While studying for my thesis defense today, I came across a project I did for a Victorian Lit class a few years back, in which I read through marriage manuals from the 1800s. If you're ever in the library and want some titillating reading, Victorian era marriage books is where it's at. And by "it" I mean the true gems of our Western literary tradition. For this particular project, I'd compiled the love advice from the manuals--what to look for in a companion, how to know if it's "real love," when to confess your love...you know, the things that only every person who's ever lived wants to know. Seeing as it isss the month of love and all that, I figured this might be just the kind of thing the world is in dire need of. So, in three parts, I present:
LOVE ADVICE FROM THE VICTORIANS!
(part one)
IS MY BELOVED WORTHY OF MY AFFECTIONS?
Make a mental note of the statements that are true of your beloved.
My beloved...
occasionally speaks slightingly of the opposite sex
is ill-prepared to honour the virtues of the opposite sex and defend its weaknesses
comes to visit at irregular hours
exhibits a vague or wandering attention
gives proofs of a want of punctuality
shows disrespect for age
sneers at things sacred
absents him/herself from regular attendance at divine service
evinces an inclination to expensive pleasures beyond his/her means
evinces an inclination to low and vulgar amusements
is foppish
is eccentric
is very slovenly in dress
displays a frivolity of mind
exhibits an absence of well-directed energy in his/her worldly pursuits
exhibits symptoms of insanity and nervous derangement, often sinking under the morbidity of imaginary burdens
exhibits frailty of health, such that his/her ability to support/nurture a family may be incapacitated.
If you noted "affirmative" to any of the above statements regarding your beloved, it is best that you let dissolve any intimations of affection that you had begun to nurture within yourself.
If you are one of those fortunate enough to have found a beloved who is not in the least described by any of the above inquiries, return tomorrow for part two...
"IS THIS LOVE I FEEL, OR JUST A FLEETING PASSION OF THE HEART?"
*please note that I am wearing the same shirt as I was on this other thesis day. sick.
In an unexpected and blessed turn of events, beside a warmbright fireplace and a twinkling Christmas tree, in a house and in a town buried in feet of falling snow, this little lady may have just finished her thesis. "Finished" meaning she has (finally) made a draft that just may pass muster. "Finished" meaning she has (finally) made a draft that she is kinda proud of. "Finished" meaning that so-help-me if I have to rewrite this thing again, I am throwing in the towel and moving to France, with or without my degree. This sort of torture has a way of killing part of your happy little soul.
And so tonight, I shall sleep the sleep of angels,
and tomorrow, to the city, for some lights and dinner and easy breathing.
Sometimes writing a thesis is going down a slide,
or eating a pan of brownies,
or watching every episode of Little Dorrit in one night,
or a conversation with the person you love love love,
or driving through the canyon in the fall,
or taking pictures of the pigeons and lampposts in Venice,
or reading Harry Potter late into the night, back when Sorceror's Stone first came out:
You get sucked in and don't ever want to get pulled out.
("Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe" by Nicolas Poussin, via)
She drew back shuddering, ...like the sea that is ruffled when a slight breeze skims across its surface. But after a pause when she had recognized her love, she struck her blameless arms with a loud blow, tore at her hair, embraced the body that she loved, filled his wounds with tears and mixed her weeping with his blood.
(from "Pyramus and Thisbe"
in Ovid's Metamorphoses
trans. D.E. Hill)
[Addendum: You know you're doing what you love when, four hours ago, you told yourself you could stop working at 8pm, but now it's 8:30 and you have no intention of stopping.
Thesis. Library. Books. Latin. Love. Love. Love.]
Some days, when I quiet my anxieties long enough to get myself to the
library, I remember why I got into this gig in the first place. I'm
buried in Latin dictionaries and seven different translations of Ovid,
and all I want to do is sit here for the rest of the day (let the football game and the rain and the hoards of Saturday students not studying march on!) and think about the words and
about what they mean and about why that makes any bit of difference in
this big wide world.
It's silly, but in moments like this, sometimes I could cry I'm so happy that words and books and stories exist.
