Last Saturday I took the bus to Boston to spend a day with N. before he returned to India. That night I returned to Portland with a borrowed copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse. This will go in my summer book pile, along with another of Diamond's books, (on loan from B.), Guns, Germs and Steel, but I browsed a bit of the beginning of Collapse as I waited for my bus back to Portland.
The book begins by quoting Ozymandias, which I hadn't read since I was forced (er, "required") to read it in high school. The power of the imagery and the motion of the words just blew me away, and I realized that during high school I was in no way prepared to experience that poem. I know I didn't have the capacity to understand the vastness I now feel when I read that poem, nor the wrenching feeling of time sweeping by, erasing evil and good, no matter the intentions of a person at any given time.
Not so in high school. I just count my blessings that I loved to read before I had to take high school English, because if I'd been on the fence at all, 4 years of English would have totally killed my love of reading. Fortunately, I quickly saw what was happening and made up a rule that got me through it all: whenever I received the next book, I would go home and read it, start to finish, so I could enjoy it once before having to go through every sentence dragging symbolism out of the damned thing. The Scarlet Letter? Great book, the first time. I'm actually getting a feeling of revulsion right now thinking about it and remembering having to write essays on it. Ack. I played the game, I aced the AP English test, I learned to find sexual symbolism in absolutely anything. Good grief. But the real joy was getting a new book and staying up all night to finish it. I still do this--it gets me into trouble every so often when I start something like Atlas Shrugged or The Diamond Age. Although actually, I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 3 weeks out of the hospital, and I stayed up all night reading, kind of using my left hand to prop up the book when I could, and finally at 5 a.m. I fell asleep and when I woke up I could move my hand a little, so maybe marathon reading is good brain-building exercise. :-)
This week, N. e-mailed and asked whether I'd read Walden, and I said I had in high school but not recently. I remember liking Walden and transcendentalism in general, and I even got into some of the symbolism until I wrote an essay and my teacher gushed about the symbolism I had used. Um, what symbolism? At that moment I sort of stopped caring about comp lit.
Of course my writing had symbolism--the very act of writing down thoughts involves symbolism. But it's easy for me to get disgusted with analysis when I'm being told whether my idea of the symbolism is "correct". I will never understand exactly what some of my English teachers experienced when they read a certain work, because their life experiences were not my own. High school English was all about trying to figure out what my teacher would think the symbolism was and then write about that, and I was good at it, but it was a loveless act of survival. Reading something like Ozymandias again, I cringe at the thought of taking something so immense and powerful and simple and vast and trying to analyze it and break it down and explain why it "works". It seems sacrilegious and pedantic. Now I'm thinking I should go back and reread some of the things I grew to hate in high school. I'd like to let the words flow into me now, at 32, and see how they change me.