Critical Mass

I have just noticed that my bookshelf which I bought at the beginning of the semester is beginning to show wear and tear. It's not very noticeable, but I can see the gentle bend of the top shelf as it ruggedly supports most of my Norton Anthologies  and the stack of books that I like to call my Fairly Hefty Books That I Would Love To Have Time To Read stack. In the stack is Walden, a biography of Shakespeare, and travel stories from France, all travels to worlds far away from my dorm room. Though I've graduated from the cinder block, it sometimes still resembles a prison: there is always too much regulated furniture for the cramped space in the room and real life looks so good from behind the iron bars of Homework, Reading, and Papers. It's my own fault. I enthusiastically overbooked my semester with challenging classes, and even now would be pressed to give up even one. But about a month and a half ago, only a third of the way through the semester, I had to give up "fun" reading, a promise which I have mostly kept.

Still, the required reading is fun. I'm one of those nerds to the soul who covet learning and relish the thought connection from idea to idea. Happenstance has taught me many things, forcing my learning to bridge from class to class, uniting the evolution of technology with Emerson and quantum theory to creative writing. This semester I've read C.S. Lewis and Michael Crichton side by side with Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Lamott. Let no one ever say that the life of an English major is dull; we dwell in the realm of ideas and take dips in the lake of practical application. Really, this semester I've started realizing how crazy we are. We come to the field because we are in love with the beauty of words and the feel of a good books, and then we learn to do all sorts of things to it, to analyze, to inspect, to root out the beauty. We teach ourselves (willfully) to masculanize the feminine and try our hardest (as John Crowe Ransom did) to make ourselves a science out of words. But words are slippery, evasive things, and they make our science softer than down. Not that there is an evil in the scientific impulse. The best is a healthy combination.

I don't do too much with scrapbook paper. I am not the sort to take pictures and think of cute sayings to label them with. In fact, I admire those who do. But every time I walk into the paper aisle at a craft store, I want to go crazy and buy all of the colors and patters that line the shelves. They are potential, and that is the beauty in words. The fact is that I would suck at making great art of the manipulation of paper. I could do a few things, but they would be simple things strung together prosaically. And it would be good, a beautiful sentiment indeed. But someone else could come along and smash together two patterns that I would have never dreamed of together and call it better than good. The same sentiment I would try to express, portrayed majestically. This is the art and science of words.