Sometimes I get discouraged about the lack of "REAL WORLD" skills my literature studies have provided me with. Especially when "SCIENCE" provides lists like this one (featured in Newsweek):
The 13 Most Useless College Majors (As Determined By Science):
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and Theatre Arts
3. Film, Video, and Photographic Arts
4. Commercial Art and Graphic Design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and Religious Studies
7. English Literature and Language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and Archeology
10. Hospitality Management
11. Music
12. History
13. Political Science and Government
Thank you, Science. My life is more or less composed entirely of #1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, & 11.
Now I have a word about these "useless studies." Useless implies these Science-people are making some sort of value judgement of what counts as "use" or "utility." There is a crucial assumption that said-Science-people have overlooked: how they're defining "use." There are more kinds of utility than monetary value. Yes, maybe the above majors are useless if you're trying to make a million before you turn 30. They may be useless if you're trying to land yourself in a career right upon graduation. They may also be useless if you're trying to build missiles or stop computer hackers or fly an airplane. But since when are these things the things we live for? They are merely functions to staying alive...
Maybe my degrees don't do much in the way of curing cancer or sequencing the human genome.
Ahem. Or maybe they do:
I heard a story recently of a famous opera singer who sang at a special banquet. When an older woman commented on his beautiful voice afterwards, he remarked that he'd always wished he'd become a heart surgeon, and that his entire life, he'd felt badly for not doing something that more actively healed people. The woman told him that there is more than one way to be a heart surgeon, that his music and his voice had healed her heart that night.
Similarly, in a storytelling contest in Chicago, Peter Sagal (of NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!") told about his friend Morgan who met Mother Teresa in New York. Morgan told Mother T that she wanted to go with her to Calcutta because Mother T's work was "important." When Mother Teresa asked what Morgan's work was, she said, "What I do isn’t
important. I work in a theater and I help put on plays.
What use is that?” Mother Teresa replied, “There are so many
different kinds of famine in this world. In my country,
there is a famine of the body. In this country, there is a famine of the spirit.
Stay here and feed your people.”
So I'm not using engineering to build wells in Africa to save a thirsty nation. Nor do I know how to cut out tumors to save lives. But there are more kinds of "life" than the physical mortal one. And there are more ways to save a life than through medicine. Art is a medicine of its own, and its own kind of nation-saving well. Maybe I'm mapping the human genome in a different way than "Science" understands: through story and photography and reading people as well as reading books.
And what would this world be music, art, literature? These are the things that make our life lovely. If we stripped down life to only that which serves these Science-people's definition of "use," you know what we'd have? Concrete block buildings and art that only serves political purposes--both of which would be utterly use-full: not a single aesthetic superfluity. But there is more to life than practical utility. I'm not living in survival mode, and neither are you. Add thoughts to the world, not products. Help people come to better thoughts within themselves. I want beautiful film, I want beautiful music, I want beautiful words, and I want to revel in all of them and in the cosmic experiences they bring me to.
No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
-Sure.
Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!
Today was a bad case of the mean reds. One of those hide-under-the-covers mornings, one of those day-after-the-day-which-collapsed-in-on-itself days. So guess what I did. I got up and taught a bunch of kids how to make a website. Then I went to my office, where Sam was also mean-red-ing it. As was Becca. Man. What a day. So we watched videos about charming pastry shops and looked at Mondrian-esque cakes, and threw paperclips at our colleague Drew. (All normal mean-red-day activities.) Then I taught more kids about websites. Then I said, "Peace, yo, I'm done" and went home and ate the hugest salad and bowl of spaghetti (homemade, thank goodness) you've ever seen. I also ate a few cookies. (Listen, in terms of curing the mean reds, I have no pastry shop nearby and no Tiffany's either, so spaghetti was the chosen alternative. Don't judge.)
Then I went to the local library to "write my thesis." I instead took quizzes over stress levels and heart rates, and subsequently learned (by experience) that taking quizzes over stress levels only raises heartrates. Thank you WebMD for always diagnosing me as "high risk" for ebola/cardiac arrest/dengue/meningitis/every-other-disease-I-use-you-to-diagnose.
