#7 - Being an English major

When people ask me what I'm an English major for, I tend to answer in one of two ways. If I'm in a good mood, I'll say something like, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." If I'm in a bad mood, my response will be more along the lines of, "Because someone needs to teach morons like you not to end sentences with f@*king prepositions." (I mean, really.)

Regardless of how I answer, I'm usually thinking the same thing: I'm just not good at anything else. For years this has been my rationale: I'm an English major because nothing else comes as easily. I've never been successful in Science classes, I don't really enjoy History or Psych, and I really truly cannot add numbers higher than 10. Reading and writing, on the other hand, have always been as natural to me as breathing. Why waste energy on the study of anything difficult?

The problem is this: studying English isn't easy anymore. The classes I'm taking this semester are, as a rule, ridiculously difficult. The sheer amount of reading I'm assigned each week is criminal. It's as if each professor thinks that their class is the only one I'm taking, and assigning literally hundreds of pages of reading a week is perfectly acceptable, because it's not like we have anything better to do, right? And the readings themselves have become more difficult. Gone are the days of reading a couple of poems a night; my readings so far this semester have been unbelievably dense - thick packets of literary theory, philosophy, or pure didactic criticism. My lit classes are harder than they used to be - and, most of the time, not as much fun. I go to class every Tuesday and Thursday expecting to bored out of my mind.

And then my professor starts reciting Chaucer, or Wordsworth, or Didion, and I remember why I love English lit. He passes out a poem I haven't read since high school, or a short story by an author I'd all but forgotten, and I feel the swelling in my chest, and I remember why I'm here. I'm not an English major because it's easy, or because there's nothing else I'm good at. I'm an English major because there's nothing else I love more in the world than reading, or talking about what I've read. Nothing excites me as much as 15th century English lit, except for maybe 18th century English lit, or maybe 19th century American. There's no man alive I love quite as much as the long-deceased Samuel Taylor Coleridge, no one who makes me laugh as hard as Chaucer.

To be sure, nothing frustrates me as much as reading these men, or any number of other writers. Like everything good in life, spending time with all these texts is difficult, and like everything difficult, the struggle is worth it. This semester is going to be more difficult than the past two years of college combined, and I really couldn't be more excited.