Navel-Gazing Amongst the Southern Baptists

Five years into my experience with higher education, and I’ve finally, finally found what I’ve been looking for: the absorption and free exchange of ideas in regards to literature. In other words, all the ideals of the liberal arts education I’ve been openly eschewing for years while quietly seething underneath because I have yet to witness the existence of such a thing have come to fruition. Really I’m just happy to know that I am now justifiably not, to borrow the scholarly expression, ‘full of shit.’

‘You mean all that stuff about religion is true? In college they told us it was all bullshit…’

Sweeping generalizations and assignations of nebulous value judgments aside, I think I can safely say that Emerson is definitely going to have an impact on my life. Initially I felt he had a preoccupation with solipsism that made him sound self-indulgent, and he has a sort of blind, idealistic faith in humanity that at first struck me as naïve. The more I read, specifically in ‘Self-Reliance,’ the more I felt conflicted between a simultaneous longing to really absorb what he was saying and chunking my Norton edition across the room.

‘No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature…the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.’

Something in my mind wouldn’t take his ideas. It’s like if you’re trying to fit a lid on a jar, and the lid is too small and it will only stay on for a few seconds before it pops off. It’s frustrating, because it feels as though my body is rejecting these ideas before I really have a chance to think them over.

I’m fairly certain this strange refusal of mind to heed to these ideas, even if only to decide on my own to reject them later, can be chalked up to my upbringing. Attending an extremely conservative, if not downright fundamentalist, Christian church and school for the majority of my formative years, I was perpetually inundated with dogma. While I appreciate the where these people came from as I’m sure they really did think they were doing me a world of good by ‘protecting’ me from these dangerous and scary ideas, I’ve had a hard time not going through life experiencing trepidation (and that’s a best-case scenario) when coming across any idea that doesn’t strictly jive with said dogmatic beliefs. I have this sort of knee-jerk reaction to reject it.

While I realize that everyone’s schema includes dogma to some degree or another, I feel mine left no room for reasoning. Sin is wrong. People are bad. Evolution is stupid. Value judgments were formulaic; this equals this, or this plus this equals that. All I’m really getting at here is that I’ve had to fight every day of my life to be able to decide for myself what I believe. Indoctrination is a difficult thing to overcome.

My point here is, and I swear I do have one, this sort of indoctrination is the very thing Emerson was fighting against. At the time it was the indoctrination that only English philosophy, literature, religion, etc. had merit, but clearly Emerson had the foresight to realize that, given the universality of human nature, introspection will always be met with some degree of hostility. Reliance on (soley reliance, mind you, not the study of) other thinkers, other great works, other people, other institutions, will do nothing but limit you. By all means, learn what you can from outside sources, but for god’s sake recognize that you have a mind, the ability, and the opportunity to do otherwise. As Plutarch noted, the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled. Does anyone really hold all the answers? And more importantly, are answers really even all that significant?

‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind…Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.’

‘Man hopes; genius creates.’

Can you really fault me for still being slightly bitter that in high school I had to read fucking Hawthorne when this was available? I know, poor little middle-class white girl had to go to conservative private school…

He’s repressing me, did you see that?! Help, help! I’m being repressed!

Ramona Quimby, Age 23.

Let me be the first to say what everyone is thinking anyway: what is it about literature that attracts such weirdos? Depending on your focus you typically will find the students and professors suffer from certain affectations associated with reading tiny print in dimly-lit university classrooms. I've really studied all over the place as far eras, movements, and what not go, but it's a definite fact that the older the works, the stranger the readers. Perhaps it all stems from some sort of latent necrophilia. I blame Freud (though let's be honest, A Rose for Emily didn't really help anything either.)

While my first week of class has me thoroughly convinced that my undergraduate courses left me woefully under prepared (ex: professor makes assumption that class has read a number of Hawthorne's works I've never so much of heard of and entire class nods along while I think back to my dover-thrift edition of the Scarlett Letter I once pulled apart to get the grill going. How was I supposed to know people actually liked Hawthorne?) I will admit that getting your masters in Lit has a few unlikely perks:

1. Classes last for 3 hours, but as Lit profs tend to follow rabbit trails in their lectures one can easily zone out for a solid 15 minutes and upon their return discover that she has still not answered whatever question was posed to her in the first place.

2. Classes are small, which means we'll get to have actual discussions. I don't care what the brochures say, if you go to a university that averages 30 in its 'small' classes just forget it. The odds that you will have more than one excessively obdurate and opinionated student are far too high. You will not enjoy classroom discussions. Get used to this fact.


Obligatory Emerson quote? Predictable, but necessary. I like quotations, I feel they validate my thoughts:

'I cannot sell my liberty and my power to save their sensibility.' - Emerson

How you like them apples, Republican Party*?

*I am actually a registered member of the Republican Party. Please don't tell anyone.