I haven’t been able to think of a single thing all day since I heard of Marc’s passing. What a tragic loss: Marc’s spirit is/was so utterly unique. So gentle and so deeply thoughtful, so kind and sensitive and funny. I have vivid memories of him doing wacky things like talking passionately about hegemony and then suddenly exclaiming, “Candy!” when he saw a Starburst lying randomly under someone’s desk. He moved so freely between the world of ideas and the world of triviality, and he was willing to really take on any perspective in order to understand it. A beautiful, brilliant, adorable man.
Marc exuded tremendous respect for his students’ intelligence, and you could really feel the warmth of his being, that he was rooting for you to succeed. There was a special twinkle in his eye, and he recognized everyone individually, honoring their presence in class. He also retained a boyish sense of playfulness so that I could imagine Batman posters on his walls at home. One day someone in class recognized another student’s outfit from a specific catalogue, which prompted Marc to tell the story of the time he was walking across a college campus for an interview, all dressed up, when a student stopped him and told him the exact page number of that suit in the J Crew catalogue from the previous calendar year. Someone said, “Bring in the suit, Marc!” and he did, in the next class: he brought in the pale green/grey suit from home to show us all, which made us feel like we were his friends.
I still remember Marc’s comments on my Sociology 101 papers: he would provide such detailed feedback on my essays that I actually felt honored. Here was this intellectual giant taking my dinky 18-year-old ideas seriously and providing very constructive criticism to help launch me forward. We were reading Donna Gaines’ Teenage Wasteland, and I’d written my essay on how as a researcher she changed her appearance to blend in with the teenagers she was studying. But there was a huge blind spot in my method: I had neglected to consider other aspects of personal identity apart from clothing style. Marc wrote sagely in his comments that it was as though I was explaining how to be a clown by focusing only on the clown’s appearance rather than on her mannerisms. My essay was so juvenile and half-baked, and Marc had read it with painstaking closeness. It helped me to take my own intellect seriously, and Marc’s comments had a kindness and gentleness not typical of Smith professors in 1995.
I also remember feeling impressed by Marc’s honesty. Someone asked him how teaching at Smith was different from teaching at a coed institution, and he said, “Smith students flirt less in class.” I remember thinking his response was uniquely candid, that any other professor would have postured and said something hollow or PR-oriented. I never saw Marc be anything less than 100% genuine, and that’s so rare.
One day Luc and I were walking by Marc as he made copies in the Wright Hall copy room, and he looked up and looked at us as we passed. Luc said, “He always has a special way of looking, like he really sees you, like he attributes great importance to you.” That is so true! Marc really looked intimately at things around him, really seeing them instead of looking through them, and he saw the way people were seeing. He was also rather tenderhearted, sensitive to people’s vulnerabilities: he always tried gently to get the quiet students to join in class discussion.
What a lovely, lovely, indescribably special man! I feel astonished and heartbroken that Marc has physically left this world.