Free Lunch

Buffalo is a very poor, segregated city with many homeless people. A lot of them flock to my neighborhood, which is in the wealthier, gentrified section of the city, and stand outside of the stores on Elmwood Ave (the main shopping area), begging. I encounter at least one or two every day, and I'm really torn on how to respond to them. Is it better to refuse the homeless person there before you in the flesh and donate to a charity or a shelter instead? I'm uncertain of that mentality, because it seems too abstract, even if it ultimately does more good than to give to an individual; that individual still matters, that person right before you, appealing to you for help. The endless obligation to the other, when confronted with the other face-to-face. The face-to-face matters, the reality and individuality of the other is far more demanding, and more difficult to respond to, than the abstract vision in the mind when donating to an institution. I feel really guilty when I refuse that, but I often do refuse. Most of the time, I apologize and say that I don't have any cash on me, which is true; I very seldom carry cash. This was the case yesterday; I was walking to the corner store to buy some oatmeal for breakfast, when I saw a woman leaning up against the side of the building. I've seen her multiple times before; mid to late 40s, heavy-set, disheveled hair, the same clothes every day, flagging down every person who walks by and asking for cash. She's not aggressive or threatening, like some of the other visible homeless who regularly frequent the area. I've given her cash before when I've had paper money on me. As I approached the entrance of the store, she asked me if I could spare any money; I only had my credit card on me, so I started apologizing as I thought of maybe asking for cash back when I purchased my oatmeal, when she asked if I could buy her food. I was a little surprised, because just a few days ago, Jarrod and I had talked about people begging on the street and how our responses are really constrained. Both of us wanted to buy something for the people-- food, a sweatshirt, something-- but didn't know how to offer it. The act of begging is inherently uncomfortable in the overt recognition of class differences, a stark demarcation of those with excess and those with nothing. There's instantly a tense dynamic between the beggar and the other, an accusation of being selfish if you refuse to give some of your excess, an accusation of being wealthy. Granted, as a grad student, I don't have much excess, but my very position as a grad student designates me as privileged.


I agreed; she asked me if I could buy her food and I said, sure and she followed me into the store, clearly surprised and pleased. The dynamics of this encounter weren't aggressive or threatening, but it was still strange. She disappeared into the aisles of the store as I went for my oatmeal, and for a minute, I thought she had gone back outside and was expecting me to choose her meal. Then I thought about it, and she was probably embarrassed by my acceptance, even though she was clearly happy that I had agreed to buy her a loaf of bread and sandwich meat. I was self-conscious myself, looking around for her, wondering if she was going to thrust the items into my hands and leave the store. I thought of the reversal of the physical discrepancies between the privileged and the poor in the 21st century; this woman easily outweighs me by 60 lbs, but heaviness no longer indicates wealth and the ability to feed oneself to excess. It's because she's forced to eat convenience store food, buying bags of Doritos and 99 cent donuts with the spare dollars she collects, while I walk another block to buy fresh produce at the local co-op. I rounded the corner and headed towards the check-out line and noticed her standing off to the side, holding a loaf of bread and a package of bologna. I made eye contact, and she placed her items on the counter before me. The cashier, a grim-faced older woman, asked me gruffly if I was paying for her things and I said yes. The homeless woman requested a separate bag, I paid, and headed for the door; she thanked me again and I just nodded and said no problem.


Did I handle this well? I obviously helped this woman; the loaf of bread and sandwich meat would probably make 10 sandwiches, so maybe she wouldn't have to stand outside and beg for the rest of the afternoon. I didn't look back to see where she went; she was still inside the store when I left, and I sort of didn't want to know what she did after. I had the impulse to disengage, to slip back into anonymity and have no one else confront me, recognize me, ask of me. I think I did something good, but am I obligated to do this every time I encounter a homeless person? Is it my personal responsibility to triple the cost of my order to buy food for others when I'm rationing that container of oatmeal so it lasts for the last month or so of the semester? I'm not sure if there's any good solution, if it's my responsibility to take on, but I also feel like I couldn't have refused. In total, it only cost about $10 for my food and hers, giving her $7 that she just didn't have, $7 that I could spare. Perhaps that's the difficulty of all of this-- what, exactly, can you spare?

