It's hard to complain about my sorry lot in life when I got to show my Comedy students a clip from the "Chuckles the Clown's Funeral" episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in class yesterday--and my book got a shout-out at the faculty meeting last night--and I finally got up the courage to put on my new blue-and-white plaid pants, which vary so markedly from my usual blah monochromatic wardrobe that they make me smile every time I see them. I haven't owned a pair of plaid pants since probably 1972, but these are so cheery and comfortable that I couldn't resist buying them. Nevertheless, I've delayed donning the plaid until I got to the point in the semester when I really needed a mood booster.
And boy do I need it. I've caught up on all the things that fell through the cracks while I struggled with Covid and I've got a pretty good handle on the many drafts and exams I'll be collecting starting tomorrow, so the immediate future is looking manageable. However, every time I get a glimpse of the more distant future, I want to put my head down on the desk and cry.
Can it possibly be true that the expertise I've poured so much time and energy into developing will be swept into the dustbin of history by people who no longer believe literature matters? Where do I fit into a culture that seems increasingly convinced that a liberal arts education is an obstacle to success instead of a threshold to possibility? How can I go out in a blaze of glory when my field, my knowledge, and my passion are dismissed as irrelevant?
When this mood strikes I want to start channeling the narrator of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat":
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
And I deeply feel the dilemma faced by the suffering father in Sherman Alexie's short story "Do Not Go Gentle":
When you're hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don't need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.
So I am trying very hard not to throw bricks or deliver pain, especially to others who are stuck in this same leaky boat. Instead I'm holding on to the promise offered later in Alexie's story, when the father of a very sick child tries to buy his suffering baby a toy but wanders into the wrong kind of toy store and emerges with a vibrator, which he and his wife wave around the hospital ward as if it's a magic wand bringing healing. "We humans are too simpleminded," he says:
We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that's not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with ideas and love and hope and magic and dreams.
I want to believe that this is true, that even the curricular and cultural changes that make me feel marginalized and worthless might bring some unforeseeable hope or magic or dream, but it's going to take more than a pair of plaid pants to help me hang on to that hope.
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