Reflections at the end of a degree...
I handed in my final paper today for my Racial Formations class. It might be my last academic paper ever, although I doubt it will really end up being the last essay I ever complete. They make you write things in law school, or so I hear. And who knows...after a year or two out in the real live working world I might want to take another run at doing a PhD. The thought of it right now makes me want to run screaming in the other direction and say, open up a bowling alley in Florida, but that could change.
It's funny, because now that my English and Cultural Studies MA is doneski I can only conclude that I still don't know much about English or Cultural Studies or Literature or that tricky thing called the human condition.I was just reading this due South fanfic, which is so good and so sad and so honest about the way we all go about our fucked-up lives. It draws heavily from Eliot's "The Waste Land". And I didn't recognize the quotations until the author's note end. And even when I went back and re-read the relevant sections I still had no freaking idea what it was about. That may just be Eliot, or it may be me and my woeful ignorance, but it seems like I really should have read "The Waste Land" sometime during the course of my five years of English. Or at least, I should be able to understand it when presented with small sections. Right now the degree seems to represent all the stuff I never got to learn or read or talk about because I was busy learning and reading and talking about other stuff I really didn't give a shit about. Not that I'd give a shit about "The Waste Land". I'd probably hate it. But still.
I feel like my opportunity to be the kind of person who has read and understood Eliot is slipping away. Someday soon I'll be completely invested in something else - a career, law school, maybe a child, and I won't have time to read anymore. When I do have time to read now I end up reading...well, fanfic stuff, or comics, or romance novels, or bestsellers that won't ever end up on a seminar reading list. Those choices are probably the result of some kind of rebellion against the serious stuff I've had to read this year. But life is so goddamn short and right now I feel like I've spent the last five years reading things that I didn't like or that don't matter or that were wrong, in some way. Like I should have become something different than what I am now after finishing my MA. I should be able to recognize lines from "The Waste Land" or get really excited about going to the library tomorrow and checking out a copy of the complete works of Joyce. I should love literature. It shouldn't make me feel tired and depressed and inadequate.
Anyway. I'll cut it off there before I get really morose. I did decide that I want to get a tattoo to celebrate finishing the degree. This will require a lot of thinking and research but I've got a general idea about what I want and where I'll put it. I'm going to find a nice font and work up a few decorative flourishes and then get this tattooed on my right shoulder:
Everything was beautiful,
And nothing hurt.
I'm not a big Vonnegut nut, by any means. I read Slaughterhouse Five for a particularly brutal American Lit class back in my fourth year and came out hating pretty much everything except that sentence. Someone (Bloom?) called it the most perfect sentence in English literature. I always liked it for its irony. It's the phrase Billy Pilgrim, the time-jumping/alien-abductee protagonist of Slaughterhouse, wants chiseled on his tombstone. And of course it's a complete lie - nothing was beautiful in Billy's life, and everything hurt. But he wants it put on his tombstone anyway because despite having the amazing ability to see his whole life from any perspective he wants, the only way Billy can summarize everything is with this tremendous fiction. And that's so...human. I love it for its beauty and I love it for the lie. It's a literary reference but it's not too pretentious, and if it's on my shoulder I won't really have to see it if it turns out to be incredibly ugly or embarrassing.
So there. The degree is finished and all I'll get is a lousy tattoo.
It's funny, because now that my English and Cultural Studies MA is doneski I can only conclude that I still don't know much about English or Cultural Studies or Literature or that tricky thing called the human condition.I was just reading this due South fanfic, which is so good and so sad and so honest about the way we all go about our fucked-up lives. It draws heavily from Eliot's "The Waste Land". And I didn't recognize the quotations until the author's note end. And even when I went back and re-read the relevant sections I still had no freaking idea what it was about. That may just be Eliot, or it may be me and my woeful ignorance, but it seems like I really should have read "The Waste Land" sometime during the course of my five years of English. Or at least, I should be able to understand it when presented with small sections. Right now the degree seems to represent all the stuff I never got to learn or read or talk about because I was busy learning and reading and talking about other stuff I really didn't give a shit about. Not that I'd give a shit about "The Waste Land". I'd probably hate it. But still.
I feel like my opportunity to be the kind of person who has read and understood Eliot is slipping away. Someday soon I'll be completely invested in something else - a career, law school, maybe a child, and I won't have time to read anymore. When I do have time to read now I end up reading...well, fanfic stuff, or comics, or romance novels, or bestsellers that won't ever end up on a seminar reading list. Those choices are probably the result of some kind of rebellion against the serious stuff I've had to read this year. But life is so goddamn short and right now I feel like I've spent the last five years reading things that I didn't like or that don't matter or that were wrong, in some way. Like I should have become something different than what I am now after finishing my MA. I should be able to recognize lines from "The Waste Land" or get really excited about going to the library tomorrow and checking out a copy of the complete works of Joyce. I should love literature. It shouldn't make me feel tired and depressed and inadequate.
Anyway. I'll cut it off there before I get really morose. I did decide that I want to get a tattoo to celebrate finishing the degree. This will require a lot of thinking and research but I've got a general idea about what I want and where I'll put it. I'm going to find a nice font and work up a few decorative flourishes and then get this tattooed on my right shoulder:
Everything was beautiful,
And nothing hurt.
I'm not a big Vonnegut nut, by any means. I read Slaughterhouse Five for a particularly brutal American Lit class back in my fourth year and came out hating pretty much everything except that sentence. Someone (Bloom?) called it the most perfect sentence in English literature. I always liked it for its irony. It's the phrase Billy Pilgrim, the time-jumping/alien-abductee protagonist of Slaughterhouse, wants chiseled on his tombstone. And of course it's a complete lie - nothing was beautiful in Billy's life, and everything hurt. But he wants it put on his tombstone anyway because despite having the amazing ability to see his whole life from any perspective he wants, the only way Billy can summarize everything is with this tremendous fiction. And that's so...human. I love it for its beauty and I love it for the lie. It's a literary reference but it's not too pretentious, and if it's on my shoulder I won't really have to see it if it turns out to be incredibly ugly or embarrassing.
So there. The degree is finished and all I'll get is a lousy tattoo.