her role within it, we often found ourselves, after half an hour or forty-fiveminutes, in familiar surroundings. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot from it, about myself and about Alice.I hope that you, Alice, will think of this brief bit of prose not as a recommendation or a grading report, but as a testimonial of the kind the Wizard of Oz hands out near the end of that movie—an entirely symbolic and superfluous recognition that you are who you are, and that you’re loved and valued for those qualities and the way you embody them. I’d go on to spell out those qualities—the fervor of your intellect, the heat of your creative desire, the way you knit and un-knit and re-knit yourself as you move through the world—simply because you need to be reminded of them. Most of the truly creative people I’ve ever known were smarter about looking at the world around them than at themselves. And most of them went through a stage I think you’ll understand—where the distinction between themselves and the world around them seemed merely nominal, barely worth paying attention to.As for me, I miss those conversations, and I hope they’ll resume in some form one of these days. I’m truly sorry that the end of your time at Duke has to be so insubstantial, so un-ceremonial. I look forward to watching you give substance and ceremony to your world as you invent in the months and years to come. – Verylin Klinkenborg
