That was reportedly Anne Carson's response to winning the Nobel Prize in literature. It might also serve as a response to Princeton's public congratulations to her. Carson taught classics there in the 1980s and was denied tenure. Now the university is celebrating its association with a writer it once decided it could do without.

Institutions have a gift for recognizing excellence once it belongs to someone else.

McGill is celebrating, too. It closed its classics department in 1997, though Carson stayed on and received a named professorship in 2000. Its congratulations are less embarrassing than Princeton's, but closing a department suggests a judgment about the value of its work. Another Canadian writer of some renown put it succinctly: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." Universities might post that outside the provost's office.

As a scholar of ancient Greek, Carson will know the old couplet about seven cities claiming the dead Homer--the same cities that allowed him to beg for bread in their streets. Whatever the literal truth, the sentiment survives because we recognize the behavior. Carson need not beg for bread, and had substantial honors long before Stockholm called. The pleasure here is in recalling what bureaucracies tend to reward: showing up, keeping quiet, and giving nobody a reason to reconsider how things are done. Originality often looks like a personnel problem until it wins a prize.

Prizes are hardly reliable measures of quality. Committees make decisions, and those decisions tell us something about committees. But occasionally an award directs attention toward someone whose existence is reassuring. Carson is........

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