Loss & hope

When literary criticism suddenly hits home:

It is not conflicted for Virgil to see betterment in history and yet be haunted by the sorrows of the world; rather, it is the mark of a mature and many-sided mind. Certainly, the view that a voice of doubt and sadness is the 'real' voice and that the paeans to Roman achievement should be discounted misses one of the poem's dimensions. In the underworld Aeneas wants to spend more time with a dead comrade, but the Sybil tells him that night is hastening on and 'we squander the hours in weeping'. That is the Aeneid in a nutshell: the impulse to linger compassionately and lament, but also the stern pressing on towards a greater purpose.

(Richard Jenkyns, Classical Literature, p. 169)

Disinterested virtue

During the past few weeks, a combination of personal reading, life experiences, and academic discussions has left me mulling over the idea of integrity.

It's easy to do the right thing when its consequences are in your favor. It's a lot harder when you know there's nothing in it for you. Or even worse, when there's a direct certainty that taking the moral high ground is going to detract from your private happiness/security/satisfaction. How many of us have the nerve to go ahead anyway?

As our culture hurtles toward narcissism acute individualism, it's bringing along a shift in our code of ethics. I'm not overly-fond of the trendy bashing on Millennials that goes on,* but I am disturbed by this pervasive attitude amongst those of my generation, that the ultimate rule of morality is personal fulfillment. We seriously consider moral dilemmas like: "I want X, but it belongs to Y. Is it less moral for me to take X from Y or for me to be forced to go the rest of my life without having X?" This scenario alone is thinly-veiled theft. Our ethical code is teetering on the edge of chaos; how can you have a functional society where we all are out, first and foremost, for our own interests?

The very core of virtue is its selflessness. It places the needs of others above those of the self. It does not feel entitled to anything. It recognizes that good transcends immediate happiness. It is humility and hope.

One of my deepest regrets, as an English person, is that the word "charity" has fallen out of use. There aren't any other terms that encapsulate the kind of love motivating true virtue. It's the caritas of Latin and the agape of Greek. It's old Christian theology. Which, for me, will always be a point in its favor.

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*Beyond the hastily-broad generalizations, I believe that most of the time, the legitimate problems cited are universal issues associated with coming-of-age, not just with those born between 1985 and 2000.

Week 2 and still alive

Titus Andronicus living the dream

So I think I discovered my dream job.

Only half of my work as an MA student is the actual coursework - the usual stuff like attending class, reading/annotating homework, writing. For those of us who were fortunate enough to get into the program with full funding, however, the other half takes the shape of a (bottom-of-the-totem-pole) department job. Most people work as TAs, teaching freshmen English; I'll let you imagine what it's like to teach a curriculum you had no hand in developing to people who don't want to be there. I have the utmost respect for my fellow grad students, because they are down in the trenches.

There are a handful of us, however, who do other things. I have no idea how I lucked out on this, but I wound up being an RA ("research assistant," not dorm supervisor). RAs have a less clearly-defined set of duties. When I got the official job description, there was everything from proofreading faculty manuscripts to actual research on authors or bibliographies. I have a hard time thinking of this as a job, because it is so much fun to do. Currently, I work for three different professors. For one, I hunt around for a very specific type of poetry for use in an upcoming paper; another has me transcribing correspondence of a 20th century political activist for a book project; and for the third, I'm gathering sources for the bibliography of yet another upcoming book.

Along the way, I find myself learning a lot about topics that wouldn't normally have captured my attention; I'm surprised by how intellectually invested I'm getting in other people's projects! The icing on the cake came today, when I handed one of the professors the files of my work from last week - I have never seen such joy come over a person. I am not exaggerating when I say that "giddy" is a relevant keyword. How can that kind of enthusiasm not rub off? So in a first-world kind of way, I feel like I'm helping people, which is a very satisfying thought. As far as I know, no such thing exists, but if there was any way to do this kind of job full-time, this would be my first choice in careers.

On the academic front:

Medieval Literature: We read books 1 & 2 of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy this week, which pleased me, because this marks the third time I've studied this book: highschool, college, and now grad school. I think that of all the choices to follow me through each stage of my education, this is one of the most appropriate. We touched on allegory today, which I hear will be developed further in subsequent weeks. I'm excited about that, since it dovetails nicely with my own research interests (Pilgrim's Progress and The Divine Comedy come to mind).

