“For every door opening, there’s another one slowly closing.”
--Elizabeth and the Catapult
Last week I got my diploma in the mail. I didn't realize they'd actually list my majors, and even "Magna Cum Laude" doesn't completely detract from the "what the heck?" factor I incurred with a B.A. in English and Latin. I have to wonder, should I ever hang this diploma up in my office when I’m a therapist, are my clients going to think, “English and Latin? How did that happen?”
(Yes. Yes, they are.)
That’s awhile off yet. But my majors have been on my mind lately, as I’m trying to figure out the best way to get rid of my schoolbooks from undergrad. I’m keeping the psychology texts, but the vast majority of books in this brown box are literature. Sure, plenty of them can go: the bucolic poetry we (thankfully) never even looked at in English Renaissance Literature; the American lit books I skipped over in the major seminar because I was ticked off about the “C” I got on my Henry James paper; comedies of Plautus and Terence in Latin, marked with my frequent notes; the collections of scholarly articles on Jane Austen, Ovid and Shakespeare.
But for every book I’m planning to sell or donate, there are two more I’m keeping. Why? What is their place now? For what possible reason could one woman need two different translations of the Aeneid? Am I expecting to pick up The Canterbury Tales sometime soon and take another shot at the Middle English? Better yet, In Catilinam in Latin? Am I ever going to really understand what the hell James Joyce is doing in Ulysses? Will I ever get through the thousand pages of Middlemarch again? And I’m well aware that owning the complete works of Jane Austen is socially acceptable, but those of Ovid, not so much.
I’m keeping these books because, in spite of the practical Masters degree I’m headed toward, in my heart I am a nerd and I love these books. A year ago, I was seriously contemplating an honors thesis comparing the heroes of Homer’s and Vergil’s epics to see what light they shed on their respective cultures of shame and guilt. I have been known to tear up when Odysseus and Penelope reunite (the simile about the shipwrecked sailor is a killer). Sometimes I absent-mindedly break words into their original parts and wonder how they reached us in their current form. I can still remember the sections of The Canterbury Tales and of Hamlet I’ve memorized in school. I actually like Faulkner. The best papers I wrote last year were about the play-within-the-novel in Mansfield Park, and the connections between violence against women and enforced silence in Ovid and Shakespeare. And I love writing papers.
Heres’s the punch line: I’m entering a field where literary absorption is not the order of the day. Don’t get me wrong; I know this is where I’m supposed to be. I am so excited to go into counseling. But in spite of this shift, I’ve got the beginnings of an English professor’s library. It exists to no purpose beyond assuring me that I haven’t lost the stars that anchor my firmament in tradition, history, order, connection and beauty.
“…Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”
--Czeslaw Milosz
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