My Vanity | Reading

I'm not sure what is happening to me, but my last entry seemed to me, upon re-reading it, utterly childish. I must apologize to myself, and to anyone reading. Trust me, I gave graduate from high school.

About four-fifths through the onerous reading assignment (about 200 pages of literary essays) I mentioned in my last entry, I stopped my frantic reading and my consciousness forced me to examine what I was doing, or rather how I was doing it. I was reading, sure, but I was skimming through huge sections of text, many of the essays were about writing and art, a topic I usually enjoy to read about, but I had to finish the assignment. My competitive nature and my need to show off -- a particular trait of mine I'm not proud of -- were compelling me it forward.

A brief digression about my competitive and alternately vain nature. Since grade school I can remember reading my report card which always contained average grades and excellent writing ups regarding my behavior. I remember how much these comments pleased me and gave me the feeling that I was special, that I was somehow better than my degenerate school mates.

Those initial shots of vanity influence me throughout high school, and I can remember the difficulty of balancing the appearance of "coolness" which usually meant appearing and acting in a rebellious way, balancing that with being an average but conscientious student who got along with the teachers themselves. And even now, having graduated with my second Bachelor's Degree, I am still conscious of what professors think of me, but now of course it has spread to the rest of the class, mainly because, unlike high school, it is "cool" to be smart in University.

So this trait was one of the factors propelling me through this book of essays. But I stopped suddenly. The assignment was crazy. Shouldn't a writing class try to instill a love of language and an appreciation for the written word? We were being asked to disrespect all these carefully put together words and sentences by skimming through page after page, sometimes only reading the first sentence in a paragraph, sometimes both the first one and the last one. For some classes it's inevitable, but for a writing class the assignment struck me as counterproductive at least.

I imagined being at a university like Harvard, taking a writing course from a famous professor/writer, perhaps a Nobel Prize winner, and being given an assignment like this: read the last half of this book in a day and a half. A day in a half later, he or she would ask a show of hands for who finished the readings. Several would lift their hands, pride shining on their faces, their heads and eyes swivelling onto colleagues who hadn't finished. Then the professor would say, "okay, anyone with their hands up can leave, if you don't care about the written word enough to refuse me and stand up for it, for the integrity of art, you don't have the passion to write, try again next semester." Now that would be something to see, a professor with that kind of passion for language and for other people's work.

Needless to say, I stopped reading right there. But the professor today did not say anything of the kind -- hardly anybody finished anyway. I wonder if I'm the only one thinking this way. Am I obsessed? I wasn't disappointed because I didn't have my hopes up. I've always wished -- and by always I mean since grade eight -- I could have gone to a Ivy League University, where the professors are simply outstanding.