I’m taking an English literature class this semester and it’s been an interesting experience. I’ve not studied literature in an academic setting in awhile, and this particular course is mostly poetry, which I’m pretty much out of my depth with. High school was really the only time I studied poetry, and in hindsight I don’t think any of us knew what we were talking about.
It’s a small class, only five students, which means there’s nowhere to hide. My professor is dogged about our answers to his questions being defensible from specific places in the text and, perhaps because he is a poet himself, often has a confusing way of explaining things. There have been both bursts of excited, interesting discussion and long, bashful silences. It’s not uncommon for the professor to begin lecturing, without “hello” or preamble, a few minutes before class even starts.
But I’m glad I’m taking it and it’s been a good challenge; I’ve probably learned some stuff or whatever.
While I was working on my last paper, trying to say something profound yet defensible about Yeats and…concepts of beauty…or something, I got to thinking about people’s bodies of work, how we analyze them and make inferences about them: what they thought about x, y, or beauty. Not for the first time, I wondered how much we can really figure out about how someone viewed the world based on what they wrote or sang or whatever they left behind.
I still think it’s an interesting exercise to study these things and try to piece together themes, but I can’t help but wonder how much we get wrong. Especially because of our insatiable thirst for patterns. Especially when I’m writing a paper and could really use another quote to support my thesis, so sure, let’s include that random line from that other poem from two decades later and call it applicable.
But I do think there is a benefit that can come from studying something years down the line. I’ll refrain from waxing too academic about the importance of history and context because I need to save that energy for a different paper, but I do think there’s something to be said for insights that can be gained from being far removed from a situation.
Sometimes I wish I could read a paper someone in the future would write analyzing my views and opinions. I wish I had a body of work that other people could study and then let me know what I think about the world. Not even something as pretentious as a literary oeuvre, my Collected Poems, or great literary works. Say someone found my journals a century from now and I—having passed on into a state of glorious perfection, no longer horrified to witness them being read—could learn something about what in the world I had thought about the world.
It would be great if they wrote something like:
Analyzing her journal entries over time, we can see that she valued all the right things and her actions followed accordingly. While she wrestled greatly with the tension of simultaneously desiring community and independence, it is clear that she was actually nailing it the entire time and really had nothing to worry about.
But it would probably be more along the lines of:
Although at times acknowledging the wider events of the world, her tortured prayers—written in almost completely illegible script—most frequently focus only on personal circumstances and her disappointment in her own work ethic.
Or:
Ribbens was clearly a product of her time. She struggled greatly with the doubts and foibles typical of a young American woman in the early twenty-first century. The influences of advertising and the young adult fiction she consumed throughout her childhood created in her a desire to be unique, heroic, and capable. While at times she lived into those traits, she just as often used them as a lens by which to be overly critical of herself and others.
But maybe, in a conclusion written by a sympathetic someone, I’d get something like this:
In later years, she seems to have found answers to the great questions of her youth: how to live justly, how to spend her time well, how to make hash browns like the diners do. Her journals from the final years of her life present a woman with her own blind spots and shortcomings, but a genuine curiosity, kindness, and openness to the world around her. Personal philosophies inevitably change over time and so we, posterity, will not judge her too harshly for being so completely wrong about the Triptiphlagn Incursion of 2072.
Christina Ribbens (’19) graduated with a major in history and minors in studio art and data science. After working in campus ministry for a few years, she’s getting her master’s in public humanities at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She has a benevolent dependency on tea, is always down for a game of pick-up basketball, and would love to have you over for pancakes sometime.
1 Comment
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
As an avid journal-er myself, I found this both funny and heartwarming. Such a clever concept for a post. Well done!