Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I thought about how I have always, for as long as I can remember, had trouble falling asleep. As a child, however, the unquietness of my mind stemmed from far more fanciful, yet strikingly more fearful subjects. I was, in general, a bold kid. I’d touch any bug, perform any daring stunt, tackle any social situation (shyness came along with bad skin and unfortunate fashion decisions in junior high), but I was cripplingly frightened of the shadow-world of possible evil I imagined when alone in the dark.
Ritual kept me safe. Every night, after my p
arents read to me and tucked me in, I would say, “I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight” and they would answer with the same redundant phrase, as I had instructed them to do. You had to say it twice, you see, to make absolutely certain it was heard and understood. Then they would leave the door open a crack with the hall light on, so a narrow beam of gold fell comfortingly across my bed. Sometimes, when Daddy was in a silly mood, he would leave the door open a “butt crack,” measuring the width of the opening with his posterior. I would laugh, but when he had gone I would get up and close it to its normal two inches…he didn’t know (how could he!) that skeletons could creep in through a larger opening. With the skeletons safely shut out, I only had to worry about the witches in the closet, the mummy in the niche over my closet, and whatever-it-was lurking under my bed. “Everybody and everything, I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight,” I would whisper out loud, to ensure that the ghoulies, ghosties, and beasties of every sort didn’t feel offended or left-out and creep in to take their revenge. I pulled the covers up to my chin–to protect my neck from vampires–and lay on my side–to protect my heart from the stabbing blades of “murderers.” I lay in the dark, frightened, and thought about things that troubled me. About the witches, skeletons, vampires, mummies, and murderers, yes, but also about nothingness and nonexistence. Someone must have explained to me what death was around the age of five or six, and the concept of non-being gave me a chilling sense of vertigo. Actually, it still does.
I no longer lie in bed hearing the creaks of the sleeping house as monstrous footsteps of innumerable nightmares. Contemplations of what it must feel like not to exist are rarely allowed to trouble my mind. My worries now, however irrational, are far more likely to come to pass than any of my childhood fears. And yet, while I still have trouble falling asleep, these “realistic” fears are warm and welcoming compared to the perilous nightmare-world I invented as a child, in which safety was secured by a delicate web of precautions and rituals that, if disturbed even a little, might bring disaster.
A rich imagination is a child’s greatest asset by day, and her darkest curse by night.
My uncertainty about whether we can ever really firmly latch on to a solid manifestation of ultimate truth stems in part from the history of science, which is in essence a history of wrongness. Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts explains the history of scientific belief as a series of big changes in basic ways of looking at the world. Big changes like earth-centered universe to sun-centered solar system, physics based on Newton to physics based on Einstein, etc. Basically, a paradigm shift entails the realization that very fundamental principles for looking at and making sense of the world are at best flawed, at worst wrong. This has happened too regularly over the course of known history for me to really trust that the currently established way of thinking about anything is in fact the right or true way of thinking. Wouldn’t that be arrogant? Of course it seems like a right and true way of thinking, just like a sun-centered universe seemed the right, true, and only logical arrangement of the universe to pre-Copernican folks. Facts and truths are set out by people, and people are very fallible creatures indeed.
professor raised the question yesterday) to wonder why I should study Old English. It seemed obvious; “Ure ealdfaederas spaecon Westseaxna theode thusend geara aer thissum” (our ancestors spoke the West Saxon language a thousand years ago.) That is, I consider Anglo-Saxon culture and the Old English manuscripts that it produced to be my roots, and everyone should study their roots, right?
ETS. The Educational Testing Service. If it were a person, we might come to blows. Impenetrable webs of bureaucracy, bitchy customer service reps, misleading websites, and money-grubbing monopolies would be a source of annoyance any day, but when they come between me and grad school, I’m neither patiently forgiving nor temperate in my anger. It was like this: in late October I sent out the additional score reports for my general and subject tests. I hadn’t received the subject test scores yet, but I figured that my order would be filled when those scores became available. Why would I make such an unreasonable assumption? Well, only because a statement on the instruction page of the online score-ordering website said:
in the language of my struggle to deal with loss of faith, and utterly forgotten, this poem had still reached someone who “really liked” it, a fellow Minnesotan who thanked me for its creation.
ding experience at least 3x more enjoyable than it would have otherwise been with its pretty cover, ribbon bookmark, and classy illustrations), co-author Seth Grahame-Smith claims the intention of “writing ridiculous, gratuitous scenes of violence and gore in the imitated style of Jane Austen” (9). I was excited. After all, I like fictitious violence as much as the next person. I was ready for zombies and the accompanying blood, brains, and brutality. Here’s what was not, and will never be, ready to accept: