Sliderule Envy

This morning in my American Lit Survey we counted things--words, sentences, words per sentence, commas, semicolons, exclamation marks--and this afternoon in Concepts of Nature we read about seemingly uncountable creatures subtracted into extinction--passenger pigeons, bison, dinosaurs. If any of my students signed up for literature courses in the sincere hope of avoiding math, they must have been sorely disappointed.

Literature professors are occasionally subject to Sliderule Envy, the fear that talking about literature lacks the aura of importance that surrounds more scientific pursuits. Sliderule Envy motivates some literary scholars to erect a fortress of complicated jargon and complex theoretical schemes around works of literature, a fortress only the elect are permitted to enter through a tiny door to which only the more enlightened scholars possess the key. We stand by our theories as if they rivalled Einstein's, but what are they really? Words. Just words.

We envy the certainty of numbers, their apparent lack of slipperiness. Let x equal 3, and by golly it does; but just try to translate a poem into an algebraic equation. A poem does not send a man to the moon, cure the common cold, or make the trains run on time. A poem cannot stop the extinction of a species, even the human species, and it cannot even prevent its own erasure. Its words are transient breaths, surviving only if someone cares enough to preserve them in the archives. The fortress will fall, the rocks tumbling to the ground and left in a neglected heap, but the poem itself might survive the cataclysm--for, as Robinson Jeffers reminds us, "stone have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems."

And it's a good thing literature lives, because otherwise the English professor would be an endangered species. I don't know about anyone else, but I for one am not ready to be declared extinct.