Toward the end of a long day of teaching, two students came to the door of Arielle’s office. A young man and a young woman, both freshmen, each holding a draft of the final essay for the course, which had been assigned as “an analytical piece of writing comparing a place in literature with a place from your own life, paying special attention to what is remembered and what cannot be recovered.” The young man had written about the island in Lord of the Flies as it both resembled and specifically did not resemble a treehouse that he and his brother had constructed in their yard. The young woman had written about Paradise Lost and a threadbare couch in the apartment to which her father fled after abandoning her, her mother, and her brother, and in which she cowered as a pre-teen and downed vancomycin to combat shooting pains in her stomach that her father’s new girlfriend, a nurse, insisted was bacterial colitis but which the young woman believed was divine punishment for the sexual thoughts about her drama teacher that besieged her at night and which she had begun to manually reset. Both drafts received encouragement, though the language used was different. “Good start—keep going,” Arielle wrote on the young man’s paper. On the young woman’s: “I wonder what powers this little engine of lust and liability, which in turn drives this paper forward, and to what degree you recognize how much of what you have written is fueled by joy, even if it feels like sadness. I do not know how high you take take this, or whether the sky really is your limit.” The young man, revising more assiduously, obtained a slightly better grade.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment