Thursday, April 29, 2004
 

I'll Find the Stable and Pull Out the Bolt

The horror (the horror, ha ha ha) that is postcolonial theory finally ended today. That class managed to top even The Romanticism Horror for worst graduate class ever. I bolted from the professor's backyard, where we had our last class (don't ask me), with a sense of unparalleled relief. Oh, and annoyance that the unusual time had caused me to miss CSI. Priorities, you know.

One more semester of coursework, I keep telling myself. Almost done.

Then comprehensive exams, of course. Sigh.

Backing up a bit here: must be nice to be a big-shot chaired professor hauled in from a top-ranked university so that you can take leave whenever you feel like it and teach miserable courses and get away with it. Oh, and have a really swanky house, too. And your much-younger (ex-student, I believe) wife.

About a month ago, a professor here directed me to a specific Yeats poem, which he feels expresses graduate student life perfectly. I tend to agree, so here, for your reading pleasure, is "The Fascination of What's Difficult":

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something that ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

[1910, The Green Helmet and Other Poems]

Elvisette philosophized at 11:30 PM