Shakespeare: This week focused on Revenge Tragedy. Titus Andronicus was the focal point. Good heavens. This has to be - by far - the darkest of any of Shakespeare's plays, at least that I've read. There is so much gore happening onstage that I had to wonder exactly how they depicted somebody's hand getting chopped off back in the 16th Century. A lot of the class discussion had to do with the impact of revenge on the character executing it. Does it strengthen or weaken them? It could be read as a glorious assertion of self or as a descent into caricature. I tend toward the latter. Watching Titus or Hieronimo (Spanish Tragedy) go on their quests for vengeance, I saw them gradually lose touch with the world around them; they were no longer able to constructively interact with society, which I believe is a crucial virtue in Shakespeare. I also read Harold Bloom's analysis of Titus, and he commented that the over-the-top melodrama of the play is too bad to be taken seriously; he's of the opinion that it was a parody. That was illuminating, and helped explain why I felt like I was reading something straight out of gothic Romanticism.

Roughly 1/70th finished with my masters...or, Grad School: Week 1

16th century rebound

I'm still kind of in shock that I'm actually a grad student. It feels like this unattainable plane of existence, like it's up there with the land of the Beautiful People. But here I am, student ID and all, with a week of classes under my belt. I walk around campus, with old buildings nearby and giant edition of Shakespeare in hand, and feel like the people in The Theory of Everything or Gaudy Night. AND DID I MENTION I HAVE AN OFFICE? Well, I share it with two (lovely) people, but......still.

My college (which I like referring to as Mayberry) was very conservative, so the transition to my new gig has been fascinating and entertaining and occasionally bewildering. I'm now in the world of trigger warnings and fluid gender identity. The religious skepticism isn't unfamiliar though, from the Cambridge-University-divinity-lectures days. So for the time being, I'm trying to figure out the nuances of this new environment and how I can fit into it, with the strongly conservative theology of my research interests.

My experience in starting grad school has been very different from starting college. The latter sometimes felt like a continuation of highschool: Constant social activities and low probability that more than 1-2 close friends share the same major. Now, the only people I have met have been in my department. Since academics is the focus, I haven't really felt the need to "find" friends, because we're all down in the basement together and it's happening organically throughout the day.

The tower of my building reminds me of Ely Cathedral AND IT MAKES ME VERY HAPPY

Also, a point of existential struggle: I have no idea what to make of the homework. The workload, per class, is rather astonishing (Monday: read two Elizabethan plays by Wednesday, k thanks bye), but I only have 2 classes. So I think I'm living out what I dreamed of in the trenches of senior year; gone are the days of being distracted by 6 competing classes (=trains of thought). If this keeps up, grad school is looking to be easier than college. (I anticipate future me laughing/crying at this statement)

This may be a failed experiment a month from now, but I've been thinking of writing more about my academics here, both to have something to look back on, and also as a way to think through some of our class discussions more thoroughly. We'll see.

• My first class deals with romance, war, and classical reception in Medieval literature. Not too much to report on yet, except the beginning of what could become a very incendiary discussion on the ethics of writing about experiences that are not personal or first-hand. On of my classmates was vehemently opposed to the idea of monetary gain for writing someone else's story. There are several assumptions in that statement that make me inclined to take the other side: first, that the end of writing is financial or social limelight; second, that the only people qualified to accurately depict an experience are those who lived through it (as opposed to careful research, including consultation with witnesses, by an outsider); third, that people can "own" experiences; fourth, that it is better to leave some stories untold (for lack of a witness's willingness or ability to write it down) than to have them written by someone else. It seems like a very low view of the relationship between imagination and truth.
• My other class is on Shakespeare. A big point of discussion is the theme of greatness. I have a seminar-length (20-25pp) term paper for this one, so I'm already brainstorming potential theses (I think I've narrowed it down to the relationship between greatness and altruism/public good). Anyway, this past week, we compared Henry VI.3 and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. I think I'm a little fixated on Margaret in 3H6. She has Lady-Macbeth capacity for ruthlessness, but isn't motivated by personal ambition or devoid of human feeling. I can't figure out if she's sympathetic or not.

To be continued.