even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: scholastic pursuits

imaginary outfit: scholastic pursuits

After nearly 32 years on this earth, I have only a handful of things I am sure of. One is a certainty that there is a lot I don't know about that I probably should. Another is my constant need to try and learn some of it before I die. If I am not learning something, my gears start to sputter and lock. I panic. Stagnation terrifies me. It might as well be death.

The flip side of this fear is a joy - the little clicks of illumination that come with comprehension and suffuse your brain with wonder. I don't assume I understand, but occasionally, blessedly, I glance at the right thing in a lucky way and for an instant I see. These little glimpses are humbling and profound. They drop the scales from my eyes and let me ground my life and my experience of the world in something larger, something more complex and miraculous. So I am always reading and looking, trying to fill the holes and making new holes.

This new project is a sort of systemization of some of those impulses. It is a tricky thing - look too hard and you miss things, but I still have to try. In a magically ideal world, I would go to a magically ideal graduate school for reading and thinking and writing and have help from magical and ideal teachers and colleagues. But I live in the world I live in. Graduate school is expensive and competitive and even if I could get in somewhere, I don't think any course of study I'd undertake would help me get a job to pay off the debt I'd incur. Debt gives me the cold belly squirms. Still, I like a sense of progression and intent. So I am making a plan for myself.

Anyway. You can read more about it here if you like.

In the meantime: hats. I really am looking forward to wearing hats this fall.

***edited to add: I have decided to password protect the school of one site. If you want access, you will need to email me for the password: evencleveland (at) gmail dot com.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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