Life is Beautiful

I think this is on my "Words of Wisdom" thing on the side of my blog, but it deserves repeating:

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I have been too much an accuser and negator lately. I've had a rough couple of weeks with a lot of presentations and more reading than I could handle, and while I got it done and performed well with my presentations, I wasn't satisfied. I think it's because of my approach to them, my orientation towards these challenges. One of the things that I love about Nietzsche is his approach to failure. It does not matter if you fail, it only matters that you strove for greatness. What paralyzed me and made me so frustrated, and ultimately feel empty and unaccomplished regarding my presentations and such, was that I fixated on the potential for failure. It's incredibly hard to do, but I should throw that concern aside and rise to meet my challenges. Failure is only possible if you strive for something greater than you are, and that reaching toward greatness should be my focus.

I think this mindset should help me power through these pages and pages of Bourdieu that I have to read now!

Masks

I've been writing this blog from an impersonal perspective. The premise was to write about books I've read, and then these last few posts have been attempts to keep myself on-track in other areas of my life, but I've kept my writing vague and distant. Both of these subjects, reading and maintaining a balanced life, are intensely personal, and these bland updates are not helping me with the unspoken goal here of reflecting thoughtfully on my experiences.

So let me begin again. I'll introduce myself. I'm in my second semester of grad school, working towards a Masters degree in English with the intent of teaching high school in two years. This summer, I moved over 400 miles away from my hometown and I'm now living on my own for the first time in my life (a college dorm 30 minutes from my parents' house doesn't count as living on my own). I live with my boyfriend, and my decision to go to school here was largely based on wanting to be together; he got a PhD offer here, I got into the Masters program, and I can say unabashedly that love led me here. People go to grad school for the humanities for a host of irrational reasons, and I say that being with my boyfriend is a perfectly valid one. Three years ago, that notion never would have made sense to me, when I was bent on earning a PhD even if it took me 20 years and a monomaniacal level of focus. Scholarship and learning are still very important to me; I'm in grad school and want to be a teacher, after all. But they're not everything, and since Jarrod came into my life, I've realized that there is much, much more to me than being a good student, although he certainly encourages me to be a scholar too (he wants me to apply to the PhD program here, but I have a lot of reasons why I don't want to). Yes, I love him.

Moving far from home has been a complex experience with a lot of highs and lows. Some days, I love my new city. Sometimes I feel inexplicably nostalgic over something random and weird, like the roads I used to run on in my hometown or the way the morning sun fills the kitchen of my parents' house. I occasionally hate grad school and threaten to quit. Other times, I love it and get excited about what I'm reading and writing. It's an undulating tide of emotions that I'm trying to sort through, but I'm thankful to have this experience. For a long time, I avoided all risks and didn't challenge myself beyond what I knew I could achieve with reasonable effort. Now, for the first time in my life really, I know that I could put everything I have into some of my endeavors and still fail.

There's life after failure, and I'm a deeper person because I've failed. There is tragedy in life and I don't try to turn away from it. There is a great deal of comedy too. I'm trying to be brave enough and smart enough to recognize both.

First Semester Re-Cap

Happy 2011! I'm back after the most grueling five months of my life. That's right, I completed my first semester of graduate school (I'm getting a Master's in English).

A lot has happened since I first started this blog about a year ago; I started off by posting about the books I read as a way to keep myself in a semi-academic mindset in the gap year between graduating college and starting graduate school. Now that I'm here in grad school, academic exercises do not require the kind of extra exertion that they did when I was out of school. Academics now take up a large portion of my life-- in this first semester, it felt like an excessively large portion-- and that requires a redirection of energies. Reading and scholarship will take care of themselves now; I have and will put in the necessary hours of studying, writing, editing, etc., but I need to be as diligent about not letting other areas of my life slide for the sake of scholarship as I was about keeping up with reading and thinking critically when I wasn't a student.

I will always think of myself as a student and learning will always be an important part of my life, but now that I have this first semester behind me, I know better what it's place should be. Academia is not the place for me, and I will be very happy to finish this program next spring. I value all that I have learned and I look forward to my remaining time as a Masters student, but I would not consider going for a PhD. Scholarship cannot be my entire life.

As far as this blog is concerned, well, I'm not really sure what shape it's going to take now. I want to hold myself accountable for being healthy, nurturing my relationships, and enjoying the new city in which I live. I suppose now its focus will broaden to include all the aspects of living on my own and shaping my adult life. Still much to be learned, so I'll keep the title as it is.

