Reading Shakespeare is a lot like mowing the lawn for me. I think I'm doing fine the first time through, but then my dad comes out and shows me that I'm missing spots, that I'm not following lines, that I'm not cutting deep enough, and that without knowing it I ran over a glass bottle.
I'm auditing this fifth course this quarter in Medieval Studies. Over spring break I thought it might be a viable option as a double-major. My criteria for this was that I happened to know a few people who I thought were cool but who also happened to be Medieval Studies concentrators. Unfortunately, the class is just OK, and appears all the more mediocre by the fact that it is sandwiched between a class on Shakespeare and a class on Plato. It's hard to go from Hamlet to reading second-hand sources on how many pots a monk brought along with him when he walked from Tours to Rome.
So medievalism doesn't look to be my second major, which forces me to start from scratch and figure out WHY I want to double major in something exactly.
...No.
The more interesting question is why I'm GRAVITATING towards the disciplines I seem to be gravitating towards. For instance, Classics. For some reason, I can't wait to take a class in Latin (or Greek). It's not just a potential interest, it's a real burning urgency in me to start learning ancient declensions. Why? I've never sampled it. I've never read the Aeneid and only scattered books of Homer, and only a smattering of Greek drama. But for some reason, I've convinced myself that I'm going to love these things. Maybe even that I HAVE to love them.
This sudden appetite for Great Books with a capital G and B has me very suspicious, because it reminds me of spurts and phases in middle and high school when I would listen to certain music or watch certain movies so that I would feel "up to speed" with the people I knew or wanted to know. For some reason I guess I always have this nagging sensation that I am "behind" my peers in learning or taste. I don't know from whence this springs, but I know that it was a very real force in shaping me and it seems to not have subsided, only exchanged content. The epilogue to high school is that all those put-on tastes have been absorbed into my own natural (or at least, foundational) tastes. If untrue motives bequeathed a lasting impression, then I shouldn't worry about it.
Still, I have that sick feeling that I'm reading books or taking classes or adopting auxilary majors in order to impress someone. It's not clear, though, who it is I'm trying to impress. Maybe it's me.
Factoid: Tomorrow I'm looking at a potential apartment on 57th and Kimbarck. It looks like, next year, I will be living in an apartment with all girls. Nobody should be surprised.
I'm auditing this fifth course this quarter in Medieval Studies. Over spring break I thought it might be a viable option as a double-major. My criteria for this was that I happened to know a few people who I thought were cool but who also happened to be Medieval Studies concentrators. Unfortunately, the class is just OK, and appears all the more mediocre by the fact that it is sandwiched between a class on Shakespeare and a class on Plato. It's hard to go from Hamlet to reading second-hand sources on how many pots a monk brought along with him when he walked from Tours to Rome.
So medievalism doesn't look to be my second major, which forces me to start from scratch and figure out WHY I want to double major in something exactly.
...No.
The more interesting question is why I'm GRAVITATING towards the disciplines I seem to be gravitating towards. For instance, Classics. For some reason, I can't wait to take a class in Latin (or Greek). It's not just a potential interest, it's a real burning urgency in me to start learning ancient declensions. Why? I've never sampled it. I've never read the Aeneid and only scattered books of Homer, and only a smattering of Greek drama. But for some reason, I've convinced myself that I'm going to love these things. Maybe even that I HAVE to love them.
This sudden appetite for Great Books with a capital G and B has me very suspicious, because it reminds me of spurts and phases in middle and high school when I would listen to certain music or watch certain movies so that I would feel "up to speed" with the people I knew or wanted to know. For some reason I guess I always have this nagging sensation that I am "behind" my peers in learning or taste. I don't know from whence this springs, but I know that it was a very real force in shaping me and it seems to not have subsided, only exchanged content. The epilogue to high school is that all those put-on tastes have been absorbed into my own natural (or at least, foundational) tastes. If untrue motives bequeathed a lasting impression, then I shouldn't worry about it.
Still, I have that sick feeling that I'm reading books or taking classes or adopting auxilary majors in order to impress someone. It's not clear, though, who it is I'm trying to impress. Maybe it's me.
Factoid: Tomorrow I'm looking at a potential apartment on 57th and Kimbarck. It looks like, next year, I will be living in an apartment with all girls. Nobody should be surprised.
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