Ladies and Gentlemen . . .

The class I loved the best this year is also the class I have my lowest grade on.

Dr. Fitts has managed to deliver a class in which I truly have a love/hate relationship with. Modern Western Literature has me drooling over the poems and essays and stories while at the same time wishing for death when writing essays. Let me explain.

After my brain is blown reading Keats or Yeats or Lorca or Borowski, I read it again when I get back to my room. I can't help but feeling small and insignificant against the amazing minds behind these works. Many of these writers only fuel my wish to change the world--for example, Lorca was one of Che Guevara's main insipirations. Now I don't want to create a bloody revolution, but that is another story. . .

Part of the class assignments is writing an essay over one of the authors. This is where it gets hairy: you have to have the essay exactly like Dr. Fitts wants it--it's almost as if he is the one writing the essay for you. Which I don't like. Which is probably why I have only got one "A" essay this semester.

Regardless of how much I love/hate the class, what kept me from dropping the class was the sheer beauty of the literature I read. Some of it was downright shocking. Keats' odes, Yeats' Easter 1916, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, and many many more all stayed deeply rooted in my mind.

The latest thing we read was Tadeusz Borowski's Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber. I had already told myself I was not going to read any more Holocaust books--I had read too many. By the time I was in 8th grade I had already read the likes of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night, and I felt like my humanity was scarred enough. But this work by Borowski is written in an objective journalistic style, and all long I could not take my eyes off of it. I am pained.

I cannot wait to get out on the field and report and awaken some consciences. I feel like humans would be more understanding and more peaceful if we only stopped to understand the people that are affected by our decisions. Just stop . . . and understand.