I particularly want to make sure that I keep art in my life as I press onward with graduate studies. I did not take time to paint or draw at all this semester, and I noticed a change in my mood as a result, so I will probably use this blog to document some of my artistic projects (like the mural I started on the back of my bookcase in August, which I'm working on presently).

That's all for now; the new semester starts in less than two weeks and I intend to make it a more balanced one than the first.

Still Alive

I don't think anyone actually reads this anymore.

Anyway.

I'm almost done with my first semester of grad school.

This is harder than I had ever imagined. I've been pushed to my limits. Tears have been shed. Much sleep and a few pounds have been lost.

But I've gained so much being here, and I think I've become better for these past five months. I know that this experience will make me a better teacher. I have a new empathy for struggling students, the ones who just can't seem to get it. I've been there now.

I still hope to get it in the end. I'll write back later for a more comprehensive reflection, but until then, I'm writing until my fingers break.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

This is my final night at home. I'm sitting on a mattress on the floor of my bedroom. It's strange that, even though all of the stuff I'm taking with me is packed and out of the house, this room is still very much mine. My dresser, my TV, my pictures, my high school diploma, some paintings I did years ago, bunny slippers, and GRE books are all still here. An elementary school name tag is still thumbtacked to the wall.

I guess I'll be haunting this house for a while.

My last posts have all been about looking back and reflecting on my life here in this small town with pizza shop owners who have known me since I was a toddler and quirky points of pride including a stolen bell from the Civil War. But I haven't adequately expressed just how excited I am to do this. I really can't wait to arrive at my new place and arrange all of our things. This is an adventure, and I'm so happy to be doing it with Jarrod, because we will grow, explore, learn, struggle, laugh, sing, wash dishes, discover, run, study, and love.

But I've been correct in looking back, because this is a big step and my excitement for the future does not discount just how dear this time has been.

Mom and Dad, I'm not leaving you and I'll continue to need you, not in the same ways, but I'll need you nonetheless, just like when I could tie my shoes by myself, there were still other things that I needed and wanted you for-- I'll always need your ears, your words, your support and encouragement. But now I can give more to you too. This isn't easy, but it's good; I'm leaving home because you've been such incredible parents. You have raised me to be an adult, and I am one.

Now I can look forward, and move forward, and construct my life. This is a great responsibility, but I'm equal to it, and I'll do so with zeal and joy.

Plus, you know, Buffalo isn't all that far away and I'll always come back to this place, and it will always be my home. It will change and so will I, but it's still home.

Sweet New England

My worldly possessions are ready to be loaded into a truck tomorrow morning, including a lot of my pictures. I still have them all on my computer, however, so here are some images of my final summer in New England.

The first few images are from a walk around my neighborhood

Love

Strawberry-picking in New Hampshire

And baseball in Rhode Island

Boston on Independence Day

A garden in Harvard

One last trip to my alma mater

My friend's mad tea party birthday

And a goodbye cake

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.

Life Update

I haven't written on here in a few weeks. First, I want to note that I'm not nearly as sad as I was when I wrote that last entry on the day that my dog died. I'll always miss Sasha, but I know that it was her time and I had to let her go.

This month has been insane because I'm preparing for my big move. In two weeks, I'll be packing up my life and [cliche alert!!] shuffle off the Buffalo, where I will earn my Masters in English. I'm packing, planning, making phone calls, reminiscing, painting, and writing and moving in a million different directions at once (emotionally, that is; physically, I just get on one highway and head west until I hit my first Great Lake). The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and emotion, and it's only going to intensify from here on out. Despite all the turbulence that necessarily surrounds this kind of life change, I can't contain how excited I am to embark on this adventure with my boyfriend, my best friend, Jarrod.

So this blog will undergo some changes in this process; I won't have as much time to write here, because I'll be writing papers for classes, studying, exploring my new city, and living. But, when I do post, I am certain that the quality of these scribblings will be much improved, because I want to keep this as a sort of portfolio of my work; after I hand in my papers for school and get them back with grades and comments, I'm going to make some edits to them and post them here.

In the meantime, I'll post a few things about this preparation period and my move (expect pictures!), and try to keep sane.

