Last spring, in a moment of over confidence, I agreed to be a mentor to one of the new phd students (Little Momma). We get together every couple of weeks to have coffee and chat about this strange life we've chosen. Mostly, it's the blind leading the blind, but I think we do a fairly good job keeping each other sane.
This week was pretty hard for her so we got together on Saturday to talk things over. As we talked over the events of the week and discussed strategies to get through the semester she mentioned something that stuck with me. One of the things that draws each of us to this place is our love to read. Yet, when we get to this place all we seem to do is put off our reading. The thing we love to do becomes the very thing we avoid. Her observation probably made an impression because at the end of last semester I didn't read.
Normally, the promise of reading for pleasure gets me through the final push of writing seminar papers and grading student work. At the end of last spring I read four Val McDermid novels in three days. This year I couldn't do it. I started The Master and Margarita, but didn't finish. It's not because I didn't like it. I did. I just didn't feel like reading. Part of it was because I had other projects to complete, but that wasn't all of it. The heart of what we do is read, whether it's theory, student papers, or literature. Getting through this process shouldn't rob us of that love.
I have to hope that it doesn't. Hopefully, et just defers it for a while. I didn't share these thoughts with Little Momma. She has enough on her plate. I told her it probably all just boils down to one of the ways we are most like our students. We don't like to read things we are told to read. We want to read what we've chosen to read.
On that note, it's time to get to work reading On Rhetoric.
21 January 2007
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