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Dear Members of the Search Committee, I have flown eight hours into the future to be here in the past, in this dark office with you. I grew up here. I knew something like love. I am covered with letters. Like an improbable animal suspended on a skyline, I am writing to tell you how delighted and keenly aware, redoubtably, I would be to step off this airplane to stand in my newly discomfited glare. To be fitted to the raw basin of a hotel attic room at the top of the stairs. To be handed the key to a house for one day. To contemplate a return. To fly in from the future in a dusk of pink forgiveness. Dear Search Committee. Two decades have passed, their many labours. Did you know there are many places in the US and Australia named Ithaca? But only one in Greece. Dear Search Committee, I descend slowly, slackened at the neck. In new clothes, my animal unwilling to admit that the cold hotel sausages look delicious. Contemplate instead the feet of a sculpture under which you fall again and again whose name is beauty, whose name is the mother of Hermes. Dear, I have torn open all the letters you did not send. I confess that it is your dark office, its storied walls, that I most want. To stand in this peculiar sunlight, under these jacaranda trees. To make peculiar this improbable animal of longing. What was it my mother said, that morning, as I woke in her city, our city, a complex evolving picture. You know very well. I am an evolving picture of intersecting revolutionary aesthetic movements. I believe I have made my experience your aims and objectives. Drawn to its many opportunities. Dear Search Committee, I hope your loved ones, too, recede into darkness when you wish for them most. I thank you for your time. I yield my time. I yield to your dark offices.