Sometimes I feel like I haven't really learned anything, I've just been memorizing the right answers.

Filing things away

I've gotten a start on cleaning and organizing and was going through some old schoolwork when I happened upon my old English papers. I found this in one of my papers:

I believe that the works that I hold closest to me are those that frightened and disturbed me: those that snuck into the far corners of my mind and started to pick away until the whole of my thought caved in to a mountain of self study and assorted psychological ponderings. Each one, at least initially, scared me because of how much of myself I found in the pages.

At this time I was writing about Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Shakespeare's King Lear, but I've come to notice more and more how very true that is-- not only with literature, but movies and music as well. Maybe it's that they manage to put into words what I have been longing to, maybe it's that they can break through the layers that I can pile on, maybe I just like the challenge of facing them.