About Caroline Meline
Who I am…
That’s a very philosophical issue! I am, and we are, many things and one thing simultaneously. We are a series of changing phases and interests, and through it all, a single all-purpose identity.
One of my biggest questions is, how much choice do we have over who we are and become. I have been thinking about that for years.
My book is part memoir, so there is a narrative in there of parts of my life—the parts having the most to do with my eating disorder. The falling apart parts.
What I share on this platform are the better parts, what I’ve been doing since stopping my eating disorder, when I began recovering stability and redrawing my parameters.
I’m excited to share some of my phases and stages with you because my example shows how a person can come through a bad phase, one that lasted for decades, and reach a fulfilling new life activity.
How It Began
Teaching
It still surprises me that I am a college teacher in my senior years. I didn’t plan on this. But I was writing something that ultimately became the book featured here, and I had a question that demanded an answer. That led to pursuit of a PhD, and that led to teaching.
How I got here.
I had majored in English in college (Smith), and married my high school sweetheart right after college graduation. My husband had one year left in his MBA program at Columbia Business School, so we were New Yorkers for a while. We lived on Riverside Drive at 116th Street our first year of marriage, which was a great address!
I imagined myself having a career as an editor at a book publishing company or magazine, and I did land a job at a prestigious literary agency. But I got pregnant! The agency promptly fired me, and I finished the pregnancy working as a secretary at the Columbia School of Journalism.
Our first child, Michael, was born around the same time my husband finished his MBA. He got a job in Philadelphia, and that’s where we went, now three of us, and I have been here ever since.
Three years later, our second son, Matt, was born, but the marriage failed. We divorced, but both of our sons grew up in Philly, and our four grandchildren were born here.
So, teaching.
It turns out, I really enjoy it, especially my present job. After 18 years in the Philosophy Department at St. Joseph’s University, I have a semi-retirement position teaching one course each semester at Curtis Institute of Music, which is one of the best music schools in the world. I am not exaggerating.
I don’t teach music there, I teach philosophy to students who are musicians. Besides their musical studies, these students are acquiring an education in the humanities and will graduate with a Bachelor of Music degree.
In these two photos, taken in Spring semester 2025, I am teaching the Philosophy of Time and Time Travel. I offer a variety of courses, including several in the area of metaphysics like this one.
It’s a hard course, and every time I teach it, I ask myself why I am doing this. The problem is that the philosophy of time involves physics, including topics such as Galilelan relativity, Newton’s laws of motion, and Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and I don’t have a physics background. Not infrequently, I am learning aspects of the subject along with my students. We are explorers together.
It’s typical of me to be scared to do something, and then seem to be unable not to do it. That’s how I know I don’t have total free will, which is a big topic in my book.
While I take on the hard thing because I am unable not to, the part of me that causes me to doubt myself slows me down.
Perhaps the hardest thing I have done in my life was starting and continuing the process of studying for, and obtaining, a PhD. I was 51 when I started. It took me 11 years, going part-time, so at my graduation, I was 62!
The holiday card I sent out in 2004 said “Mirabile dictu! Grandma gets her PhD!!” and showed me surrounded by my four young grandchildren—three of them four years old (two are twins), and one nine months.
More than two decades have passed since then. My grandchildren are young adults and have witnessed me publish my first book. That, too, was a hard thing I was afraid to start and then could not not finish.
And that’s how I got here.
