Reading After Graduating

Since the end of this past May, I've been working to reconcile myself with a serious gaping abyss in my life: the lack of syllabi. Of course, the varyingly thick or thin sheaves of paper that I have looked forward to receiving on the first day of each new term over the past four years are largely just symbols of the whole curriculum, community, and support system that comes with full-time enrollment at a liberal arts college. For mixed in with the course description and the central lists of "required reading" and due dates are all the other, often less conspicuous components of my education. There are the office hours that represent the care and involvement of professors and other mentors along with (sometimes) the information that connects you to peers or other members of the community. There are all of those lists of "supplemental" or "recommended" materials that I, at the time, thought were nothing more than cruel jokes designed to instill further feelings of guilt and inadequacy. And now, even the paper that all of those assignments and projects were printed on signifies an access to physical resources that are no longer quite as convenient in my plain-clothes, dilettante "Alumni" status. After nearly six months, it still feels like just yesterday that I was sent out into the world to "do my thing," to prove myself, to change the world and give back to those who've contributed to my growth and ideals (the requests from the Alumni Office started pouring in even before I "walked"). So how am I doing so far?

As a literature and philosophy major, my own evaluation of my progress pretty much boils down to reading patterns. And I guess this emphasis on reading is the only way I can feel okay with my current status as a part-time employee/volunteer who spends most of his time not earning money but cooking, thinking, reorganizing my bookshelves, and flipping pages. Although I have no official "affiliation" with any institution and no formal, professionally-verified curriculum to follow, I still consider myself the same sort of "student" that I have been for the past 4 (or 18) years. On one hand, there is the feeling that holding onto this vocation of student represents an unhealthy and immature understanding of myself and the work I could/should be doing. I guess this is where market/economic-based criticisms of higher education (and perhaps particularly the liberal arts model) offer their recommendations for more practical, "real world" degree or certification programs (see some of the commentary offered here). After all, isn't the point of a B.A. to prepare a person for a job and, more particularly, for a salaried position? When I get going on this line of thought, I can begin to feel overwhelmed and a bit depressed: "What am I supposed to do with all these books on my shelves?" "Did I really just spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars (albeit mostly from other peoples' pockets) on an education that has left me unhearing and speechless, in the sense lacking any practical vocation or immediate sense of calling?" "Am I just supposed to use my diploma to wrap up Big Macs at the drive-thru window?"

Of course, I consider such desperate questions to be merely part of my bad days. That is because, on the other side of the learning-earning dilemma, I can unequivocally confirm my commitment to books—to poetry, philosophy, anthologies, stories, guidebooks and manuals, plays, biographies, and all of the other disciplines and traditions that might find a voice in printed word or textual community. Despite my various critiques of the liberal arts as a curriculum and a system, what I do have no reservations about are certain ways of thinking and doing that are closely affiliated with the diverse field of the "humanities" (including my recent interest in non-human members of our living communities). Self-examination, critical dialogue and discussion, and active and creative engagement with others and with the world are all aspects of living, learning, and working that disciplines such as literature and philosophy can uniquely illuminate and cultivate. This is not just a matter of cloistered, bookish intellectuals spouting ideological discourse. Neither is it just part of the leisure class and the consumer market. Reading, and all that comes with it, is an integral part of flourishing, distraction, belief, pleasure, creativity, hard labor, and all of the other things that make life work living.

Of course, my relationship to "academic interests" and "professional goals," and with these my whole understanding of what I'm doing or where I'm headed, has oftentimes been muddied by my approach to life and learning: my short attention span and flexible schedule, my less-than-rigid boundaries (and priorities), and my tendency to favor holistic and dialectical as well as open-ended thinking have all at times contributed to a sort of drifting. At least, I've found myself at several times over the past few weeks referring to myself as a sort of "buoy." And while all that aimless bobbing does not feel like the most healthy, not to mention secure, state of affairs, I'm hoping that I can both stay afloat and avoid becoming truly washed up before I can apply to grad school in Fall 2011. My obsession with books might just help to keep me buoyant until then; and so this blog, in all its intermittent indirection, will be my way of semi-publicly keeping tabs on my location and (I hope) my progress as a reader and aspiring professional reader. For more unscrupulous metaphorical expansion of what this blog is "like", see: sonobuoy.

Next up: academic theory/practice, more books, and opining for graduate school