By Maddie Hoagland-Hanson
God, I’m miserable.
It’s not my fault, really. I just finished reading a book called "Landscapes of Abandonment: Capitalism, Modernity, and Estrangement" for a paper I’m (supposed to be) writing for one of my English classes, and it was a miserable book. It’s the kind of book that can make you mildly nostalgic for the 19th century, tuberculosis and all, and then make you hate yourself for your own pathetic bourgeois sentimentality. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel duped by Romanticism, ensnared by nihilism, and disgusted by both. It’s the kind of book that makes you think, when it comes time to write your bi-weekly Bi-Co article, “Why bother?”
The question, I believe, that springs from my misery (in addition to “Why bother?” which I certainly don’t know the answer to) is one that I was recently discussing with a friend who just graduated from college and, as one of the lucky ones who was actually able to find employment in this economy, just began work at an entry-level position at a local publishing company. When I inquired about life in the real world as opposed to life at college, he said that it was nice to make a living wage and that he wasn’t sorry not to have to deal with a heavy collegiate workload filled with other people’s deadlines, but he was bored. “I fix the copy machine a lot,” he said ruefully. “I mean, usually I just kind of poke it till it works.”
He went on. “Yeah, I mean, nothing you do in the real world is nearly as intellectually stimulating as the work you do in college. You’d be surprised how little thinking you have to do on a day-to-day basis.” He paused. “I do a lot of data entry.” Another pause. “A lot of data entry.”
Which brings me, somewhat vaguely, to my point. Lately I’ve been bothered, not only by the usual fears (shared by every humanities major in his or her darkest moments) that the things I’m learning in my classes are worthless in their capacity to be applied to Life with a capital “L,” but also by a more sneaking and insidious suspicion that the things I’m learning in my classes are actually ruining my life with a lowercase “l.”
Take, for instance, deconstruction. I wish I’d never heard of this crap—ever. I never fully appreciated my former conception of sign and signified as connected and comfortably unified until it was ripped from me, violently, by Jacques Derrida and the rest of his rapacious, disinterested cohorts, and now I can’t get it back. Don’t even get me started on Postcolonial theory, since I’m pretty sure I won’t have the emotional fortitude to finish this article if I endeavor, however briefly and accidentally, to give it any thought whatsoever. The other day I walked into my bedroom to find my pre-med roommate feverishly typing up a lab report. “Do you realize,” I said tragically to the back of her head, “that you are going to be thinking—thinking—every second of every minute of every day until the moment that you die?”
“Uh huh,” she said unconcernedly. She didn’t seem to find the implications of this realization half as terrible as I did. After awkwardly waiting a few seconds in the doorway should the existential anguish belatedly descend, I shuffled back into the common room and glumly buried my nose in T.S. Eliot, who topically assured me that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
And he’s right, of course; at least, he’s right about me. Not only can I not bear reality, the land of the perpetually broken copy machine and data that needs to be entered, I can’t even bear academia. And in a sense, it’s academia’s fault that the broken copy machine has taken on such catastrophic significance for me, has become some sort of postmodern, epitomic symbol for the mechanical drudgery of modern life—my future, your future, the future. Why is it that the things I learn in college are making it harder to live, not easier? I find myself wondering how the true intellectuals do it. How do they live? How do they eat breakfast? How do they put on a pair of pants? How do they write Bi-Co articles?
The thing is, I guess, they just do. As my recently-graduated and recently-employed friend put it, “I don’t worry about all that stuff.” But if there’s so vast a separation between human thought and human life, then how am I supposed to care—genuinely, beyond a desire not to fail out of college—about the former? I am supposed to care, aren’t I? If the separation is so obvious, why can’t I see it? Are books like "Landscapes of Abandonment: Capitalism, Modernity, and Estrangement" always going to stall me in my tracks? And what good am I to the world at large if I’m stalled in my tracks? I can’t expect make a difference if I’m standing on the sidelines pondering the infinitesimal fact of my own existence.
Ultimately, David Hume decided that there was philosophy, and then there was daily life. For me, then, I suppose there is T.S. Eliot, and then there is a broken copy machine. If fighting to keep them separate is nothing but ongoing intellectual surrender, I will gladly hoist the white flag—or blank page—until one wins. My money’s on the copy machine, but my heart is in the books.
Hoagland-Hanson, a junior English major, can be reached at mhoaglan@haverford.edu.
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Editor's note: Articles that appear in the Last Word section are works of satire.
