When I was very young, I lived with my mother and a very sick great aunt, whom my mother was taking care of. We had a dog, a poodle-mix, who quite literally saved my life one morning when a neighbor’s doberman-beast got loose and decided to go on a rampage. Our dog would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. We had a cat, who was as defiant and obstinate as every stereotypical cat that couldn’t co-star in a seedy Japanese cartoon if they were made into a person. The cat would literally live to the age of 26 off of pure anger and spite, and to ensure that my first experience with death that I was sentient for to understand, after years of battling cancer, this cat would be sentenced to a merciful death; that he would proceed to raise two middle fingers at and die on his own in the car on the way to the vet. Though there were men in my life in my extended family, I had no friends in the neighborhood; I didn’t go to the school that I was supposed to, because every morning my mother would need to take me from what is now the Walkersville area to the Linganore area. She did this so that my aunt, her sister, could watch me in the mornings while she went off to work at four. Great Aunt Bett had died before I started school proper.
I made some friends in school, but proceeded to have little to no contact with them outside of school until I was eight, when we moved to be closer to the rest of the family (and partly out of my own inability to lie about my address to the teachers who believed I was living at my aunt’s location). I would play with toys, read, and otherwise distract myself in the time I had alone (which was a large amount of time) by even occasionally reading. My mother was too tired to play when she and I got home each night, my grandfather was in no condition to be able to teach me how to play SportBall, and my uncle was never home early enough to do so either.
I was smart. Smart enough. I certainly didn’t have as much trouble in school as my cousin, who at this point in my life was more like a sister that I didn’t have actually at home with me and my mother. My grades never suffered for my abilities to accomplish a task. Except for Physical Education, which I blame entirely on an illness that had left me unable to walk for the greater part of two months (and at Christmas time!). In fact, my grades were excellent for the amount of work that I was putting into the admittedly simple tasks that were being given to us, once I had mastered the basics. It has always been the things that I simply failed to do which hurt me the most; in both school and in my personal life. To this day, my family has loved to give my mother no end of harassment for her treatment of what we call “the map incident”. A Social Studies project, a major part of that grade at the time, was to create a map. The details of the project itself are lost to time and memory, but she and I had both known about it for weeks and weeks and weeks. I didn’t start on it until the night before, and in the time that she spent calling people to yell and complain about my foolishness and openingly admitting that she wanted to watch me fail, I fulfilled the requirements of the assignment and received an A. She very nearly called up my teacher to tell me that I deserved an F; and looking back, I wouldn’t have blamed her. Everyone else in my family would cite this incident as a way to remind her not to underestimate my capabilities.
But the truth of the matter is, my abilities did not matter. That assignment was not about my ability to create a map, and getting the A, while helpful at the time, the cost may have been my future success after all. The assignment was about using your time wisely. It has become increasingly obvious to me, over the course of the last semester, something that should be fairly obvious to anyone who’s actually bothered to read through this; my thoughts are all over the place, and I’m having difficulty even paying enough attention to write.
Over the last two weeks, I have repeatedly sat down to write something or another for the rapidly approaching Finals and have each and every time “woken up” several hours later on a website that I had read several hundred times before, with absolutely zero progress made on what I’d originally set out to do.
What originally started as me developing an ability to keep myself entertained with books and music and art and television and video games has developed into a serious problem for my productivity, but has alongside it spawned a fascination and a need for literature. Everything that is constantly fighting for my attention with flashing lights or repetitive sounds or whatever completely fades away when I’m able to truly devote my attention to something; anything. Today, I read the back of a bottle of shampoo for twenty minutes.
But this same defense mechanism that’s inadvertently crippled me is also what’s allowed me to be so completely enthralled by stories. When reading Beowulf, there’s only so much of the world we’re being told. Shakespeare’s plays only show us so much of Vienna-London. Even in bigger works that tackle the creations of complete worlds (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) there are no distractions. Everything that is being shown is something that is important, and thus deserving of attention. There’s no trying to decide what there is to pay attention to or not. (Incidentally, this makes me a terrible person to watch a movie with, because why are there fighter jets flying so close to the kaiju when this is clearly set in roughly the modern era, in which we have magnetic rail guns mounted on battleships that can, with pinpoint accuracy, launch a minivan at it from more than three miles away.)
Add into this the growing technologies of our media and the increased abilities of video games to create worlds and stories worth considering and deconstructing critically, and it becomes easier to at least rationalize the ease at which I get lost in them. At the risk of damning myself, I very well may have forgotten more about the Warcraft setting than most people will ever learn about their home country’s history.
Utopia, Oroonoko, Gulliver’s Travels; all of these are excruciatingly important because through what they choose to show us, we learn more about the worlds not just in their narratives, but also the worlds that created them. Just like literally any media or literature ever made in the history of humanity.
Much like even sitting down to write this paper, sometimes the hardest part is simply sitting down and starting; in this case, to talk about things worth considering. The Utopian civilization in Utopia has slaves. Oronooko gives us a conflict between what we consider to be “civilized” and what we consider to be “savage” in the form of an educated, royal general who is both a slave trader, and eventually enslaved. Gulliver’s Travels opens with a long, drawn out masturbation pun, and I may very well have Attention Deficit Disorder and didn’t even realize it until it’s been able to have the tremendous effect that it’s had on my life and my productivity. I should have graduated last spring.
But I can sit. I can read. I can think about what I’ve read. Stories are important, in all of our media. The canon of literature that has come before now will always influence us, as it has helped to shape the culture, and thus society, that creates what we have now. We need stories; as points of reference and as points of focus that we can all look at, because it might be easier to talk about London when your plays are set in Vienna, but it is certainly easier to look at just the one thing you want to look at when that is what the story is about.
Now it’s your turn. What did you learn this semester that had nothing to do with the lectures and the reading? What did you learn about yourself?
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