All Apologies

The following is an entry that I started writing last Wednesday afternoon. I was listening to the Avett Brothers and feeling somewhat maudlin about leaving. I didn't get a chance to finish the post, so it's just been sitting here for 5 days. I just re-read it, and I'm a little embarrassed about how pitiful it sounds, but I decided to publish it anyway. Sometimes a little emotion is a good thing.

Today is my last day here in the dorms and my room is empty, except for my computer and close to seven hundred dead bugs. I promise I didn't kill all of them, just the one that I wrote about previously. I do feel badly that they get in and then can't get out again; I'm not really sure how to solve that problem for them though.

An empty dorm building is a pretty sad thing, but it has allowed me to reflect a bit on everything that I've learned here this summer.

What follows is a piss-poor photograph of the staircase at Loretto Chapel.

I really am sorry it's so terrible. For those of you who don't know, the staircase was constructed in the 1880s by a mysterious stranger who came to town. He offered to build it for a convent of nuns during the construction of the chapel, and after he was finished, he left town and was never heard from again. The staircase was built without nails or a central support, so the joinery used is some sort of witchery that defies understanding. The prevailing theory espoused by the nuns is that the mysterious stranger was St. Joseph, and thus the staircase is considered an actual real-life miracle.

After graduation earlier, I was looking through my phone at some of the pictures I took in Santa Fe this summer, and, as English majors are wont to do, attempting to come up with some sort of unifying metaphor for the summer (not something, I understand, that occupies the brains of most people who are productive, functioning members of society). I've been working for the past six weeks to wrap my head around some truly astonishing feats of verbal skill. It was my task, on several occasions, to select some tiny facet of these texts and articulate what exactly makes them fuction as they do. Digging through mounds of scholarly research and poring over the significance of each word selected by the author, I attempted, with my tiny pea brain, to tease out the implications of these choices and identify the ever-elusive "deeper meaning" behind a really good story. Like the staircase at Loretto, these texts are artifacts that represent a super-human achievement combining virtuoso technical skill and artistic wizardry (whether or not they were created by actual saints). Like my pathetic iPhone photo, any attempts to capture and articulate the brilliance of the original work are at best derivative, stupid and pointless.

Nevertheless, I can't think of any better way to spend my summer, or the rest of my life, for that matter, than to live as a scholar. It's unlikely I'll ever create anything as wonderful as a staircase with invisible joinery, or The Canterbury Tales, but spending my time thinking about them is good enough for me.