And then tonight happened, in which I went to the English Department Awards Banquet. Oh boy. Nothing like a tsunami of nostalgia to cure the mean reds and leave your heart bubbling over with joy. (Although a word of caution: nostalgia is a drippy kind of joy. It tends to effulge and ooze and otherwise occasionally leave you crying about days long gone. Kinda like how you feel when you finish watching all the Lord of the Rings movies.)
A word on this Awards Banquet: it happens every year--everyone looks all fancy, we have fancy meal (yes I want more rolls and pats of butter please!), then there’s an impossibly inspirational address given by one of our professors. The whole thing disgusts me it’s so beautiful. And the sun is setting in the windows behind the harp player, and I’m sitting at a table with my MA friends, and around me are Phil and Delys who were the professors I went to London with; Rick whose mind and goodness and words I admire so deeply--Rick who first taught me to love Shakespeare, who first showed me the magic of those plays; Brett and Brian who have coached me through this whole graduate instructor “thing,” and oh so many others. And they’re all smiling on and giving me encouraging nods. In short, it’s an evening to be surrounded by people you’ve grown to love and admire and depend on, and it’s a sad whisper that “this too shall pass” and you’ll soon be SHOVED out of the BYU-tiful nest into the dark and lonely world!
That Banquet is the saddest, most beautiful night of the year. It makes me want to be forever a student of literature, to learn to write and think like those professors who give such beautiful addresses, talking about how literature expands your mind, quoting Thoreau and Shakespeare and Wordsworth. It makes me realize, for that one brief moment, that my study of literature has never been about finding a career or about making myself "marketable." It has only been about love.
It is about leaving an evening class in the deep blue sky of sunset with the lights golden all over campus, and walking home with the remnants of a discussion of Shakespeare, or Donne, or Hemingway still lingering in my thoughts. It is about organizing reading groups, book clubs, culture nights, to read C.S. Lewis together and talk about it in the living room. The “skill set” was never why I got into this racket (although for those of you who are currently English majors struggling to justify your studies, hear this: the skills I have developed as an English major have been surprisingly marketable! So don't despair. Keep reading, keep writing.). I didn't get into The Study of Literature for any of those reasons. It was only for the joy of books upon books, of pages undiscovered and unexplored in library shelves I run my fingers across as I look for “PR 2839 .A2 P58x 2010”. It was only for the exuberance of writing a perfect conclusion, of having my mind BLOWN in British Lit 201, or Modernity, or Shakespeare and Film. I study English for the dream I have of someday knowing all great stories ever told, and all great words ever written.
And this is why the Awards Banquet is the saddest, most beautiful night of the year: because it dredges up from my heart all the reasons I love being a student, all the reasons I love BYU, and worst of all, all the reasons I decided to study literature in the first place. Graduating would be so much easier if they forced you to end in mid-March, when it’s cold outside and you’re in the middle of plucking your head bald for all the term papers you’re writing/grading. But nooooo, they wait until the trees have blossomed, until the warm weather returns, bringing with it all the fondness of your years here. And suddenly you remember all the beautiful reasons you are, in fact, MADLY IN LOVE WITH WHAT YOU'RE STUDYING. Which tangentially is also the reason why graduating suddenly seems absolutely horrible.
Inevitably, as I walk from the Hinckley Center to the library to “work on my thesis,” the wind is blowing warm and bright, like the first nights in Heritage and the outdoor freshman dances, like the nightgames the summer of ‘08, like every memory with Brooke, like walking out of the HFAC after seeing some lovely play or performance that left me bubbling over with satisfaction, like the day Michael and I escaped studying to fly kites, like the walk home after evening classes, profoundly grateful for this thing we call “learning,” for professors with brilliant minds who believe in the beauty of art more than they believe in "marketability." Like every evening that that walk home has left me humming and dreaming and smiling. And again and again, I am brought to the end of this book, or at least this chapter, in "the life of Carolyn." But they are pages I want to reread again and again. They are pages I tear out and write all over and fold up and shove in my pocket. These pages are lovely pages to me.
