My writing professor took the podium and spoke on various approaches to building meaningful abstractions, and the search for meaning in a difficult world with fewer and fewer readers in it. If the degree I will receive in the spring is accurate, it will specify that my studies in the liberal arts focused on literature's failings and how I’ve been taught primarily to destroy it.
To be even tangentially initiated to the state of modern literature is to become intimately familiar with the many failings of language itself. These failings were presented frankly to me today, literature’s common cold with cancer symptoms.
This is a routine shedding of the layer of ego that insulates a writer from his audience much like the text holds the reader at arm’s length. It is one thing to take notes, but another to bask in the glory of the beautiful failure of literature in an endless search for meaning.
After my grapple, by now a routine flexing of my muscles, I was able to return home. I opened the blinds and took a nap in the rare afternoon sun Olympia enjoyed today.
I am reptilian, but not a reptile. Sensitive to sun and heat, but unlike some cold-blooded scaled thing, I do not die surrounded by the cold of my art’s death-throes, the books I read do not rot in my stomach when I lose my source of light. Even though my professor knows the dangers better than most, he still shows his students how to construct a meaningful story, or build interesting sentences.
But like a reptile, I still crave the sun.
About the author: Anthony Preciado is a creative writing major. Find him at http://flavors.me/anthonypreciado. Photo by Patrick Thoits with permission.
