Two Saturdays ago, my colleague and friend Julian Nelson went into cardiac arrest and died. About the shock and sadness of losing him I have nothing more to say than that I am heartbroken. But besides the shock, and besides the gaping sadness of losing him, I was insulted by the surprise of his leaving: he was a young man, or at least not an old one, still gadding about Clark College like a boulevardier or a peripatetic philosopher in the week he died. While he had suffered daunting health challenges his whole life, he had an illusionist’s knack for conveying vitality to the world. I must have just been assuming that he would be around forever. As Ophelia would have said, I was the more deceived.

Julian came to work at the same college as me in 2005 as a German professor. I was on his screening committee, in fact, so I met him before almost anybody else at Clark College had. And even before he was hired, I knew that he was someone who, if circumstances permitted, I would be friends with. Thankfully, the circumstances did permit: Clark College hired him, and we became immediate fast friends. I was impressed and a little intimidated by his skill with languages and with his knowledge of writers and philosophers that I had barely heard of, much less read. Yet I think we also saw in one another a love of old books, a commitment to the ancient Stoic concept of kosmopolitês, a shared sense that the world and its follies were an elaborate joke with a hilarious and redemptive punchline just over the horizon.

Lots of people thought we looked alike. I didn’t see the resemblance, frankly, though I can understand that a couple of bald Teutonic men of a certain age will share certain likenesses. One upper administrator at the college–a supervisor to both of us–would call me Julian at least as often as they would call me Joe. After a few months of that public confusion, Julian started greeting me with “Hallo, mein Doppelgänger!” a term which he knew better than anyone conveyed the sense of the eerie, a spirit twin or evil double, as though the existence of one of us spelled trouble for the other. But I knew he was joking, and even if our resemblance had been deadly serious he would have joked about it because humor was his natural stance towards trouble of all kinds.

And trouble did find him. I had only the vaguest notion of many of the difficulties he faced: he approached so many of his misfortunes with such stoic and sardonic humor that I wasn’t always sure how heartbroken he was. But the misfortunes I did see–such as when the college shuttered his beloved German program, not because of his teaching (which was excellent) or student demand (which was strong), but because it seemed a convenient place for the administration to scoop up a little money in a lean time–he faced with aplomb. And, because he had a PhD in comparative literature and knew more about novels than most of the English department, he simply remade himself as an English teacher and kept going. It wasn’t long before he won a second Faculty Excellence Award, this time for teaching in a field he had never intended to work in.

I drank as much beer with him, and shared as many laughs with him, as I have ever done with anyone. And, since I am not a young man myself and I follow not so far behind him, there may be no one else in my life that I will share more beers and silly bookish jokes with. Though we had grown up up across the world from one another, we were both children of a homophobic age that is skeptical of close male friendship, as though the most natural and necessary thing in the world is to say “no homo” after any expression of affection between men. We spoke about this modern hesitancy about male friendship over beers once, bonding over a line from Montaigne that we both loved (ironically for me now, an essay Montaigne had written about the passing of his own close friend, Étienne de La Boétie): “If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because he was he, because I was I.”

I did love him, because he was he and because I was I. As I think about his being gone now, as I consider his wonderful writing that will remain in rough draft forever, the portraits he took with his ancient cameras whose film will never be developed now, my own regret is smaller and more personal. I regret my lack of courage about speaking German with him. He had such facility with English, French, German–I think Greek, even. But I was too reticent, too self-conscious, to say more than a handful of words to him in German. What is it like to speak a language that’s not yours, to know that there are a thousand things you could say if you were speaking your own language, but that in this language, the one you are trying to speak now, you are limited to the crudest approximations and flattest understatements? That the language you are trying to learn has a million deeps and narrows that, even if you practice every day for the rest of your life, you’ll never be able to express? I told him once that I had been studying German daily–I think I was up to a three year streak on Duolingo at that point–in hopes that we would one day talk about books and history in his native tongue like two refined and learned men of the world. (Being refined, being regarded as a man of the world, has been one of my most ridiculous and futile obsessions since I was 12 years old.) And Julian, always the language teacher even years after the college had scuttled the German program, praised my faltering efforts and then made a couple of quick steps in German that escaped me before he had said four or five words.

I’ve lost the chance now to look past my own embarrassment and fear of mistakes, to just speak with the man in whatever poor German I would have been able to cobble together. But in his honor, I want to recite one of the only German poems I know by heart: “Herbsttag,” by Rainer Maria Rilke. This poem, which translates as “Autumn Day” in English, captures the season in which Julian died. And more to the point now, it captures the feeling of the autumn season of life that comes for you, too, if you are lucky enough to live that long.

Tschüss, mein Doppelgänger: Ich vermisse dich.