Regaining What's Lost
10 May 2002

Learning isn't always fun. I'm sure we can all think of things that we didn't enjoy learning. Like...shaking up a can of soda never leads to anything good...Crazy Glue means you'll go crazy trying to get your fingers apart...yes, that knife is as sharp as it looks...your heart is more fragile than you think it is...drunk dialing/emailing can only make you feel like something that ends or begins with "ass"...time, and the school bus, wait for no man...when someone says "hey, that's a little spicy," they usually mean it...paste does not taste good.

Sometimes learning is mediocre. You go to school and the teacher isn't inspired, and they stand up at the front of the room and drone on, or teach with their back to the room, writing notes on the board the entire time. Or maybe they love teaching but you could care less what the hell x is, and why does it want to hook up with y anyway? Why do we have to prove geometric equations that have been proved a hundred million times - I believe you, really. They're true. Maybe your teacher thinks teaching you chemistry through football plays is a creative way to learn, but if you're a drama-club-belonging, long-skirt-wearing, James-Joyce-fanatical Latin Club president, that's not going to help you get above a C.

Sometimes, though, learning is like the sun rising. Not the everyday sun that comes up in the morning, the one you always miss because you're asleep or not paying attention - but the sun that rises in the morning when you've spent the entire night on your friend's back porch, talking and laughing and being thirteen, and when the sky begins to lighten you watch it and then look at each other and share one of those secret smiles that says even if we're not friends in seventeen years, I'll never forget this sunrise. We've all had those mornings, right? Where suddenly a hundred things that never seemed possible are laid out in front of you and it's impossible for you to choose the wrong one?

I've had several moments like that over the course of my schooling. Most took place long ago - and until this year, the last one was in 1989. AP English. Mr. McKee had sent us home the day before to read poetry by someone I'd never heard of - Wallace Stevens. When I opened the book and read this:

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

everything changed. Literature, poetry, drama - I knew that somehow whatever I spent my life doing would involve all three. By the end of the school year, I knew that what I wanted was to get my PhD in Literature and teach at a university. I wanted to create those moments for students - I wanted to watch that world come alive. I knew it wouldn't happen for everyone - out of fifteen of us, only two of us cared about that AP class - but I thought that the few it did happen for might make it all worthwhile for me.

That plan - dream - was lost for a long time...Under rug swept. I went through so many incarnations of myself that for years I thought I was someone else entirely. I got lost. Very lost. Eventually, I forgot who that girl was, that seventeen-year-old who would talk about Joyce with her teacher while the rest of the class pretended they weren't sleeping. College didn't help me find her again - it was too fragmented, there were too many failed attempts. And when I went back in September, it was just to finish. Finish and get the hell out of there.

Something happened, though. I started to wake up. It came in bits and pieces - first, I realized I looked forward to going to class. I thought maybe it was the interaction with other students, even if most of them were almost ten years younger than I. And it was, to some extent. Over the course of several months, I became more and more aware of everything around me. I started contributing to the discussion - a lot. I started loving everything I read, even the stuff I hated, simply because it was new. I realized just how good my professors were. I made friends. I teased my advisor and labored over "A" papers and, finally, volunteered to read aloud in Shakespeare after keeping my hand down most of the semester.

I'd forgotten how much I love to read aloud.

Despite all of this, I was still looking forward to leaving. I still wanted to finish, to just be done with it. That all changed one day, and I can pinpoint the exact moment it happened.

Brit Lit started out good. I knew it would be good, but it was "just a survey course" and I wasn't expecting amazing things from the material. We were reading so many different people - how would I get a feel for anyone? But still - it was good, right from the start. Familiar faces and William Blake and Dr. V asking me to read on the first day. The poetry - it was good. I'd forgotten how good. And then this day came, and everything was different. After we'd read My Heart Leaps Up, I went up to Dr. V to talk to him about the whole Wordsworth reversal (which we hadn't talked about in class yet, but I'd figured it out from the dates of the poems), and I went home and wrote that entry.

That day in class? That was the sun rising. That was the day I remembered who I was seventeen years ago, and started to realize that she was still hanging around waiting for me to notice her. After that, things happened in my head with a speed I could hardly keep up with. I started to devour the Romantics, picking up books in stores and reading things online. I talked to Dr. V and Dr. C about independent study; both gave me books and lent me books and offered advice and encouragement and I now have the groundwork for a summer of reading.

Everything was...brighter, somehow. Now when I looked up in class and caught the eyes of my professors, or raised my hand and made a comment, it was almost like I was part of some exclusive club. That's not a good description at all - let me try again. It was like...they'd opened a door, and I stepped through, and they knew I was there. Not there, in class, but there - in that world where literature is magic, and analyzing is fun, and Prufrock is indecisive (like Hamlet) and Thomas Hardy is clever, so clever for writing vitriolic poetry in sonnet form, and Shakespeare is bidding farewell to his audience through Prospero. Going to class was not just fun but vital, whether I was reading aloud from The Dead or not.

From there it was an easy step to decide on graduate school in English, and when Dr. V asked me Have you thought about getting a PhD?, I realized that I had.

Years ago, in another lifetime. When I was someone I thought I'd never be again.

But here I am. She's still here. Or back, maybe. And this is a sunrise that I will never, never stop seeing. I don't know how to thank them - maybe they already know. Maybe it's easy to see. Can you hide joy that fills you to bursting?

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