Essay
The gray blankness outside the window draws my already wandering attention away from the hideously mundane task at hand.
When I decided to become a literary student, I was filled with anticipation. I didn't expect the very act of reading to become as odious as it has.
Before me sits the usual assortment of objects; a half eaten crust of bread, a chewed up pencil, the dreary and miserable half finished paper on Romeo and Juliet, and my faithful and painfully ignored copy of Jane Eyre.
A groan escapes my lips without my former knowledge as I push away from my desk. Even the heavy mist outside captures my attention better than the necessary evil of attempting to ferret out the deeper meaning behind the idiotic young love-birds. If you ask me, the meaning isn't all that deep at all. It's beyond me why literary professors insist that Shakespeare was doing more than making a darkly comedic commentary on young love and early marriage.
My body contorts in a long overdue stretch, and I can all but hear my bed calling seductively to me. I blink away the cobwebs and stare once again at the starkly white paper before me. Only a few tightly scribbled lines mar the perfection, making it all too clear that I am going to fail this class.
What sense does that make? Going into this semester, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to tackle the delicious project of understanding literature and objectively using that knowledge to write a better book myself.
And yet, I'm not even halfway through and already I've been bogged down. Is this what I'm paying for? To regurgitate the ideas of half a million other scholars and students? Am I supposed to conform, to print out the old words, reuse the tired script of everyone who came before me?
Perhaps I'm reading into this too much. Perhaps that's what this entire class is for; reading too deeply into an author's meaning. Already I feel like we've deconstructed things that were simply objects in the surrounding scene.
Perhaps, in the famous words of Sigmund Freud; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
A steely determination grips my soul, and subsequently my writing hand. My fingers wrap around the mildly unsteady pencil, and I begin to pen my thoughts into words. If the purpose of this class is to recreate an already written essay, then today I might fail.
But if the purpose is to direct the mind into an entirely new direction, away from the tired narrative that Shakespeare was god-like and for meant us to read far too deeply into his chuckle-inducing plays, then perhaps I will be fine.
When I decided to become a literary student, I was filled with anticipation. I didn't expect the very act of reading to become as odious as it has.
Before me sits the usual assortment of objects; a half eaten crust of bread, a chewed up pencil, the dreary and miserable half finished paper on Romeo and Juliet, and my faithful and painfully ignored copy of Jane Eyre.
A groan escapes my lips without my former knowledge as I push away from my desk. Even the heavy mist outside captures my attention better than the necessary evil of attempting to ferret out the deeper meaning behind the idiotic young love-birds. If you ask me, the meaning isn't all that deep at all. It's beyond me why literary professors insist that Shakespeare was doing more than making a darkly comedic commentary on young love and early marriage.
My body contorts in a long overdue stretch, and I can all but hear my bed calling seductively to me. I blink away the cobwebs and stare once again at the starkly white paper before me. Only a few tightly scribbled lines mar the perfection, making it all too clear that I am going to fail this class.
What sense does that make? Going into this semester, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to tackle the delicious project of understanding literature and objectively using that knowledge to write a better book myself.
And yet, I'm not even halfway through and already I've been bogged down. Is this what I'm paying for? To regurgitate the ideas of half a million other scholars and students? Am I supposed to conform, to print out the old words, reuse the tired script of everyone who came before me?
Perhaps I'm reading into this too much. Perhaps that's what this entire class is for; reading too deeply into an author's meaning. Already I feel like we've deconstructed things that were simply objects in the surrounding scene.
Perhaps, in the famous words of Sigmund Freud; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
A steely determination grips my soul, and subsequently my writing hand. My fingers wrap around the mildly unsteady pencil, and I begin to pen my thoughts into words. If the purpose of this class is to recreate an already written essay, then today I might fail.
But if the purpose is to direct the mind into an entirely new direction, away from the tired narrative that Shakespeare was god-like and for meant us to read far too deeply into his chuckle-inducing plays, then perhaps I will be fine.
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