Procrastinations

Alright, so I decided when I started this blog that I would write at least 1 post a week. I'm a little behind my goal this week. To some extent, I feel like I'm back in college. As a student of 3 languages and literatures, I had lots of papers to write. However, even though I loved my classes and my subjects, and although I usually loved breaking down a piece of literature and expressing my observations about it, somehow I always found it much more fun to listen to Götterdämmerung or Sibelius until crunch time came--the night before the due date. This was also how I wrote my journal entries as an AP English student in high school. And now once again, I find it's so much fun to watch The Frisco Kid and Jane Eyre on TCM, and I'm having trouble keeping to my own writing goals and deadlines. Dear Abby, is there something wrong with me?!

I'm beginning to realize something: This preference I have for avoiding writing deadlines is really not conducive to a career where I would have to write long papers and articles frequently. Therefore, I should not become a literature professor! Or, any kind of a journalist. Actually, I first began to realize this years ago when I started taking a hard and serious look at grad schools. Analyzing literature is one thing. However, at the graduate level nowadays, it seems like classic works of literature are not really analyzed anymore. Rather, theories are broken down and discussed, particularly, it seems, social theories. Now, I'm not a sociologist. I'm not even a terribly social person. I certainly work and talk with people often, but at heart I am very much a hermit and thrive off my quiet time and my opera. It really seems to me, and to many of the older generation of professors, that the humanities, in taking this sociological trend, are becoming more like watered-down social sciences. Which means, no old school Dead Poets' Society love of great literature. No Mr. Darcy sparring words with Elizabeth Bennet. No Sidney Carton going to the guillotine with the solemn utterance, " 'Tis a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; 'tis a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." I don't think that this trend will win. A classic is a work that has withstood the test of time. Let's see an intro to sociology textbook beat out A Tale of Two Cities. I think it'll be a cold day in Satan's belly button before that happens.

Now, I can sort of see how it all began. Joseph Campbell analyzed mythology from a psychological standpoint some sixty to eighty years ago. To my knowledge, this was one of the first applications of one of the social sciences to an interpretation of literature, and it was done masterfully. The trend must have caught on from there. Certainly, by the 1960's, Pier Paolo Pasolini was writing poems and making films that were positively riddled with Marxist theory and criticisms of current values—he was an artist engaging in social theory and analysis in the form of creative works of literature. Already then in the 1960's, the lines between art and theory were blurring. However, not everyone is a Joseph Campbell or a tremendous cultural influence! Not everyone is a Pier Paolo Pasolini and an avant-garde artist! And nowadays, it seems the works of art are getting squeezed out of the graduate school classrooms. But to see a whole scene of gifted intellectuals blurring the lines between art and theory, and usually leaving out the art? I realize I am only a human being and I have my limitations, but to live in a world like that would twist my neck into knots. The reason that we have the humanities is precisely to contest the theories. The humanist artists, scientists, and literati made their mark on history because they refused to see man sacrificed to a set of ideas—something that went on quite literally in the days of the Inquisition. Likewise, we need to assert our own prevalence and dominance over ideas and theory. As Christ said, "The Sabbath was made to serve man, man was not made to serve the Sabbath," so also our ideas and theory are second to us and to the use to which we put them. We need art. We need literature. We also desperately need to understand ourselves. And analyzing works of art truly helps us to do that.

I realize that this fight is a good fight. And I don't know how to fight it if not in the trenches. But here comes another one of my preferences: for air missions rather than trench warfare. I've found out that I'm happier having a bird's eye view and less bumping of elbows. I don't really want a job where I have to debate with my peers and colleagues. I really want a job where I work with a few closely knit people and I'm very close to the top. I'm not really giving up a dream. I'm renouncing an illusion. I've always wanted the same few things out of life, and now I think I have a clearer picture of a few ways to get them—ways that are more practical for me and more natural. I still want to publish a book, but I don't really want to do it for a living. Maybe that's why I always procrastinated about writing.