Tribute to the Writers: Essay on the Importance of Literature
Sometimes, when I least expect it, I can remember my left hand running along a lined sheet of paper with a lead pencil awkwardly poised on my child fingers, feverishly scratching passionate garble from a five-year-old mind on a three-thousand-year-old topic: what I want to be when I grow up. These visions are like black-and-white photographs, whispers of the past that I see only through stories and repetitions, and through the glass of the unblemished, romantic ideas that only children can have. I realize now that my identity as a college graduate had little to do with my dreamy decisions in kindergarten; what I hadn’t taken into consideration, however, is that the act of writing it, my first assigned paper, would eventually expose me to an everlasting world where culture transcends linguistic boundaries, and where the human condition becomes a collective universal. Where I would decide to try my own words at writing, and where I would decide to abandon a secure future for an uncertain one. The extent to which our world has evolved in twenty-two years is minimal, even impossible to measure; yet now, as I dive into my last Comparative Literature undergraduate paper, twenty-two years has been, in retrospect, an entire lifetime. A series of remarkable and irreversible events, ones which drastically altered my predestined paths on the way to the capstone courses of my education-and since my first step inside an institutional building, knowing that I was safe and unmarked, every moment has been etched onto the permanent clipboard that is my life. I remember that first paper as I now remember my last, and I see a lifetime in-between them-what did I want to be when I grew up, to what did I do when I did. What we do when we grow up, you see, is the real unanswered factor to this mysterious question, and now that I write it again, I still blush when I stumble to answer it.
It seems rather fitting, somehow, that I am reflecting on the moments that are happening right now, at this very second; yet, it also seems ironic that I have slowly evolved from writing expositional essays on what my summer vacation entailed and other such kindergarten happenings to what my college career in Comparative Literature involved. How something so ephemeral in transit could be so permeating in spirit always proves to be permanent and life-changing, yet what I believed to be true and what I discovered actually is leaves an ocean between my past and present selves. Both the average and extraordinary student would agree that a comparatist genre of study denies a definitive or qualitative definition as to the root of our educational endeavors, but in the same vein, is seems verifiable that any boxed answer would ultimately refute every open-minded observation that the student of cultural studies undergoes.
Writers, unmistakably those often dubbed as the shadowy figures on the margins of society, revealed something innate and unexpected to me through my four years of university study; they sparked something fresh, alive, and tolerant in me, in ways sometimes gentle, and sometimes cruel. These weavers of tales, poets, flakes, eccentrics, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, travelers, recluses, environmentalists, and music-makers, preserved life, either their own or their imaginary dream worlds, in the purest of all possible ways. This universal longing to discover the root of mankind, along with the eternal questions that have haunted and danced around these artists of words, became the discipline of Comparative Literature, and inadvertently marked the dawn of a new civilization of scholars: the acknowledgers and interpreters of the trend towards globalization. This phenomenon of humans-whether by history, politics, literature, music, logic, anthropology, sociology, ideology, or philosophical theory-led me into a world, a being, and a lifestyle that has left me at a massive crux in my life with not much more than a passion for travel, a love for language, a disdain for the ignorant, and an infatuation with experience. I remember the early moments when I began to cry after reading a passage I truly connected with, and I think about days now when I still do. It could be said that in undergoing my transition from normal human to passionate writer, I fell into a non-conventional, non-partisan group of radical thinkers and liberal minds, with a thirst to teach myself everything my memory could embrace, and I soaked up my new cultures with a revived passion. I had found something to complete me, to scribble in the white spaces in my spirit; something I could hardly believe the rest of my young life had somehow survived without. And while I recognize these central changes in my perception of mankind, it continues to leave me wondering if my studies did indeed take me too far outside of myself to ever return to regular society in one piece.
