Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Sanity? Where?
So, this quarter has been driving me nuts. No, not peanuts. Not the politely salted mixed nuts next to the ice bucket that no one touches during Christmas parties. No, no--I'm talking impossible walnuts in the shell, setting next to a decorative nutcracker. There is just no way--not without breaking said decoration.It's the trouble with studying something you really love. Studying something you love, making it work...you start to hate it. The last thing I want is for reading and writing to be things I don't do for myself because I've had to do them for other people. I don't want that passion taken away from me. It's frustrating because the more I learn about literature, the more I seem to understand it...the less important it starts to be. Literature is a game, a crafted fabrication by paid liars.
Upper division literature courses have had me picking through the essays of the great thinkers of other times....times in France where certain folks had the luxury of doing nothing but making decisions (confusing, complex, labyrinth-type concepts) while consuming copious amounts of opium and absinthe. Then you take those ideas and apply them to everything--every work, every thought, every word, every swoop and dot of punctuation. It even works if said word or swoop is absent...because of course if it's absent, that means something too.
In attempt to reclaim my love of reading, I ordered some books from amazon at the beginning of the quarter.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (a sunshiny, page-turner if ever there was one! har har)...which I have wanted for a while.
And...Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Lifeby Abigail Thomas.
Thank you Abigail Thomas for my sanity. The book is made up of a series very short (and very short) stories from her life. Plain and simple. It's like sitting down with one of your parents really interesting friends and having one of those talks that makes you remember why it's nice to talk to people in the first place.
I want to share one of them with you (one which just reminded me there is life outside of finals and French philosophers).
An Elegant Theory
She and the kids were eating at the Moon Palace, the
Chinese restaurant on 112th and Broadway where physi-
cists from Columbia University used to have their feasts
and scratch their theories on the backs of napkins and
matchbooks. Her daughter looked up from her moo-shu
vegetables and with her chopsticks indicated a man whose
iron-colored hair stuck up five inches from his head like
a cloud of wires. "Too much science," she said, a theory
elegant in its simplicity.
Thomas, Abigail. Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life.
Anchor Books, New York: 2000. p.99
In the end they're all just stories.
"Breathe". Personal Photograph by Natalie Rogers.June 2004.
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Things can be crazy this time of year. Good luck keeping your head on straight! I know how it is with hating what you love. Sometimes I get so fed up with the mistakes I make in German that I just want to ditch the language all together - then I listen to Tokio Hotel and feel better :D