Vocation

Sooooo, at least 8 people over the past 6 months have uttered the following phrase to me: "I can totally see you teaching college." Perhaps this comes from my frustrations teaching at the High School level, but this is an intriguing prospect. Now, it's true that I love ideas and conversation, but it's also true that I'm a crappy, sloppy, ill prepared, unorganized High School teacher. I mean, I'm improving, prospective future employers, I'm definitely improving. Another problem is my memory. I just picked up a book I began reading last month, but was interrupted through moving, wedding plans, lesson plans, and forgetfulness. I remembered enjoying the book and respecting the author's synthesis of disparate information, from Hegel to Picasso to Freud etc. aaaand it's actually practically worthwhile (the book is Love and Will by Rollo May), buuut I had forgotten any of the book's contents, and had to reread half of it. I had forgotten the book's CENTRAL THESIS. Disconcerting. Then last night I'm watching a program on the Augustan Poets (that's late 1600's I think)...Dryden, Pope, those guys. And one of the profs interviewed for the piece reminded me why I loved English classes in college, that confluence of history, philosophy and the beauty of language. But he also reminded me I don't know much, or at least I lack the framework, and that deep attentiveness that good profs have (on the heroic couplet, he says, "it appears to resolve something, you gather experience and concentrate a comment on it in this seemingly resolved couplet. there's a real sense of structure and order to it, a strength and resolve" If asked about the heroic couplet two days ago, I might have said "I think it, like, rhymes.") Of course, he's much older than I am and finished his PhD, but he spoke no differently than my old English profs, and if I get into that line of work, I have a ways to go. I actually had to pause the DVD and ponder, before moving on, the following point. Let me paraphrase: "It would be a mistake to characterize the Augustan Age as an age of reason. In 1690, John Locke publishes his 'Treatise on Human Reason' [or something]. And in that, he posits that all mental processes, however complex they might be, derive from sense impression, from experience. So it's up to individual to order them, to marshal them. So there's a real sense in which ("there's a sense in which" is every English prof's favorite phrase), out there, things are not so ordered, and there's a real need for the creation of order, which influences greatly the way the 18th century sees itself." Now, I may have read some John Locke, I really don't remember, and I certainly don't remember any of his main ideas, let alone their hhistorical context and socio-literary impact. I do remember something of the Romantic Poets' reaction to Empiricism, and their clash against stratified, logical-linear, scientific method, positivistic, reductionistic worldview, which is not my favorite either, although in my later and less vulnerable years, I am able to see the value of structure and order, even if it is not my natural ally. And reading May today reminds me I am lacking an overall framework. I may have bits and pieces of information rattling around upstairs, on poetry, on theology, on psychology, a teensy bit on philosophy (the most difficult for me to remember, because I can't form a mental image of how, exactly, Heidegger differs from, say Schopenhauer, and how he, in turn, differs from Hegel. Somehow, these bits of information haven't congealed. All that to say, should someone with a mind like a steel sieve be pursuing a Professorship in English? Hmmm.