Perspective, from a literary position, relies on both the senses and the imagination, for it is perception coupled with reflection that allows us to form opinions. Becoming disillusioned with society and falling into the crisp and unfettered universe of books is not always a favorable one, though it may at first appear to be so; the meek can suddenly become critical and dogmatic, and the devout religious can become doubters and skeptics. The study of literature can flip a person’s entire universe on its head, leaving the student with much, much more than they may have perhaps bargained for when the ticker stopped on the vast wheel of majors. The reality of our strengths and weaknesses comes not from our ability to assess what we’ve read but to wrap it into our personal repertoire and flavor it with our own seasonings-I believe that is why so many of us have notebooks scribbled with quotes from classics that we ascertained applied only to us. Our thirst to have our own philosophies applauded and supported, with our desire to expand our catalog of writers, often lands us, by surprise, in the eccentric and unfamiliar domain of literature students with not much more than a need to stay away from all the clamor of the business school and tweed suits.
I believe that it is an undeniable failure to see the world as one-dimensional, a view that unfortunately bleeds from so many American mouths. Something characteristic and utterly vital to triumphing over the socially conscious and the mainstream culture is to watch the same human condition performed with new actors, and there is no better method for doing so than to eradicate the comfortable and embrace the unfamiliar. To uproot oneself from familiarity and begin to perceive the cosmos in an unusual way is the only method to truly begin to understand the inner workings inside our own impressionable minds. Literature, in this sense and in many senses, assists the searcher of truth in a manner of exposing the rest of the world to the intricate torments and triumphs of the extraordinary minds; a reader, it can be said, becomes wholly part of the writer with whom they identify, and the relationship deepens not only their understanding of the world but also of who he or she desires to be. These universals I have learned, not only through experience, but from an unexpected catalyst called literature.
It seems that one of the most universal dilemmas of the young mind is insecurity and instability in a modern world that demands constant decisions. By the age of our early twenties, we are expected to draw a tentative map of the rest of our lives through the decision to study something that entertains, interests, and changes us-and this transition, the void between childhood and adulthood, is where our forced resolution to jump into a discourse lies. My personal journey, a jumbled one at most, led me down an insecure and tumultuous teenage existence, full of moments of doubt, heartache, passion, and misjudged situations. I, as do so many of the writers who lived on the margins of their respective societies, felt an emptiness, an wide breach, that needed to be filled in and covered with something more substantial than the filler that the average product could provide. We find our inspiration, our emotions, our love, and our common experience through the interpretation and reiteration of others; and as humans, we thrive on a sense of belonging. The interesting phenomenon, however, with the study of comparative literature, is that as we begin to study the philosophies of the far reaches of the world’s cultural minds, we find that we fit a mold more delicately than perhaps we had originally noticed.
A field of study can teach patience, skills, analyses, trades, and histories, but what it cannot ever adequately teach is experience. I remember the words of Rene Descartes, who reminded his readers that in order to truly live, on must first resolve not to seek after any one particular science but to find what might lie inside the great book of the world. Learn not to believe too firmly anything that we have been convinced of only by example and custom, but undertake the task of understanding the world as best humans can. I consider the religious dilemmas of Dante and Milton, the labyrinth view of the universe of Borges, the suffering of man through Dostoevsky and Kafka, the passionate dramas of Shakespeare, the oral histories of the Malian jelis, the abandonment of human society in Thoreau and the existentialists, the blending attitudes of the ancient Chinese Zen society, the acute plans of pÃ?Âcaros in the first Spanish novels, the peace found in the early Sanskrit poetry, the delicate touch of nature in Emerson’s world, and the cultural distinctions and relative comparisons between these great writers from each earthly continent. Realizing that without the recommendations of my professors and the fundamentally broad nature of Comparative Literature, I see that my education would have been simply a reminiscent breath of whispers from the great writers of the world, and I would never have understood what is really meant to be cultured. I remember their words, blend them into my own speeches, keep them tucked away in my journals, and remind myself that the world is never over but always something to be interpreted, analyzed, and compared.
