Being a graduating senior majoring in literature, it's about daily someone purses their brow in conversation with me and asks what I'm going to "do with my degree."
They generally find the reply "I'm going to know about literature" to be either a laughable silly joke or the dangerously misguided musing of an idealist whose perspective on "real life" is downright infantile.
In these moments, the confused stops and sighs that sputter out of my interrogators are often much more of a response than whatever words they eventually manage. The whole scene feels like a pat on the head from a grown-up.
It feels like being 16 and driving to Thanksgiving dinner only to have Grandma call you "Danny," cut your turkey for you and point you to the plastic Fischer-Price table with a pat on the bottom when you try to take your place in the dining room.
Apparently I'm a naive little boy skipping to class in OshKosh B'Gosh overall shorts for thinking, like W.E.B DuBois, that "true college will ever have one goal, — not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes."
Apparently, reality will summarily beat this notion out of me upon my graduation.
Apparently, it is actually cute to find someone so green at such a ripe age.
Apparently, I should have spent my college years becoming a thing that can be had for the right salary and benefits package.
Yet four years ago, I did not come to this university to become a commodity. I did not set out on these college years to become marketable or to shrink into some formula for material success. I set out to become a man. I set out to grow large (and have since begun to realize just how small I am).
Educational success or failure should not be gauged by a paper diploma, paper money or how employable a person is on paper.
Are we not 3-D? Don't our hearts thump against our chests more than 50 times a minute? Can't we look at the world with our own bright eyes?
C.S. Lewis wrote, "[literature] enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."
I believe spring sprouts irresistibly from the cracked deserts of broken lives. I believe it will rush into this whole dark, beat, desert planet.
I believe in regeneration, resurrection, life.
I believe in the essay, the novel, the play, the poem.
I think the MLA appropriately calls for present tense language in writing about narratives because even though writers die, words live.
I think all that has and will happen is a text. I try to read it as a great story twisting into eternity, and I want to understand the symbols, themes, &c.
I want to situate myself soberly in the desert of today and work passionately all my tomorrows trying to irrigate for the coming spring.
I want to fight ignorance, darkness and death. I want to overcome evil with good. I want to know what it is to be alive.
That's what I'm going to try to do with my degree. Thank you all for asking.
Daniel can be reached at: daniel.d.wallace@asu.edu.
