In Praise of Literature

In commencement, it is only fair to state that I have always loved books. That said, as a high school student my English classes were interesting, but certainly not subjects of abject adoration. I distinctly remember a respected classmate once expressing her desire to be an English major upon entering that mystical land of “college,” and thinking to myself, why would you want to study that? In my mind, English majors were strange souls, bookworms who pored over fantasy novels and corrected everyone’s grammar, not to mention that everyone already speaks English. Fast forward several years: I was significantly more educated in the ways of the world (as far as majors go, that is) and was a rather discontented education major. Finding my classes un-stimulating at best, I spent my spare time reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was on a deliciously warm day, with the delicate snap of fall approaching on tiptoe, that I sat on the grass outside the HFAC, soaking up the brilliant philosophy and genius exposition of the human soul crated in Tolstoy’s masterpiece. It was quite in the middle of my literary feasting that it fully dawned on me how utterly strange my situation was. My major bored me, and I satisfied my intellect and hunger for knowledge by studying literature, alone. I closed the book, walked across campus to the humanities center, and changed my major. 

When I announce that I am an English major, after the polite nods and affirmations, the predictable question greets me: “what are you planning to do with that?” Sometimes, the question is slightly more creative: “why are you an English major?” Without time to express a passion that could fill books, I generally answer with a smile and a quick, “because I love it.” It is here, however, that I wish to expound on what I mean by the love I throw so hastily out, what I meant by grasping Anna Karenina as my door to a new world, what I see as the fuel of my studies, why I am devoting my time to, of all things, literature. 

Stories surround us. The myriad of humans who stand at stoplights, wait for buses, go to church, raise children, find love, create beauty, hurt and destroy, eat, sleep, breathe, these masses are each carry threads of closely knit strands, composing narratives of desires, passions, heartbreak, fulfillment, bitterness, forgiveness, joy. We are tied to each other, tied by our commonalities that somehow make us different and distinct. We understand each other, we are separate from each other. We love, we create, we kill. We, we are the humans of the earth, and that role is ours alone. Questions with attempted answers billow around our existences: what is emotion, so central to this experience? How do we relate with the cosmic force propelling our lives forward? What is the purpose of the staggering number of us, seemingly infinite in our array across time and space? We have exhausted days hunting for food, painted our stories on the walls of caves, discovered fire, tied baskets and made pottery which became art. We have built boats and ravaged countries, built planes and escaped to far-off lands. We have climbed mountains and touched sea-beds, bowed to kings and fought for governments. We have raised swords for our families, dropped bombs on others’. We have crafted palaces and died in huts, fallen from pyramids and replicated human hearts. We have saved lives and we have destroyed lives, we have loved and we have hated, we are and we are not, we are survivors in a human experience, and it is ours. I study literature because I am a student of the human soul. Because I am alive in this world, because stories bridge gaps and build portals to empathy, because I see sadness and have heard broken sobs, I study literature to understand. What else has lasting meaning but the experiences which span centuries and unite men and women across time and space? What else but love and greed, hate and envy, joy and forgiveness, hope and redemption give unity to this cohesive experience that separates us from the rocks and trees teeming with life of equal value?

I study literature because I want to be awake in the haphazard passage of time, I want to know what has made us kill and what has made us weep for joy. I want to know who crossed the Panama Canal and why their experience was valid, what made them human and why it all matters. I want to live deliberately, knowing the world I am alive in, to greet with empathy those whose lives are vastly different from mine. I want to be informed, I want to be thinking. I want to greet tasks surmising my awareness with a depth of questions, thoughts, and dreams. I want to think, and I want to find meaning. I want to feel and I want to make it matter. I want to cross time and space, I want to decide for myself, again and again in a thousand new ways, why it matters that my heart beats. 

I will go to dark places in the pages of stories about rape and murder, greed and burning lust. I will not shrink from my self-appointed task, because I want to know what is real, I want to escape from my own narrative and understand others’. We students of humanity, we must have courage to gather material, knowledge, darkness and light, and assemble meaning and purpose. We are alive in this world, and will listen to it crying out, we will see it expanding, we will grasp the universe and reach into the soul, and we will reap mysteries. We will live.

Our Ends Are Our Beginnings