Already two and a half years into my "Dartmouth Career," I've suddenly decided that I've been on the wrong track all along. And it's not an uncommon occurrence. Judging by the number of fickle people I know, I'd be willing to guess that most of us have absolutely no idea what we're doing.
For me, things began feeling off a few days ago when someone told me that -- because of the way I look as well as the way I act -- I should be the heroine of a young adult novel, that I should run around with a secret notebook solving neighborhood mysteries. I'm used to being told I look young for my age, but this was a new one. But not necessarily bad. In fact, I've begun to think this observation is right; it's the cause of all unhappiness and dissatisfaction I've ever experienced. I am a children's book character trapped in a painful real world.
So far, I've spent this term acting as a sidekick to a friend, providing moral support on virtually all of her errands and even helping her research mysterious problems and events on microfiche in the back of the library (a very young-adult-novel activity).
Just like any good heroine, I take weekly trips to the nursing home to call Bingo. And after the big Bingo game last weekend, I went on an adventure to the dump, the Norwich Transfer Center. While there, a mentor explained to me the philosophies of throwing part of his life away to watch it being compacted. Bizarre, indeed, but very possibly the chapter of a pre-teen novel. To make things even stranger, I've become best friends with a nine-year-old, and I've never been happier at college. It's great. We go to movies, make cookies and read the same books: young-adult novels, of course.
I'm trying to introduce her to the classics (well, classic in that they've always been my favorites), such as "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson, "Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great," by Judy Blume, and, my all-time favorite, "Anastasia Krupnik," by Lois Lowry. In fact, thinking of Anastasia makes me pretty happy to be a young adult again. Among other things, her series of books taught me about sarcasm, William Wordsworth, Sigmund Freud, "Wuthering Heights," the suburbs, Gertrude Stein and poetry.
Just like Anastasia, I love to read. And just like Anastasia, I love Wordsworth's poetry because it makes me smile, because it warms my heart to know that being alone and growing old can be okay because of "that inward eye" of memories.
Anastasia's trip to her father's English class at Harvard (he's a professor) reminds me quite a bit of my own classes. Rather than just loving Wordsworth for the beauty of his words and the emotion in his ideas, the students in Anastasia's dad's class spewed out intellectual comments, comments that Anastasia couldn't understand. But she was ten; she had an excuse. I'm just a blissfully ignorant twenty-one year-old who can't handle literary criticism and who's having trouble handling higher education at all.
Thus, I've accepted being an idiot with the tastes of a ten year-old. And I think I like things a lot better this way. I've missed the days (even in high school) when we could read books, love them, cry over them and talk about them casually. I've missed writing papers in which we thought about characters, recognized symbolism and figured out what the authors were trying to tell us. Now, when we read poems, novels and plays, we're trapped into a whole tradition of reading, a rather unemotional tradition in which authors apparently have no control over the works they create, a tradition that teaches us to deconstruct and psychoanalyze our favorite pieces of literature.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to use "Marxist Theory" or "Feminist Theory" or "Queer Theory" to explain why Anastasia was so nervous about reciting poetry in English class, or why she was unable to climb the ropes in gym class for months, and then, when she finally could, she threw open her arms in excitement and fell.
Are Lowry's novels clearly about growing up as a woman in New England? Do we need to look at her own life in order to interpret her novels? Or do we need to ignore her life completely? Does it matter that the events in the books may correspond to real-life events? And does it matter if those events occurred on different dates than in real life? I can't believe questions like that came out of my head. Even as an English major, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't get it. I don't get why it's no longer right to love a book because of what I think the author was trying to illustrate and because of the way it makes me feel.
So I'll just pretend Dartmouth Hall is Dartmouth Middle School, and I'll love my favorite books for what they are. This advanced education is clearly one of the best parts of my life, but I'm sure not going to let it force me into an adulthood I don't want. Step one in finding my own maturity, I think, will be incorporating "The Baby-Sitters Club" into this term paper I'm trying to write.