And after I consider the internal changes I feel stirring within my graduating bones, I wonder if I would have ever tested my independence with as much enthusiasm as I would have without my international studies. I also remember the teachers, the tellers of stories, who chose to become individual experts in the cultures I explored through texts. Some were natives, some had stepped in from someone else’s soil, some had experimented with a new view entirely outside of their own, but their common thread was the simple fact that each had dedicated a part of life to assimilation into a delicate area of life known as art. Life, as an expression of eternal series of interconnected events, influencing perception and perspective, is the major component that these inspirational people wished to imprint upon the minds of the faces which watched them speak each day. As I would discover by accident, my own passion-that of the Spanish-was something I would embrace, care for, associate with, and desire to teach, more fervently than I imagined possible. As a culture that evolved from the power source of the Renaissance to the sun-drenched continents of Western Europe and the far stretches of the Americas, the Spanish seduced me.
What I discovered, with more ardor, passion, intent, and unexpected affection than I ever intended, was the beauty of the Spanish resided not only in their dramas and their novels, but inside my personal journey to breathe what I had read. After I interwove my Comparative Literature degree with Spanish in the hopes of leaping from my native soil and truly becoming an international scholar, my decision indeed changed my life. I commenced my comparative travels in Spain, becoming one with the literature I adored, finding myself in unparalleled and exceptional experiences, and evolving in both my intellectual and personal pursuits. I found that every single part of my studies played a relevant key in my constructive orchestra, and that I had fallen in love with the art of gambling my American life in the cradle of another kind. And through the hardships, the dedication, and the pressure, I acknowledged my independence from Georgia, my independence from my family, and my independence from myself. I became inspired, through the languages, music, rituals, lifestyles, concerns, and world visions of other societies, to touch them with my own hands, and I went on to explore Europe, work in Malta, jump around the American continent, and make plans to teach in South America. What followed is still intricately interlaced into my uncertain future; yet I know myself, what pleasures and what pains me, more acutely than I ever dreamed possible, and that is what college is meant to provide. My studies, in essence, gave me the gift of discovery.
I think of the profound wisdom an old traveler has on his face, and I wonder if he knows that he has done everything I dream of doing through the tales and philosophies I have come to recognize as my own. I wonder if he realizes that most scholars believe that the most complete man is the most well-read, and feels somehow inferior. I have conducted studies based solely on my interest in a particular culture or language, and by diving into these distinct boundaries, I have found myself unable to stand comfortably in any of them. Sometimes I feel as if I have danced around so much that I have lost my footing altogether, and though I know that the study of literature places us nicely outside of ourselves on purpose, I wonder if I will ever be able to re-enter modern society as easily as I did when I first exited it. I am thrilled with my accomplishments, and genuinely proud of my honed abilities to see far past the intentions of authors, but I am also trusting that, armed with my knowledge I’ve gained and my diverse bank of literary friends and foes, I will be able to forge into the future, backed with my heart and my intensified passion, and find myself with my own pen, once again reflecting on the course of events that brought me to a new desirable place. The only things we have in this life are the world and ourselves, and now that I finally see that, I know I have done what I was destined to do.
It seems rather fitting, somehow, that I am reflecting on the moments that are happening right now, at this very second; yet, it also seems ironic that I have slowly evolved from writing expositional essays on what my summer vacation entailed and other such kindergarten happenings to what my college career in Comparative Literature involved. How something so ephemeral in transit could be so permeating in spirit always proves to be permanent and life-changing, yet what I believed to be true and what I discovered actually is leaves an ocean between my past and present selves. Both the average and extraordinary student would agree that a comparatist genre of study denies a definitive or qualitative definition as to the root of our educational endeavors, but in the same vein, is seems verifiable that any boxed answer would ultimately refute every open-minded observation that the student of cultural studies undergoes.
