Lit S.
People have been asking about Lit S.
What did we go through when we were thinking about it? – Whether Evans despised us too much? Would Purvis and Clements even look at us and not have to spit? (Clements retired after we left, didn’t he?) – I remember creeping up to Evans, wringing my hands, and in a mortified whisper, asking, Is Milton OK for special interest? (Dear God, I don’t think that agony would ever quite leave me.) (Austen does strange and terrible things to the mind, not the least inflicting it with the suspicion that one is the sole object of contempt in the universe.)
I suppose it was gratitude as much as anything that made me work hard when I got into Lit S. It was wonderfully fun – there is Shakespeare outside B+ for Hamlet! – but did anyone else find it hideously difficult as well? The people who said there are no pain receptors in the brain are wrong. (Of course, if you were Yen, it must have been nothing.)
I remember the first essay Rollins returned – I had toiled over it, but the more I did to it, the crappier it became, until I handed it in more to have done with it than because it was complete. (The same thing happened in Uni. The Homer essay had a whole month of love and suffering lavished on it; but it was the Milton, knocked off in under a week, that got the highest marks. Oh well.) Su-Lin had the same problem I think. We can’t seem to not pour our entire tortured souls into every essay; we have grown to define ourselves by what we write of Virginia Woolfe, of Zola Neale Hurston, of the Gawain-Poet. Literature must possess you entirely, or not at all.
Did anyone, wanting to say something in an essay, suddenly felt he had to say a hundred other things before it could be said properly? And each of the other hundred things needed its own introduction as well? Every book one read obliges one to read six others (not that I’ve never eked an essay out of a single piece of criticism; but one does one’s best). Was anyone ever afraid to start, fearing it will never be finished? Have we gotten over that? Minzhi (who always accuses me of needing a hinterland)? (I will never find the time or gumption to learn Latin, I fear.)
We will never truly write a good essay, nor even a tolerable one. We will merely run out of time.
What did we go through when we were thinking about it? – Whether Evans despised us too much? Would Purvis and Clements even look at us and not have to spit? (Clements retired after we left, didn’t he?) – I remember creeping up to Evans, wringing my hands, and in a mortified whisper, asking, Is Milton OK for special interest? (Dear God, I don’t think that agony would ever quite leave me.) (Austen does strange and terrible things to the mind, not the least inflicting it with the suspicion that one is the sole object of contempt in the universe.)
I suppose it was gratitude as much as anything that made me work hard when I got into Lit S. It was wonderfully fun – there is Shakespeare outside B+ for Hamlet! – but did anyone else find it hideously difficult as well? The people who said there are no pain receptors in the brain are wrong. (Of course, if you were Yen, it must have been nothing.)
I remember the first essay Rollins returned – I had toiled over it, but the more I did to it, the crappier it became, until I handed it in more to have done with it than because it was complete. (The same thing happened in Uni. The Homer essay had a whole month of love and suffering lavished on it; but it was the Milton, knocked off in under a week, that got the highest marks. Oh well.) Su-Lin had the same problem I think. We can’t seem to not pour our entire tortured souls into every essay; we have grown to define ourselves by what we write of Virginia Woolfe, of Zola Neale Hurston, of the Gawain-Poet. Literature must possess you entirely, or not at all.
Did anyone, wanting to say something in an essay, suddenly felt he had to say a hundred other things before it could be said properly? And each of the other hundred things needed its own introduction as well? Every book one read obliges one to read six others (not that I’ve never eked an essay out of a single piece of criticism; but one does one’s best). Was anyone ever afraid to start, fearing it will never be finished? Have we gotten over that? Minzhi (who always accuses me of needing a hinterland)? (I will never find the time or gumption to learn Latin, I fear.)
We will never truly write a good essay, nor even a tolerable one. We will merely run out of time.
