My British Literature of the Sixties professor, whom Kate and I likened to a weekender sailboat with his accent and merry smile and collarless dress shirts with the sleeves pushed up, gave us two choices for our final exam. We could have the typical self-scheduled short answer and quote identification test, or write a take-home exam where we chose a quote or passage from each of the major works that we had read and write a short analysis about how the selection was important in relation to the course, the author, or the work itself.
The class chose the quotation option unanimously. My choice was based on the fact that I know an opportunity to be a little creative when I see one. I also know that whenever I have to sit in a room and stare at a typed page of questions and names, I panic and spend the exam session listening to what must be a very tiny man playing Chopin in my head, and he’s not very good. Not only does my grade plummet on the spot, but it’s so boring to just sit there and kill time while everyone else writes the test.
Still, the project was a little dangerous for me. Though it wasn’t expressed this way in the assignment, my instinct was to pinpoint the all-encompassing quotes that defined the course, the author, the written work, and the era as a whole. Intellectually, I knew that wasn’t just unnecessary, it was impossible and so not the point. But I still found myself trying to channel de Beauvoir and Brecht as if I was to become the prophet who would retroactively elucidate a decade, even though doing so would, in many ways, break from the axiom of the sixties all together.
But it’s a habit to want to give everything a profound and invariable meaning. I’m always trying to define something, the day, the details, the passing moment. It’s why my writing comes in fits and starts. I’m waiting for that illuminating moment, with the break in the clouds and the rays of brilliant sunlight (no angels though, for some reason), when everything snaps into focus. Sometimes I just want to tell maybe-you-had-to-be-there stories and whine aboutcaffeine withdrawal. Is that all right? Is it okay if I don’t have an epiphany on the essence of me or my life or the world every day?
Before all could be said and done, the Brit Lit final broke me. I had to get it out of the way so I could move on to assignments that required continuous pages of formal and coherent thought, rather than freeform paragraphs, which should have been theraputic to write. I went down the hall to Kate’s room to borrow a book and became teary while she looked for it on her shelf. In a flash, she had her arms around me and was smoothing my hair, saying, “The sailboat wouldn’t want us to be worrying about this! He’d say, ‘don’t worry girls!’ in his British accent!”
I got an A. I made some connections that stretched the limits between critical and creative, but it was enough, and that’s all it had to be. I demonstrated that I was engaged and had an open mind and that I had learned something in the course, and I got an A, on the exam and for the course.
So, for whatever it will be worth in my last semester, I asked the sailboat to be my advisor. I went to his office to have the form signed, and I’m not even making it up, through the window behind him, I could see a break in the snow clouds and the rays of sunlight and he handed the form back to me with a merry smile and said, “Have a nice afternoon, Emily” and maybe you had to be there and maybe you didn’t, but it felt a little like an epiphany.
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