SWM Seeks Muse
As many of you know, because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland that spewed ash into the atmosphere which resulted in the grounding of more planes than ever before, I’ve spent the last two weeks in Paris instead of back home on the East Coast where I was planning to be. I can’t say that I was overly impressed by the idea of spending two weeks of vacation with my books and mountains of esoteric articles on the intricacies of the cyclical nature of Lol V. Stein’s journey to reconstitute her past in Marguerite Duras’s take on the modern novel about nothing (no really, that was the goal of the book, to be about NOTHING). You know what’s important in life? Not that. I can’t think of many things I care about less than Marguerite Duras’s take on nothingness at the moment. Actually, perhaps my generally apathy for this whole program exceeds my general indifference to Duras. Last summer, after two years off from academia spent in hospital administration, I was kind of psyched to speak only French for a few months and genuinely excited about learning again, but ever since I came back from Christmas break, the novelty has most definitively warn off.
I think it’s time that I confess something: when I applied to Middlebury’s M.A. French program, it was more to escape the dull workaday world of lab specs and staff meetings than out of a burning passion for French literature. My friends actually had to goad me into actually sending in the deposit to finalize my acceptance. Don’t get me wrong, I love the French language and some francophone literature, but I actually mildly dislike a lot of “serious” contemporary French lit. It’s too depressing and too often art for art’s sake which is fun to analyze for awhile, but picking apart metaphors and explaining synecdoches (where a part of something represents the whole for all of you who don’t actually talk about this crap everyday) basically equates to intellectual masturbation and after months and months and months of it, I’ve lost my drive. Now, instead of being a fun game or an intellectual quest that reveals some fraction of universal truth like it used to, my work here just feels like a colossal waste of time.
If my goal was to escape the drudgery of life and live in a dream world for a little while, mission accomplished, but as a means to achieving that end, this master’s program has lost its utility. The point of getting good grades this semester is to get the degree, but as I’m fairly certain I’m never going into a Ph.D. program nor do I really have any desire to teach at a private school, I find myself asking the question “à quoi ça sert?” (what’s the use?) The part of this education that I’m going to use, the part that will make me a better writer and a better French speaker, I’ve already got; the rest of this process is just tying up loose ends to get a piece of paper. Even if I stopped now, I’d have gotten my money’s worth out of the program. So why not just quit worrying about all this research and academic mumbo jumbo and enjoy my 44 remaining days in the City of Lights?
OK, you’re right. I am SO CLOSE to the end and having the degree can only help my future so I might as well finish it. After all, I’m here until the middle of June and need something to give my days structure until then, right? The only problem is that when I get like this, when I have decided something is pointless, I have a much harder time coming up with clever ideas to write about for, oh say a 10-12 page mini-mémoire (research paper). Does anyone out there have a muse they’d like to lend me until Thursday? Maybe I’ll just take a deliberate break from pounding my head against the desk trying to find a way to finish these papers and just watch a movie or something. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find my muse after I stop looking for her.
are you ever going to write again? PLEASE