English

‎‎‏‏‎Dear colleagues,

Welcome back from what was, I hope, a restful and replenishing few weeks away. The new term, like the new year, is already upon us, and we are off.

I wrote a bit last time about a few of the things I think the English major is and does. I said, for instance, that, “We study the varying and sometimes contradictory ways that excursions into language can be transformed into meaning – and in our work as teachers and scholars we pay an especially exacting sort of attention to the processes by which such meaning is assembled, dispersed, freighted with joy or with anguish, and otherwise deployed into the larger world.” If you want, you can find more descriptions to that effect here.

To put it gently, these are rough times in the larger world – days overfull of fire, ruin, and fear. And listen, I’m not going to tell you that reading books is the solution to all this, or that you’ll find in them some readymade roadmap to a world less catastrophic. I wish it were so; I don’t think it is.

HOWEVER. I will tell you that the kinds of nourishment available to you in the novels and essays and poems and other texts your teachers are asking you to read? These are, actually, invaluable. Not because they’ll tell you how to redeem all the brokenness in the world – again, I’m not sure they’ll quite do that – but because they’ll equip you with altogether new ways to encounter that world, to live in and through it. Anybody who’s been captivated by a book can tell you that there’s a strange and potent magic in weird things like novels and poems (and songs, and films, and paintings…). Reading them, investing our imaginations in them, talking about them (in class and out), fighting about them, puzzling through them: all this, I think, does a lot to adhere us to life – to fortify our attachments to one another and, with this, our attachment to the world itself, even in its direst hours.

So I’ll leave you with a snippet from one of the great poems I know about the feeling of being in love – a poem in which a lovestruck delight in another person spills over into a great intoxicated love for the world itself, in all its jumbled brokenness. It’s called “Steps,” it’s by Frank O’Hara, and, in words that have lived near to my heart for a long time, it ends thus:

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much