FlamingText

Lost Time

   There are any number of things I've been doing besides writing in my blog: Learning Bill Monroe songs, reading dystopian novels from the mid-twentieth century, watching an entire season and a half of Battlestar Galactica and, of course, there's weboggle, which has basically eaten my brain. The last has proven to be an irresistable temptation to me, a way to fullfill my need to type without all the trouble of stringing together words into sentences and paragraphs indicating some kind of coherent thought. Not that I was really doing that on a regular basis, but the pressure to do it was evidently getting to be too much for me.

   When I was in seventh grade my Russian teacher (yes, I took Russian; also Spanish and French. I am illiterate in three languages.) assigned me a book to read and to write a report about, to be delivered after Christmas Break. A fun little literary romp entitled the Brothers Karamazov. I'm pretty sure I agreed to this because a.) It was September when she assigned it and January seemed a long way off, and b.) I hadn't seen a copy of it yet. Plus, I think I let confidence in my ability to read a big, serious work of literature cloud my judgement as regarded my willingness to read same. Even though I had read other long novels before this, I think it should be clear even to someone who's never read Dostoevsky that there are many important ways that reading the Brothers Karamozov is not at all like reading Lord of the Rings.

   So it was during Christmas Break of seventh grade that I first discovered Cliff Notes. The moral calculus went something like this: I looked at a copy of the novel next to a copy of the encapsulation of the novel, comparing their relative sizes. Then I thought about how many days I had left myself to finish the novel (and by finish, I of course mean start), factored in the recent snowfall and the amount of time I had allotted myself for sledding, building snowmen and pelting my friends and acquaintances with snowballs, and I then decided that it was stupid assignment in the first place and besides Mrs. I would never know the difference. Hell, the Cliff Notes would probably give me a better comprehension of the gist of the thing than I could ever come to on my own. Such was my rationalization as I pulled on my boots and ran outside to play in the snow.

   Even so, I felt pretty guilty about deceiving Mrs. I, who was after all a kindhearted, if intermittently gruff and demanding teacher. She had lines in the corners of her eyes from smiling most of the time and when she laughed she laughed loud but would also yell at you if you yawned in class. One of her favorite sayings, translated from the Russian, was "Your tongue has no bones," which basically meant shut up. Standing all of four feet eleven inches tall, she housed within that matronly little Slavic frame of hers a whirring dynamo of tireless enthusiasm for education. She spoke five languages and taught two of them. One got the distinct sense that she hailed from a tradition of pedagogy with a substantially more rigorous standard of achievement than was in place in the American public schools of the period. Her standards were perhaps absurdly high. Jesuit high. That she considered me at twelve capable of reading and understanding Dostoevsky attests to the double-edged sword of esteem and high expectations that accompanied her favorable evaluation of my acumen.

  I turned in my report on schedule and if she noticed that I was lying about having read the book she didn't let on; She seemed genuinely delighted at how well I had grasped the central polemic, a section called the Grand Inquisitor. Maybe she'd never actually heard a book report given by a student who'd really read the book they were assigned. It certainly seemed possible. So armed with my passng familiarity with the general ideas underlying one of the classics of Western Literature, obtained from my exhaustive reading and re-reading of the Cliff Notes, I learned perhaps a far more valuable lesson which was to be repeated again and again throughout the entire course of my education, growing in refinement with each iteration: How to bullshit one's way through a difficult assignment. I think I could make a strong argument that this is a life skill that has served me far better than any wisdom I might have gleaned from that novel, classic of the modern canon though it may be.

   All this is by way of explaining why I currently find myself reading a paperback edition of the Grand Inquisitor during my morning bus ride . I'll decide later if I am to go on and read the whole novel, but I feel like I owe Mrs. I at least this much. I can already tell that it's unlikely to be adapted into a film by Peter Jackson, which is too bad because future generations could skip the Cliff Notes version and just watch that.

Posted by flamingbanjo at March 23, 2006 07:06 AM