Writers, unmistakably those often dubbed as the shadowy figures on the margins of society, revealed something innate and unexpected to me through my four years of university study; they sparked something fresh, alive, and tolerant in me, in ways sometimes gentle, and sometimes cruel. These weavers of tales, poets, flakes, eccentrics, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, travelers, recluses, environmentalists, and music-makers, preserved life, either their own or their imaginary dream worlds, in the purest of all possible ways. This universal longing to discover the root of mankind, along with the eternal questions that have haunted and danced around these artists of words, became the discipline of Comparative Literature, and inadvertently marked the dawn of a new civilization of scholars: the acknowledgers and interpreters of the trend towards globalization. This phenomenon of humans-whether by history, politics, literature, music, logic, anthropology, sociology, ideology, or philosophical theory-led me into a world, a being, and a lifestyle that has left me at a massive crux in my life with not much more than a passion for travel, a love for language, a disdain for the ignorant, and an infatuation with experience. I remember the early moments when I began to cry after reading a passage I truly connected with, and I think about days now when I still do. It could be said that in undergoing my transition from normal human to passionate writer, I fell into a non-conventional, non-partisan group of radical thinkers and liberal minds, with a thirst to teach myself everything my memory could embrace, and I soaked up my new cultures with a revived passion. I had found something to complete me, to scribble in the white spaces in my spirit; something I could hardly believe the rest of my young life had somehow survived without. And while I recognize these central changes in my perception of mankind, it continues to leave me wondering if my studies did indeed take me too far outside of myself to ever return to regular society in one piece.
Perspective, from a literary position, relies on both the senses and the imagination, for it is perception coupled with reflection that allows us to form opinions. Becoming disillusioned with society and falling into the crisp and unfettered universe of books is not always a favorable one, though it may at first appear to be so; the meek can suddenly become critical and dogmatic, and the devout religious can become doubters and skeptics. The study of literature can flip a person’s entire universe on its head, leaving the student with much, much more than they may have perhaps bargained for when the ticker stopped on the vast wheel of majors. The reality of our strengths and weaknesses comes not from our ability to assess what we’ve read but to wrap it into our personal repertoire and flavor it with our own seasonings-I believe that is why so many of us have notebooks scribbled with quotes from classics that we ascertained applied only to us. Our thirst to have our own philosophies applauded and supported, with our desire to expand our catalog of writers, often lands us, by surprise, in the eccentric and unfamiliar domain of literature students with not much more than a need to stay away from all the clamor of the business school and tweed suits.
I believe that it is an undeniable failure to see the world as one-dimensional, a view that unfortunately bleeds from so many American mouths. Something characteristic and utterly vital to triumphing over the socially conscious and the mainstream culture is to watch the same human condition performed with new actors, and there is no better method for doing so than to eradicate the comfortable and embrace the unfamiliar. To uproot oneself from familiarity and begin to perceive the cosmos in an unusual way is the only method to truly begin to understand the inner workings inside our own impressionable minds. Literature, in this sense and in many senses, assists the searcher of truth in a manner of exposing the rest of the world to the intricate torments and triumphs of the extraordinary minds; a reader, it can be said, becomes wholly part of the writer with whom they identify, and the relationship deepens not only their understanding of the world but also of who he or she desires to be. These universals I have learned, not only through experience, but from an unexpected catalyst called literature.
It seems that one of the most universal dilemmas of the young mind is insecurity and instability in a modern world that demands constant decisions. By the age of our early twenties, we are expected to draw a tentative map of the rest of our lives through the decision to study something that entertains, interests, and changes us-and this transition, the void between childhood and adulthood, is where our forced resolution to jump into a discourse lies. My personal journey, a jumbled one at most, led me down an insecure and tumultuous teenage existence, full of moments of doubt, heartache, passion, and misjudged situations. I, as do so many of the writers who lived on the margins of their respective societies, felt an emptiness, an wide breach, that needed to be filled in and covered with something more substantial than the filler that the average product could provide. We find our inspiration, our emotions, our love, and our common experience through the interpretation and reiteration of others; and as humans, we thrive on a sense of belonging. The interesting phenomenon, however, with the study of comparative literature, is that as we begin to study the philosophies of the far reaches of the world’s cultural minds, we find that we fit a mold more delicately than perhaps we had originally noticed.
