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sheer nonsense to waste their two years. My job is to teach them their full course. It does not matter in how many days I do it."
In the evening he came to my house, and he said, "Don't leave us."
I said, "What has happened, has happened, and I cannot enter your university for the simple reason... you just see, I have burned all my certificates, because I don't want bridges with the past. I will never need these certificates. Now I am an uneducated man."
He said, "I will not say anything to anybody."
I said, "That is not the point. I really wanted to resign, but I was simply waiting -- it should come from you, not from me."
Almustafa is saying:
BUT RATHER WHEN THESE THINGS GIRDLE YOUR LIFE AND YET YOU RISE ABOVE THEM NAKED AND UNBOUND.
My father was worried, my friends were worried. My students came, saying, "Please take your resignation back."
I said, "That is impossible. I don't have any qualifications to be your teacher anymore."
My father was saying to me, "Even if you have resigned, what is the point of burning all your certificates and qualifications?"
I said, "What is the point of keeping them? Keeping them means, somewhere deep down, the desire is still there... perhaps you may need them, cling to them. I am now completely free of all that education which has not given anything to me, and I don't want to carry those wounds -- they are not certificates -- always with me."
After two years, the vice-chancellor asked me, "At least once in a while you can come, to address the whole university." So I went. He took me into his room, to the window from where he used to see my car. He said, "A strange phenomenon -- only that tree was green. Now that too has died."
I said, "Life is mysterious. Perhaps the tree had fallen in love with me, perhaps the tree was living just for me, because for nine years continually my car was waiting under the tree, and I had become very friendly with the tree. It was not only a question of parking the car under it, I always thanked the tree. Once in a while, when my chauffeur was with me, sitting at the back, he would say, "You are really crazy -- thanking
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