i know i've a found a keeper when a new companion enters into my life and makes me want to write good correspondence. i'm talking the kind that takes an hour from my day and some skill to craft. this, to me, is a sign that i've got a good one.
with that in mind, i stumbled upon this email that i sent long ago to one of those keepers. before my first bout of graduate work after an evening engaging with a lecture that the famed salman rushdie delivered on adaptation. this email keeps coming back to me somehow. each time i rediscover it, it seems more appropriate for my particular station in life.
i've recently completed a round of applications for grad school (again. i know, i know) and i like that this reminds me of what i want to do and why i want to do it.
[from a me from the past who still believes in the stuff that today's me is fighting towards achieving]
...Back to our point of how what gets you and I going individually seems to be these endless tunnels with tiny lights at certain points, but for some reason we keep wandering about (and I can only speak for me here): I think that what makes a lot of this stuff so great is that the truths that we stumble upon in our studies are truths that we have known in our lives and have always been on the cusp of naming (consciously or otherwise). It's like tonight, Salman was connecting literature to humanity with the appropriate language, and by this ability I was blown away and envious. I want to do that...I want to train my brain to get big, be free and not rigid, to guide itself to epiphany after epiphany as I cultivate it with stories and studies. There was also something comfortable about everything he was saying towards the end though, and I think this is because I have known this habit of adapting by some other name at some other time in my life. I think it is this connection to humanity, to emotions, to the 'essence' of life, that keeps me wandering because I am (or feel at least) always almost there. This, like my mother's perfume, c's cleverness on a bad day, and the sound of a good friend singing a new tune, reminds me that wandering, in some strange way, feels like home.
That is what rules about loving what you study and studying you love and I certainly hope that I get into graduate school.
This is great stuff, Court. I think that you finding this vertical continuity between your old self and continuing self speaks to something extraordinary in you. And you articulate so well what I think drives me, especially in my teaching.
ReplyDelete"the truths that we stumble upon in our studies are truths that we have known in our lives and have always been on the cusp of naming (consciously or otherwise)."
I love the feel of this stumbling, and this on-the-cuspness, especially when we are stumbling together, naming together. When you are on the verge with others, there develops such a palpable there-ness. It makes me want to postpone forever that finding of the one right word.