For the two years before my son was born in May of 2001, I was a graduate student in the English Department at Michigan State University. For the two years before that, I was a student at Central Michigan University, where I took a bunch of English courses to fill in the gaps in my otherwise comprehensive undergraduate education.
I liked being a graduate student in literature. I liked everything about the work: the research, the reading, meeting in seminars, the writing, teaching undergraduates. But toward the end of my pregnancy, I lost the ability to think of new ideas or to sustain a train of thought, and just two weeks before I gave birth I stumbled to the end of a mediocre semester's work, tossed my unfinished master's thesis into a drawer, and subsided happily into motherhood.
I haven't looked back. Although I enjoyed graduate school so much that while I was there I occasionally felt an unaccustomed flare of ambition--"I could actually make a career of this!"--I have felt no desire to finish that thesis on Walt Whitman and 19th Century Quakerism, or continue on for the Ph.D. I am too happy in general to want to re-introduce that kind of pressure into my life; I was too aware, even while I was in school, of the ridiculous self-referentiality of literary studies (We study important literature! How do we know it's important? Because we study it!); and I know too much about both the academic job market and the life of a junior faculty member to take my vague longings to be Professor Penn past the fantasy level.
But my recent book fast, and my subsequent return to reading, has made me realize that I do miss something about studying literature and culture: a sense of purpose in the work I do. One reason I loved graduate school was that being an English scholar means you spend a lot of days reading and writing. I love reading and writing. I still spend many of my days reading and writing; that these activities are highly compatible with child-rearing is no doubt one reason that I have felt so little of the sense of a divided self that I hear is so common in mothers of young children.
But reading five novels and six non-fiction works, and writing 30 pages on them, is very different depending on whether there are connections between the novels, the non-fiction, and the writing, or not. One of the pleasures of literary studies as it's practiced now, with a big dollop of cultural studies, is in seeing the connections between books and other books; between books and their cultural milieu; between fiction, science, and philosophy. I miss that sense of getting a bigger picture. I remember one seminar I took in which it seemed early on that the works we were studying were unconnected; about halfway through the semester, sparks started flying back and forth between the books we were reading as the connections became clear, and I felt I had a much deeper understanding of the books and their period from having read them all together.
Since my book fast, I've had trouble committing to the books I bring home from the library. A good half of them are going back unread. "What's the point?" I keep asking myself. "What is served by reading this book, other than the passing of a pleasant afternoon?"
Not to denigrate the passing of a pleasant afternoon, but it seems I do believe reading has a greater purpose than that. I am old enough and have been exposed to enough of the world that the life-changing book, so common for the under-twenty bibliophile, is a rarity; perhaps I can hope to come across one more before I die. But I suppose I still believe enough in the power of books to change us that reading begins to feel pointless if it does no more than add a tidbit of information to my knowledge bank, confirm something I already believed, or, worst of all, pass through me like a penny accidentally swallowed, unchanged and unchanging.
Literary studies allows us to read to a question: a question about a book, about an idea, about a time, about ourselves. It invites us to read deeply, to cover less ground more thoroughly, to spend enough time with a valued work to form a friendship rather than a passing acquaintance. It doesn't require these things; there are shallow literary scholars, to be sure, and in my department, as in most English departments, I expect, it was a mark of naivete to reveal that you actually loved a book; cynical detachment was much more admired. But I miss the sense of purpose all those words on paper had for me during those years.
Will I go back? I doubt it. But for the first time in almost two years, I feel a bit of regret about it.
Do you really expect to find only one more life-changing book before you die? How do you define life-changing?
I went on a TV fast during Lent, and so have greatly increased the amount of reading I do, both fiction and non-fiction (the latter tends to be all biblical-studies related). Almost every day I read something that gives me pause, that illuminates some bit of human nature or behavior, that connects previously unconnected bits of life or history. Certainly not life-changing in the way books were when I was younger; The Hotel New Hampshire blew apart my world, but I was 15 at the time.
I have been thinking a lot about movies, and how seldom I go to them anymore, how they're clearly not marketed towards me and don't interest me. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was on cable recently, and I still loved it, but I remember the intensity of how it changed me at 22, while now I thought, great movie.
Perhaps it's about degree. It's less about life-changing and more about deeply affecting.