Sasha

I was twelve years old when we first said goodbye, me and Sasha. I vividly remember that first dinner without my fuzzy friend sitting next to me with her chin in my lap, begging for whatever was on my plate. I sat at the table, sobbing over my untouched macaroni. That dog, who had been my companion for six months, was on her way to Kansas with my sister and brother-in-law, and I missed her so much already. I knew that Sasha belonged to Laurie and Brian, and that they loved her as much as I did and would take good care of her, but that did little to console me. I couldn't stop my lip from quivering as I found smudges on the windows from when she would press her nose against the glass, intently watching a squirrel in the yard. I missed that happy face waiting for me in the window when I came home from school.

I'm twenty three now, but I found myself tearing up over lunch at work and sobbing on my way home because there would be no gentle face in the window.

Sasha and I had our last goodbye this morning.

I've said goodbye to this dog a lot of times over the past twelve years; she was a dog with two families. My brother-in-law is in the Army, so Sasha couldn't always go with them when he and my sister relocated; and when she couldn't make the journey, wherever it may be, she came here. That first time, Brian was training in California and Laurie was in New Hampshire finishing her undergraduate degree and Sasha, alone in Kansas in need of rescue from a negligent dog sitter. She came back again a year later when they were stationed in Texas with an apartment too small (and an inhospitable climate) for a Siberian husky. In the months since Sasha had left, we missed having a dog so much that we got our golden retriever Heidi. We were a little anxious over whether the two dogs would accept each other, especially since my Heidi has a lot of attitude and audacity. But that qualm was quickly dispelled, and over the years, the dogs have bonded, to the point that Heidi searched the yard with perplexed sadness for weeks after Sasha had left us. To the point that Heidi stayed with her all last night.

Sasha was only supposed to be here for three years this time, while my sister and her family were stationed in Germany; but a year ago, it became evident that this visit would last the rest of her life. In October, we found out that Sasha had Cushing's disease, an illness caused by malignant tumors on her adrenal gland. An illness that would weaken her muscles, make her lose her fur, sap her energy, and eventually destroy her kidneys. The usual life span is a year or two.

When I first met Sasha, she bounded onto my front porch and greeted me by leaping up and throwing her paws onto my shoulders. She was almost year old then, but still had a lot of puppy in her, and I still had a lot of little girl in me. I formed an attachment to the dog like a young child has to a favorite toy endued with a vivid personality and internal life, a life which is a reflection of one's own inner world. Sasha was the keeper of the secrets of my twelve-year-old soul. I talked to her like she was a person, certain that, in the gaze of those intelligent blue eyes, she understood me. A precious feeling for the pains and sensitivity of that awkward age, which made it hard to let her go.

When I came home from Quincy on Monday afternoon, I knew that I had to let her go for good this time. She lay quietly on her side, her tongue lolling out. She couldn't stand up on her own anymore, and this morning, she was too weak to pick up her head. Her labored breathing was painful to watch. I sat down on the floor next to her, a cup of coffee in-hand to compensate for the five and a half hours of sleep I managed last night. She looked up at me with those still evocative blue eyes, now stained with tears from an eye infection, dimmed by illness and pain. I stroked her soft ears, still the only part of her that had turned silver with age, and said, "Soon, Sasha." It would be over soon.

I was sad to see her in such a state, so different from the strong, energetic, magnificent animal I had known. The dog who could walk for miles without the slightest sign of fatigue. The dog who took running leaps onto the couch. The one who got so excited about snow that she buried her whole face in it and stayed outside virtually all winter. But she was my Sasha still, so sweet, so calm and quiet to the last.

For her final two days, she didn't want to be alone. She yipped whenever someone left her field of vision. Her bark was always a surprisingly little sound from so large and powerful a dog, though it was less incongruous now in her weakness. I remembered Sasha the puppy with terrible separation anxiety. She once destroyed every magazine in the house when she was left alone for only an hour, and she whined indignantly whenever she was kept out on the porch for too long after dinner, impatient to rejoin the pack inside.

That's how I thought I wanted to remember her. But this morning, I was compelled to take a picture of her, knowing that it would be the last. Perhaps that was reason enough to take it. to have a punctuation mark on her life, a final image that, while so different from the young, healthy Sasha, was essential. I couldn't discount her final year, her sickness. Even dying, she was ever graceful, loving and sweet.

I ran today, I ran for a long time along routes that I used to walk with Sasha in her youth, before she started to struggle to make it to the end of the street, then to three houses down, then to the next door neighbors' house, then beyond the driveway. My parents had to carry her into the vet (we couldn't take her walking, we couldn't euthanize her until death was certain; she would have died tomorrow, but perhaps only after having seizures and suffering terribly). I wished that I could be there with her as the life left her body. One moment, she would be breathing so heavily, still struggling to sustain the last painful breaths of life. The next, gone.

