Today, feeling warm and sticky, and wishing I hadn't worn sweater tights I walked the long pilgrimage up to O'Boyle hall to fulfill my last writing center obligation of this school year. I had turned in all my final term papers yesterday and had felt giddy and lighthearted upon their completion.
Handing in final papers always feels like it should be a momentous moment; crowds should line the hallways and stairwells as I walk solemnly towards my professors' offices, twenty pages worth of intellectual toil, frustration, spatters of brilliance and blood grasped lightly so as not to wrinkle the title page with a sweaty palm. Come, now, admire this clever title, the artful intro, the dancing prose, the thought-provoking conclusion, and the meticulously assembled bibliography. At the very least a professor should be waiting with an admiring nod that acknowledges my timely completion of the task; perhaps a pat on the back; a quick thoughtful glance at the thesis; an exclamation of eagerness. Such are the fantasies of an English grad student.
Reality is hearing my sleep-deprived stumbling gait echo in an empty hall while I find what appears to be my professor's office locked and I spend a moment or two debating whether wedging it under the door or putting it in a clear plastic box attached to the door is the more likely successful method for delivering the paper into the professor's hand--a paper whose merits are questionable given its hasty and anxiety driven composition. Such are the end-of-semester glorious triumphs of an English grad student.
Although I felt that odd mixture of relief and letdown once the papers were in, it didn't really strike me that I was finished with my first year of grad school until today as I collected the bits of me that had become scattered around the writing center. Thanks largely to Heather's efforts, the writing center had been appropriately seasonally decorated all semester. As one final gesture I gave our giant picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne a pair paper cut-out sunglasses, and scattered paper cut-out flowers in Virginia Woolf's hair. Earlier this week Heather had put up word balloons for them: Nathaniel: "Virginia, I've rented a house with seven gables for the summer. Would you like to join me?" Virginia: "Thanks, Nate, but I'm headed to the lighthouse for my break." Such little self-indulgent smiles along tea and cookies and paper cut-outs have successfully made the writing center more pleasant in my opinion--even if only for the consultants.
After I finished my shift and made my way back towards the metro--again wishing away the scratchy tights--I was struck by how silently the time has slipped by; the year passed neither quickly nor slowly, but stealthily.
I met two fellow grad students in Silver Spring for a book discussion after my shift was over. It was as Susanna remarked, "the first official act of summer." The three of us had read Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson; Susanna for a class, Heather upon Susanna's suggestion, and me because the book had been a gift from my mother. Although we all found the plot troubling to various degrees and spent time sifting through the implications of some of its darker themes, we each agreed that the writing itself was exquisite--the narrative voice so concrete in its attention to the details of the world of the narrator, so deft in maneuvering from reflection to action, so subtle in developing consciousnesses, and so timely in revealing plot elements that we each found ourselves ending our discussion in admiration. I highly recommend this book, although, be warned it is not a pick-me-up.
As I was thinking about it after our discussion I found it a fitting book to be reading at the end of a semester. The book returns to and dwells upon transience; something that seems to confront me often in my paper cut-out life. Torn now between the sense of place I remember as home and the sense of place I'm creating as home, I'm left feeling "turned out of house" as Ruthie remarks in Housekeeping.
I'm going to end this post with a passage from the book I found especially beautiful and poignant:
"Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Life would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries." (Robinson, Housekeeping, Chapter 8, p. 152, 153)
