Sunday, March 18, 2007

on knowing and learning again the same old lessons

In her essay "Mirrorings," Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, writes
I once thought that truth was eternal, that when you understood something it was with you forever. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.
I thought about this passage a few times this week as I slowly disintegrated from not teaching. S. worries about what I'll be like in the summer. Somehow I get by, probably because there are trips and deadlines and such that move the time along faster. Why don't I teach in the summer, he wants to know. Because if I did, I'd be completely burnt out and miserable. I need the time to reenergize, to focus on writing, to sleep as late as I want. Yet when I sleep as late as I want, I get depressed. In other words, damned if I do, damned if I don't.

None of this is news. I have to relearn it each time I take any kind of break from teaching. My students keep my energy up. The scientists have yet to find a way to bottle such energy.

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1 Comments:

At 8:10 AM, Blogger susansinclair said...

1. Damn. Maybe that's why we write stuff down: so we can shorten the re-learning curve.
2. I love love love when you use in-text citations in your blog. Because there is no Works Cited page to refer to. And yet, it *must* be there. It just does.

 

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