She's gone now. We'll retrieve her ashes and bury them in the yard, in the place on the hill where she always sat and watched the world with bright, happy eyes. She'll return to the earth, but remain buried in my heart too.

Teach and Learn

I may have mentioned before that I am about to start graduate school this fall, to get an MA in English literature. I'm still not entirely certain what my academic focus is going to be (since I have an array of disjointed interests like postmodernism, madness, theater, work and identity), but my game plan for what to do with that degree is to teach English at the high school level, preferably in a private school or prep school. With that goal in mind, I've been thinking about how to approach teaching; true, I need to re-learn how to be a student this semester, but I think it's best to consider the two in conjunction, teaching and learning. My goal is to be both a teacher and a learner.

One of my enduring interests in literature is the construction of identity through narrative, and I think that this is one of the most important things that I have to teach adolescents; they are responsible for constructing their own identities, and facility with language is essential in doing that effectively and resisting the narratives that others will attempt to impose on them. I want to start the school year with a creative nonfiction writing exercise in which the students think of themselves as narrators and characters. There are undoubtedly dangers and limitations in viewing one's own life in terms of narrative, but this exercise of actually constructing a narrative is one way to open the discussion about those limitations, the inability to capture reality and the self in words. I want my students to realize that narratives are everywhere, and to be thoughtful and critical of every narrative they encounter.

I don't think that it's unreasonable to introduce high schoolers to literary theory; many of the theories are rather easily explained, like Marxist criticism or feminist theory, for one thing. But more important is that I want to approach my students in the same way as Zarathustra regarded the Higher Men in the second half of the book: with an expectation that they are self-sufficient and capable.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on Zarathustra and Socrates as teachers of virtue; both initially made the same mistake of assuming a position of privilege and descending to their students. In Nietzsche's reading of the Apology, Socrates chose death because he realized the inherent failure of his work and was committed to the idea of being the fool who would be taken seriously. The teacher of virtue must certainly take his work seriously, because virtue is of the utmost importance, but not himself; he must maintain a sense of irony about himself, and Socrates would not do that, so he chose death. Initially, Zarathustra insisted on being taken seriously as well, and he also failed to reach his students when he descended to them from a point of privilege. Zarathustra, however, succeeds as a teacher when he chooses to be a squanderer and a fisher of men from a mountain top:

"What to sacrifice! I squander what is given me, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that-- sacrificing? And when I desired honey I only desired bait, and sweet mucus and mucilage, for which even the mouths of growling bears, and strange, sulky, evil birds, water:
-The best bait, as huntsmen and fishermen require it. For if the world be as a gloomy forest of animals, and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather--and preferably-- a fathomless, rich sea;
--A sea of many-hued fishes and crabs, for which even the gods might long, and might be tempted to become fishers in it, and casters of nets, --so rich is the world in wonderful things, great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: --towards it do I now throw out my golden angle-rod and say: Open up, thou human abyss!"

Zarathustra approaches teaching as an overflowing of his own joy and wisdom, and the way to attract students is to throw out that excessive happiness, to lure them up to his height instead of him descending down to them. I want to teach in a similar manner, by imploring my students to "climb mountains" with me. I should not view them as deficient, but as capable and striving. I should challenge them to raise themselves, and show them how to do that by challenging myself constantly; I will also be a learner and model the life of a learner and striver for them. This is one way of avoiding the stagnation and complacency that has made me wary of teaching in the past; I have a responsibility to constantly improve myself, for myself and for my students too.

I want my students to view themselves as self-sufficient and to foster their independence. I know that they will not all love literature, and I might fail in reaching any of the goals I set for them, but it's important that I do it anyway.

Pink Moon

Death is a catastrophe which no one can ever fully anticipate. Even when we know it is coming, that knowledge is abstracted and incomplete; my knowledge is merely second-hand, through the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, and it will remain so. I am not certain that the body ever experiences its own death, or only the process of dying. The decline of health and the sensation of a diminished life may be all that we feel until consciousness finally ceases. That moment, the intersection at which life ends and death occurs, may remain a mystery forever.

Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.

But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.

I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.

Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.

Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.

Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.

But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.

Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.

The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.

Rest in peace, Uncle Doug