Thursday
Recently Sewanee asked me to cover for an ailing professor and teach a section of English 101 (Composition and Literature), one of my favorite courses. I’m therefore suspending my retirement, at least partially. I love this course, which functions in some ways as an “Intro to College” course. For many students, the first semester is the most difficult once since they are grappling with roommates, homesickness, hormones, demanding academics, and unaccustomed freedom, and those issues are bound to arise in our discussions.
Above all, college students wrestle with issues of identity: who they are, what major they should select, what vocation they should target. Mary Oliver’s “The Journey” is a good poem for them.
To be sure, Oliver appears to be working through a specific personal drama in the poem. The “bad advice” that she hears from “the voices around” may involve co-dependency, perhaps around melancholy or depression. By turning a deaf ear to someone’s demands that she “mend” that person’s life, perhaps the speaker wants to break from her own enabling behavior. Could someone else’s emotional windstorm be threatening her “very foundations”? If so then, yes, it’s time to stride deeper and deeper into the world.
I have had students whose college education has been undermined by needy parents and relatives. Sometimes they have been African American students from poor communities and/or broken homes whose parents have understandably but unhealthily relied on “the responsible one.” Or they are older students with a tangle of responsibilities. I have sometimes suggested that they will be more useful to their families if they first complete their college degree.
But students hear other voices as well, especially the voice that demands they train for a high-paying profession. This is “bad advice” because it emphasizes the end result, not the process. If they would follow their own star rather than someone else’s, they might discover their genius lies in areas they never considered.
Listening to their own voice, I tell them, will lead to a more fulfilling life and, conceivably, one that pays better as well. As I’ve informed any number of students, to receive A’s in a major they love (say, English) will get them further in the business world than C’s in one they don’t, even if it’s economics or business. I’ve seen this to be the case with my oldest son, a successful businessman who majored in theater.
I understand why students sound so pragmatic these days. After all, they are graduating with mountains of debt. I also understand why their parents obsess over their ability to pay for health care and rent after they graduate. We parents have been programmed to keep our kids safe. But as Oliver points out, everything will become clear once young people begin to follow a new voice and discover that it is actually their own.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.