A field of study can teach patience, skills, analyses, trades, and histories, but what it cannot ever adequately teach is experience. I remember the words of Rene Descartes, who reminded his readers that in order to truly live, on must first resolve not to seek after any one particular science but to find what might lie inside the great book of the world. Learn not to believe too firmly anything that we have been convinced of only by example and custom, but undertake the task of understanding the world as best humans can. I consider the religious dilemmas of Dante and Milton, the labyrinth view of the universe of Borges, the suffering of man through Dostoevsky and Kafka, the passionate dramas of Shakespeare, the oral histories of the Malian jelis, the abandonment of human society in Thoreau and the existentialists, the blending attitudes of the ancient Chinese Zen society, the acute plans of pÃ?Âcaros in the first Spanish novels, the peace found in the early Sanskrit poetry, the delicate touch of nature in Emerson’s world, and the cultural distinctions and relative comparisons between these great writers from each earthly continent. Realizing that without the recommendations of my professors and the fundamentally broad nature of Comparative Literature, I see that my education would have been simply a reminiscent breath of whispers from the great writers of the world, and I would never have understood what is really meant to be cultured. I remember their words, blend them into my own speeches, keep them tucked away in my journals, and remind myself that the world is never over but always something to be interpreted, analyzed, and compared.
And after I consider the internal changes I feel stirring within my graduating bones, I wonder if I would have ever tested my independence with as much enthusiasm as I would have without my international studies. I also remember the teachers, the tellers of stories, who chose to become individual experts in the cultures I explored through texts. Some were natives, some had stepped in from someone else’s soil, some had experimented with a new view entirely outside of their own, but their common thread was the simple fact that each had dedicated a part of life to assimilation into a delicate area of life known as art. Life, as an expression of eternal series of interconnected events, influencing perception and perspective, is the major component that these inspirational people wished to imprint upon the minds of the faces which watched them speak each day. As I would discover by accident, my own passion-that of the Spanish-was something I would embrace, care for, associate with, and desire to teach, more fervently than I imagined possible. As a culture that evolved from the power source of the Renaissance to the sun-drenched continents of Western Europe and the far stretches of the Americas, the Spanish seduced me.
What I discovered, with more ardor, passion, intent, and unexpected affection than I ever intended, was the beauty of the Spanish resided not only in their dramas and their novels, but inside my personal journey to breathe what I had read. After I interwove my Comparative Literature degree with Spanish in the hopes of leaping from my native soil and truly becoming an international scholar, my decision indeed changed my life. I commenced my comparative travels in Spain, becoming one with the literature I adored, finding myself in unparalleled and exceptional experiences, and evolving in both my intellectual and personal pursuits. I found that every single part of my studies played a relevant key in my constructive orchestra, and that I had fallen in love with the art of gambling my American life in the cradle of another kind. And through the hardships, the dedication, and the pressure, I acknowledged my independence from Georgia, my independence from my family, and my independence from myself. I became inspired, through the languages, music, rituals, lifestyles, concerns, and world visions of other societies, to touch them with my own hands, and I went on to explore Europe, work in Malta, jump around the American continent, and make plans to teach in South America. What followed is still intricately interlaced into my uncertain future; yet I know myself, what pleasures and what pains me, more acutely than I ever dreamed possible, and that is what college is meant to provide. My studies, in essence, gave me the gift of discovery.
I think of the profound wisdom an old traveler has on his face, and I wonder if he knows that he has done everything I dream of doing through the tales and philosophies I have come to recognize as my own. I wonder if he realizes that most scholars believe that the most complete man is the most well-read, and feels somehow inferior. I have conducted studies based solely on my interest in a particular culture or language, and by diving into these distinct boundaries, I have found myself unable to stand comfortably in any of them. Sometimes I feel as if I have danced around so much that I have lost my footing altogether, and though I know that the study of literature places us nicely outside of ourselves on purpose, I wonder if I will ever be able to re-enter modern society as easily as I did when I first exited it. I am thrilled with my accomplishments, and genuinely proud of my honed abilities to see far past the intentions of authors, but I am also trusting that, armed with my knowledge I’ve gained and my diverse bank of literary friends and foes, I will be able to forge into the future, backed with my heart and my intensified passion, and find myself with my own pen, once again reflecting on the course of events that brought me to a new desirable place. The only things we have in this life are the world and ourselves, and now that I finally see that, I know I have done what I was destined to do.
