Sometimes the dreams of first-grade naivety are the only dreams ever realized.
In all probability, I will never read every book ever written. To think of the amount of novels, manuals and reference materials in the Emerson College library is staggering, not to mention the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the lost world of Alexandria. Impossible, maybe, but as Freud said, dreams are only wish fulfillments, and all I wish is to learn, from books and the people who write them and, most importantly, from the people who read them. I wish to learn from teaching.
[...] There are too many books in the world to read, but I trust him to help me learn what I can in whatever time I have. But more importantly, Murray Schwartz writes with less-confident letters in a small notebook on his desk. He writes what we teach him, like a student. We make our own connections, our own outside allusions; we drop our own authors and titles and quote our own lines and passages. And I realize, at my seat by the window, that there is still so much he does not know, an entire other Barnes and Noble across the city within which he has yet to even stand in line. [...]
[...] Searching for some semblance to a proposed area of study, and really the only thing that grabs at my mind and settles in my heart is the nagging fact that I am very, very gay, and very, very angry about it. Let me clarify. My anger is not really centered on my own homosexuality, but instead on my homosexuality as seen by the eyes of a general population not really acquainted with the actualities of being a lesbian. Instead they assume all kinds of things about me, little things and big things, sexual things and personal things and things about my parents and things about the children I might not even have and things about what I may or may not have learned in school/church/back alleys. [...]
[...] Yet within this reflection were the tiniest of untruths, exaggerations and misrepresentations, maybe for the sake of comedy or rhyme. Truths based the rarer examples of human interactions that inspired the author or the painter. The more dramatic decisions of individual desperation. The creation of gender stereotypes, and the creation of the concept of a homosexual lifestyle. It is a stretch, yes, but I believe at the core of art is a distortion of life necessary for creativity, the exploitation of a single example into a rampant archetype. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
