I turned thirty-five this past week, so I guess technically I'm a little older than I was before my birthday, but I don't feel it yet. I had a mild scare when, getting on top of my bed last night to rest and get some reading done while having the TV on for mindless white noise in the background, I felt a pain in the upper part of my left leg, but that's why God created Aleve. Plus, I've had bad legs, a bad back, a bad neck, bad hair, bad skin, bad eyes, and bad everything else for a long, long time.
The thing about getting older is, you're supposed to put away childish things. But as I get deeper into the concept of being a "graduate student," especially one in a field like English, I wonder if that's wise advice. In a sense, childish stuff is *all* we deal with, and I'm not just talking about the children's lit majors.
We deal in a world of make-believe, unlike historians or scientists. We contribute ideas more than things (unlike engineers), and we won't save lives with our otherwise invaluable insights into the themes of love and women's rights in Jane Austen or some other such research. Nobody dies if we screw up the interpretation of Gravity's Rainbow, in other words.
I have been a reader far longer than I can remember, and I take it for granted that when I open a book, I'm going to forget that what I'm reading is just words, just symbols, arranged on a page in order to make coherent thoughts (or in the case of William S. Burroughs, fucked-up junkie delusions). No, I get carried away to East Egg and West Egg, aboard the Pequod or in a beat-up car driving across the country and into Mexico and beyond, or whatever book I find myself in (that last one was The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, by the by). I remember reading the book How To Read Literature Like a Professor, which pointed out this fact to me, which should have been screamingly obvious, but it's still worth considering. True, a similar process can occur with film (even if the screen is miniscule, you can still get caught up in what's going on) or with music. Both of those fall under the rubric "the humanities," which is kinda what I do now. I'm a humanist in training. I'm all for humans, you could say.
"The life of the mind" is a phrase Barton Fink uses in the movie named for him to describe what he does (in the case of the movie, trying to write a script for a wrestling movie when he's more well known for social dramas about immigrant families in the urban tenements far from the eye of Hollywood), and it's used in the film to show how cut-off Barton is from his fellow human beings, because he's an "intellectual." We have a long history in this country of dismissing and holding suspect our self-professed intellectuals, as well we should. But it's important to point out, in the recent drive to promote the sciences and other more "practical" majors in colleges and universities, that art should be an essential component of anyone's education. I guess I'm going into that good fight for the integrity of the arts, those "childish things" that we use to define us. Putting them away? Nah, I'm just getting started. One of the things I love is when I think I've read/seen/heard it all and I get proven wrong. I look forward to getting proven wrong a lot over the course of my time in grad school. We might not save the world with our work, but we sure will make it a lot more interesting (I hope, anyway).
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