Midterm Meditations

1. I was speculating this morning on the myth of Romulus and Remus. I believe that Romulus is often considered to be rash and hot-headed while his brother was poor, persecuted Remus. The thing is, Remus must have been pretty rash as well to have jumped over the wall his brother, hot, tired and sweaty, had just spent the morning on. Maybe Romulus had done all the work and Remus sat around making daisy chains and snarky comments all morning. And then what happened? Romulus had to build Rome by himself! Suppose, perhaps, that the two brothers were very close: they had known no family but a wolf and a shepherd and, after all, where was the wolf? where was the shepherd when Romulus built his wall all alone? There are so many things we don’t know.

2. It was after my geometry midterm, today, at 9:00, when a few people were left finishing their proofs, that I got out my mother’s old copy of “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, which I read for the next fifteen minutes. The book is so old and the binding has grown so stiff that in the course of the week I had read it it had split three times and was now in four parts; at page 265 it split again and I was left holding two section; I turned a page and a crevice opened up; the book fell flat.

It is a strange feeling to see someone watching you from the corner of your eye. It immediately bestows a rigid kind of self-consciousness upon you; one comes back to earth from whatever cloud of unconsciousness one was floating on; the upside of this is that the eye is, momentarily, dilated fully and measures you afresh for the first time in a long while against your surroundings. If it happens at the right moment it can gel your ideas marvelously. The downside is, of course, that it is very difficult to read properly when one knows one is being watched.

Nor is it, I found, after Nicole had turned in her midterm and we were released from the bonds of silence, when I turned to see what Tim was doing and whether he had done the proof (the answer, of course, being no, I remonstrated him, for he had missed a very nice proof indeed)—he was doing the crossword, which I attempted and failed to solve, nor is it easy at all when someone watches you, subversively, from eight inches or at most a desk’s length away. Again it tests your moral fortitude like some instrument in the scientist’s hand worries a butterfly's wing. Again it dilates the eyes, in fear, and although that moment is introspective in all technical respects of the word, it feels more extroverted than anything else in the world.

3. Among the realizations this extrasensory perception brings is a sense, marvelously, at fifteen, of having a whole history behind you—enough so that, like James, we must peel past layers to get at our infancy—and yet have the whole of life to live; like (and if I remember, this afternoon, around three, when the sun functions as a spotlight that illuminates its own in strong, dramatic rays, I will take a picture of) cupped hands holding water.

4. And what of the similarity between word and world? Is it a coincidence that the world cannot be fully conceived in a word—that it must be expanded upon? Tolkien, the etymologist, created the Ents who in their wisdom and longevity had proper words, like their word for Lothlorien, a phrase humming and golden and green; are our words thus shadows and abbreviations; are they, like we in C.S. Lewis’ mind, ghosts of their true meanings? Then what is this human power which allows us, in the course of a lifetime, to signify with so many little words so many great things? Like the writers before me I wonder at this contained energy.

5. Writers have the power of ephemeral creation. With their words they create, every day, worlds! What endows them with such god-like powers? And yet, who takes them away? For if I neglect my document; if in my haste I do not save it--it can so easily be ripped away; all the meanings and words and associations and the bright worlds which deign to be contained within them.