Borkowski 9-11_Maggie's Response

[Sondra Perl]

#673

In the last part of the book, as in the first, it was the humor that got me. David’s description of his teachers in high school–and his reaction to them–was both comical and, strikingly, poignantly sincere:

In class, they looked so glum
teaching I thought that if the material they considered essential to our
educational survival brought them so little joy, then maybe I’d actually be
better off dying cheerfully ignorant than depressingly intelligent. (205)

Since, in his own estimation, dying cheerfully ignorant is what almost happened to him, there’s more than a little black humor here, but there is also a genuine irony in the situation: his teachers seemed to hate the very thing they were saying was so important. The irony is, of course, funny because it’s irony, but it’s also funny because it’s true. It’s one of those “you’ve-got-to-laugh-or-you’ve-got-to-cry” moments and, because this part of the book is about how David, at least, is not one of those glum teachers, laughter really is the best medicine.
Of course, this passage also ties in with the more serious subject of using books against rather than for students. I don’t remember that ever happening to me–books and I had too strong an alliance going by the time I stepped into a classroom–but I do remember a Composition I professor who employed sentence structure in a rather glum and intimidating manner. I can honestly say that, in the subsequent battle with compound construction and the subordinate clause, I was soundly defeated and for a long time I avoided all English classes (I was 15 and taking classes at community college, so I had a lot of time to come around), thinking that, whatever my real talents were, they did not lie in the same department with the dreaded complex sentence. Because this happened at a community college, I now cringe at just how much of a “wheat-and-chaff” exercise may have been taking place there.
For the record, I was not the wheat.

I guess the question I still have is, why the vision of the wall of books? That is the only connection that David doesn’t quite seem to have made. By the last chapter, he figures out or at least speculates on how the shooting relates to what came before and what comes after, except when it comes to the wall of books. Nothing he describes about his life before the shooting really explains why books would seem like the answer–indeed, Chapter 10 suggests a whole bunch of reasons, including his principle discovering a new use for the weight of the weighty tome, why they WOULDN’T. So I guess my question for David would be how he understands that part of the narrative, whether, having written the book and had a chance to sit with it for a while, he has come to any new insights about it or whether it really is (unlike some of the other mysteries he explores) truly inexplicable.

• This topic was modified 11 years, 5 months ago by Sondra Perl.

[Sondra Perl]

#681

Maggie, I really enjoyed your anecdote about the composition teacher, which I think is rather ironic, considering that you have a beautiful writing style. And “enjoy” might not be the right word. The anecdote caught my attention, because it made me a little angry. I think people make too much of “correct” writing, as if language could ever be reduced to right and wrong. It reminds me of E.M. Forster, when he writes in “A Room with a View” that “there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time–beautiful?” And I think that what Forster is getting at is the indelicacy of beauty–how beauty is inherently shocking, unexpected–perhaps unruly. So why can’t our language be like that? Beautiful, reckless, and indelicate. I, for one, still don’t really know the correct way to deploy a subordinate clause. I don’t think I even know what a compound construction is. But, I do love to write.

And for me, reading and writing are, at the heart, acts of love; and maybe that’s why I’ll always remain, on some level, an amateur writer (according to the OED “One who loves or is fond of…”) I love beautiful, indelicate things. Messy, spontaneous, circular writing. Sentences with no verbs. Sentences with no subjects, or objects.

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