(my scholastic heroine face. harder than you'd think to pull--just the right amount of hoity-toity and fearlessness.)
i am a heroine, on a heroic enterprise in this journey to become a professor of literature. or so my faculty advisor told me tonight. as being such requires the biannual ritual of term-paper writing, i believe it is high time for the following list:
things i love about writing term papers:
the double-dipped chocolate peanuts. i'll be honest, that IS the first thing i think when term-paper time rolls around every year. no i am not ashamed okay maybe a little. they're in the bookstore at the fudge counter. they really help when it's 3 pm and you have fallen into the black hole of realizing that you don't a) have enough time to write the length of paper you need to, b) have enough time to write the quality of paper you need to, or c) even have an idea for what you are going to write the paper about. at that point, you begin losing any semblance of hope you had, and are nigh resigning yourself to utter despair! bad news. the good news: double-dipped chocolate peanuts will pull you out of the 3 pm black hole. you're welcome.
the stillness of writing a paper at 5 am on the bedroom floor. the morning really is a time when there is enough quiet that the right words seem all around. fruit to be plucked off the tree. (by 3 pm the fruit has been thoroughly plucked and the tree is barren (hence the 3 pm black hole). and then you feel justified in quitting, which is also a good feeling. which leads me to....
hitting the wall. i have become very attuned to my inner sense of focus. my brain hits walls. it used to take me 30 minutes to realize i'd hit a wall. now it only takes 2. when i see the wall, i keep running till i hit it, and then i pack up, and go home for a movie, or for some guitar time. you understand. i am good to my brain. i figure i've got to be if it's going to keep doing me good in this herculean task called term papers.
the nap you get to take because you got up at 5 am to write a paper.
finding cute boys in the library to sit by. sometimes this is the best way to keep me focused, because you think, "oh hey, that cute boy is here studying. that means i should study too." think of it as having your mom in the room with you when you're getting your wisdom teeth removed. in a weird sort of way, knowing friends (or cute boys) are around, sharing in my pain, helps me to be okay with being there, having the wisdom of my brain extracted. (get it, get it? it's an extended metaphor and also a pun.) (and sorry if i'm superficial or creepy for finding cute boys in the library. sue me. and sorry if the comparison of cute boys to your mom is weird. yeah it kind of is.)
finding your one song, the one that is always there to untie the twists you've gotten in your scholastic knickers. this year, mine's "The Longer I Run" by Peter Bradley Adams. (ironic title considering my procrastination rant yesterday)
having sentences just come to me, as i'm in the shower or walking to class or driving home or falling asleep. this results in me memorizing whole paragraphs to type as soon as i get out of the shower, veering off the sidewalk to sit amongst bushes and hammer out a paragraph or two on my way to class, scribbling snippets of sentences and phrases on the back of receipts in my car at every stoplight i stop at, texting myself outlines of my paper because i'm too lazy to get out of bed to find a pen and paper.
the pages and pages of scribbled notes and webs and outlines and sketches and maps that prove that i'm actually thinking, and not just sitting mindlessly staring into space. someday when i am a genius i will publish all of these in a sort of compendium to the art of crazy-writing.
that moment when you've been wrestling through empty ideas and tangled thoughts, and suddenly the enlightenment comes, and everything around you blurs and it's just you and the page and your words. those moments i could write forever, and never eat again and never sleep again, but just write until every truth in existence was unraveled in my pen. melodramatic, i know. but i live for those moments.
that last half-hour when you're writing the conclusion, and the words are just coming to you, falling like manna straight to your fingertips. and you ride the river all the way to the ocean, when your fingers show you the "so what?", the meaning, the magnitude of what you have just unearthed. i don't know that i've ever experienced this moment without crying a little bit. in a good way. crying at how lovely our minds are and the Spirit is that from two literary loaves and a few fishes, we can somehow construct a feast. i see this power in so many people around me, in the words they say, the lessons they teach, the papers they write. at the end of every paper, i am left with a profound sense of gratitude, for the capacity of our minds, for moments of enlightenment, for others' words that have inspired me, helped me make connections, deepened my understanding. for the very simple yet unknowable miracle that is words!
and now, thing i don't love about writing term papers:
the two weeks of acute anxiety i put myself through before allowing myself to experience the above joys. yes, this IS because of my habit of procrastination. don't mock.
