In the crowded A train with its noisy teenage schoolkids primping and posing and flashing their smartphones like mating plumage, I told him about a class I’d taught on Anna Karenina, in which I’d tried to get the students to isolate the psychological principle underlying the opening descriptions of Anna, where Vronsky meets her and starts shifting his allegiances toward her, away from Kitty Shcherbatsky. I’d drawn their attention to Kitty’s extreme virginal reticence, and then pointed them to the contrasting passages where Vronsky and Anna dance the mazurka together, and where Anna takes the train through the blizzard back to her husband in Petersburg. I wanted them to grasp the particular quality of awakened sexuality in Anna that draws Vronsky to her, and the way Tolstoy frames it as something at once powerfully life enhancing and highly dangerous. I’d told them to look at the phrases he uses to describe Anna in that first meeting, those repeated images of barely contained “animation” and of natural desire swelling up against the straitjacket of a dead marriage. Look at the ominous notes of painful pleasure on the train back to the husband she’s about to betray, I’d told them, where she feels as though something were being torn to pieces, but at the same time finds that feeling oddly exhilarating. I’d wanted them to feel how Tolstoy himself felt the iron law of social convention twisting his heroine’s amazing carnal vitality away from life and onto the path of destruction—the death-ward track that supplies the gruesome terms for the big scene of sexual consummation, with its charnel house imagery of murder and hacked bodies, its terrible mixture of “shame, rapture and horror.” But I couldn’t get anywhere. The more I talked about Kitty’s inviolable virginality and Anna’s awakened desire, the more stubbornly silent the students fell, and the more embarrassed they all looked.

Marco chuckled. “Why do you think that was?”

“I assume because the whole subject has just become so fraught. They’re terrified of saying something that another student might find offensive or, you know, ‘triggering.’ There are serious consequences for doing that now—actual legal consequences. So they prefer not to say anything at all. Somehow we’ve re-created the taboos of the Victorian Era. Different reasons maybe, but the same anxious squeamishness around the whole topic.”

Marco was shaking his head.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it at all.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s you, pal.”

“Me?”

“It’s because you’re old! Not as old as me maybe, but old. They don’t want to listen to some balding geezer with the flesh beginning to sag under his chin—no offense—talking about desire and virginity and the life-enhancing power of awakened sexuality. Of course they find it embarrassing!”