No matter how hard I try to remind myself that I will not have to teach forever, or how much I try to remember all I have to be thankful for, somedays just feel like Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."
Half a league, half a league
Half a league onward
All in the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred...
'Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die.
Then there are other days when I take a line from Bob Dylan and say to Baltimore:
If I'd known had bad you'd treat me
Honey, I never would have come.
Some days are all King Henry V and once more into the breach, and we few, we happy few, we band of brothers we and these things shall the good man teach his son.
Other days still, are just standing on Boo Radley's front porch and walking around in his shoes for a while and trying to understand.
And so it's another Monday here in the East - the same East that James Gatsby and Quentin Compson did so well in. Monday here in Baltimore where the fog hangs low with heat and heaviness in the second week of October, in the second year of my being here.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
10.08.2007
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1 comment:
I'm thinking of a passage from your last entry:
"I heard the orchestra director at Mizzou say that as musicians, we must absolutely walk the very edge of disaster, must be willing to walk to the very edge and then that tiny bit more – if we don’t walk that line then we are serving neither our art or our audience."
I'm thinking about that, and how true it is, how lucky we are sometimes to find these little bits and pieces of wisdom coming at us from all sides.
It is a good thing, I think, to risk the very edge of disaster, even at great personal cost. We could play it safe, sure, but to what end? The line between security and stagnation is pretty thin.
Sometimes we take a risk and suffer the consequences. Would it have been better to have never made the leap at all? Perhaps, perhaps not. Who can really say? Whatever it seems like now, it's usually years before we can look back and judge the situation with any sort of impartiality. My guess is you'll be surprised, looking back, on what was good and what was bad. I always am.
Regardless, the mere act of taking the risk in the first place makes you alive, in a way that most people will never experience. So that's something.
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