Because I occasionally still fall prey to the “parents are parents and not actually real people” fallacy, I was surprised when my dad mentioned how sometimes, because of the particulars of your life at a given moment, a book or film can suddenly and profoundly touch you. I guess I thought this was something that happened only to me, or only to people who frequently read fiction (my dad’s a nonfiction man, primarily). On further reflection, though, I suspect that this may be a fundamental and universal human experience.
A lot of novels have grabbed me over the years, and for various reasons. When I read the The Chronicles of Narnia in second grade, for instance, I was just old enough that (having experienced the relentless routine of the school day for a few years) I was incredibly aware of and disgusted with the usual. Formal education was boring for me pretty much all the way on up through high school, and I think fantasy series–Narnia, Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce’s work, etc.–rushed in to sooth the sting of constrained dulness that was a major feature of my teens and pre-teens.
College wasn’t boring anymore, but actually caring (about more than my GPA) made life stressful in new ways. An accidental reading of Byatt’s Possession while applying to grad school felt, at the time, like the only thing between me and nervous breakdown. At any other time the book would have been merely interesting and well-written, but at that time it was precisely the passionate case for the pleasure and worthiness of an academic career that I so urgently needed to remind myself that all this worry would be worth it in the end.
In recent weeks, it hasn’t been books or movies so much as graffiti. Someone wrote “Try Harder” in black sharpie on the rise of a stair approaching the third floor of Denney Hall. Every time I see it I feel like it’s speaking directly to me, and I do try harder, at least for awhile. Another anonymous friend scribbled “you are smart and beautiful” in a toilet stall somewhere on campus; I didn’t feel either of those things the day I found it. And, one day when the sidewalk along Neil Avenue was freshly poured, someone grabbed a stick and wrote “forget regret” in the wet concrete.
That person didn’t know that I would run past their defacement of public property on a November morning when I needed to hear what they had to say. A.S. Byatt didn’t know that my emotional stamina in the fall and winter of 2009-2010 depended on her publishing a literary love story. That’s what makes the phenomenon so powerful, I think–it reminds us that we’re all human, and more the same than we are different. People put their words out there without knowing for whom, and because we’re all so similar at the bottom of it all, their words are the perfect shape for the holes in someone’s heart that so desperately need filling.
ng to absorb knowledge from a very dense text. One pushes and strains and makes grotesque faces, and yet after long periods of intense and exhausting effort only a few pathetic nuggets of knowledge have passed in to the mind. (This in, of course, is what makes it reverse constipation. Conventional constipation is naturally engaged in the effort to pass said pathetic nuggets out…as it were. The direction of this passage is irrelevant, however, in light of the striking similarity between the frustration and discomfort of such fruitless effort.)
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?
go too far and found myself sitting on the edge of my bed in tears trying to think of something to do and feeling that everything was too much effort. I didn’t want to read Remains of the Day, I didn’t want to watch TV, I didn’t want to go for a walk, I didn’t want to do art, and I certainly didn’t want to study. Eventually, I forced myself to grab a new book, unopened, recently purchased for two dollars at a half-price books warehouse sale.
PocketGarden 