During my undergrad (Go Cougs!) I had to take a bunch of English classes. Mostly because I was an English major. Some of these classes were lame, some were inspiring, and most involved me writing a paper on either My Antonia or Young Goodman Brown. Occasionally both. There are a few memories of that time that really stick with me--when I did my senior seminar on Wallace Stegner, when I had an Early English class where the girl behind me knit chainmail the entire time, and when my Brit Lit professor told us that we were addicted to p*rn.
Guess which one I am complaining about?
Here is the gist:
Brit Lit prof (who was an honest to goodness cowboy) was of the school of thought that literature was to be read, analyzed, and re-analyzed. When one of my classmates said that he was missing the vital part of literature, the experiencing, he told her it sounded like she was comparing the classics to p*rn*graphy. All of the women in the class freaked out on him. Because we were FEMALE ENGLISH MAJORS. One of the pre-requisites for that department is to have an unnatural attachment to LM Montgomery and to have acted out scenes from Laura Ingles Wilder in the shower. Come on.
He would not be swayed, and I think that some people's grades eventually suffered because they refused to submit to his textual-analytical school of thinking. (Not me, though, because I know how to play the game, peeps. Principles? Not when I can get an A!)
But I often think of that conversation, that diatribe, and I wish that I would have recited this to him--my favorite poem, "Sonnet II," from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is one of the world's greatest everythings. Read on, and I defy you to simply analyze and go tend your cattle.
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go - so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, 'There is no memory of him here!'
And so stand stricken, so remembering him
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