The further I am along in my school career, the more I begin to question whether the integration of academic and personal life will ever happen for me. Or at least whether they will even a slightly overlap.
I always thought they came close through the arts, which have evoked emotional and intellectual responses from me. I've thought of both creating and observing art as being sort of the soul of my academic life — what made it important to me, in the end, beyond grades. Lately, though I've felt further away from that integrated ideal. And I've tried to figure out why.
I've identified myself as an artsy-humanities person for as long as I can remember being in school. These were the choices in academic life: Be a science-math person, an artsy-humanities person or a generally well-rounded individual. I'm not a science-math person. I might have been a well-rounded person at one time, but those days are long gone. (I would say they ended in third grade when we had to learn fractions.)
In high school, my preference for humanities was that, just a preference. In college, however, it meant something. My preference was going to be declared to the world when I decided to be A.B. It would be official.
I imagine that the well-rounded people have a more difficult decision to make, or at least, they can look fondly toward whatever field they left behind. I, on the other hand, was happy to make the decision. I said good riddance to math-science and haven't felt that bad about my decision to kill off those requirements with the easiest classes possible.
But instead of my academic life becoming full and shining and happy as I dreamed it would, I ran into new problems. Of course, I felt the futility that almost all humanities people feel at one point or another. But I found that easy to dismiss. I think it is almost necessary to have a period of hibernation and reflection (i.e. four years of college) before we embark on to the real world. Frankly, I think a case for everything and anything on this earth being futile could be made with little difficulty.
So I've accepted and even applauded the fact that I'm not doing anything all that useful right now. My pressing problem is that I've become disappointed, even disillusioned, with the artsy side of my chosen area, the side where the emotional and the intellectual were supposed to join wondrously.
I feel that having to constantly interpret art makes it significantly harder for me to be moved by it. That the intellectual has swallowed the emotional. I feel like the same experience, school, that is supposed to help me cultivate a closer relationship with art, is pushing me away from it.
I'm being pushed away because the nature and scope of art becomes more and more limited the more I learn about it. As an English major, I'm struck by the number of conversations that are repeated in precept over and over again. The same ideas recur, reducing vastly different works to the same set of themes.
I'm not complaining about the level of precept discussion. I am complaining about a problem that seems somewhat sadly inevitable. I, too, find my mind squeezing every work into the same old metaphorical interpreting apparatus. I wish that everyone around me didn't have a similar apparatus, but we are products of the same basic education.
Where I once felt that I was gaining a larger understanding through books — learning something about life that I didn't know before — I now feel that the only understanding I'm gaining is that there is only a selection of seven or so understandings: Life is about gender, life is about power, life is about class, etc. And I don't really have the ability to be moved emotionally by something I've heard before, though it makes it easier to devour it intellectually.
And these seven or so understandings scare me out of producing art myself. I know how I mentally file my classmate's artistic endeavors under these ideas or understandings that I've come to develop over my last three years here. I don't want to have the same thing done to me. I want to do something new, something unclassifiable, unidentifiable. But being in an environment that forces you to classify things, whether rightly or not, makes me feel that this is a lost cause. What I mean is that even if an artist was able to step out of the bounds, create something entirely new, the audience would be unable to accept it as such. It would force it through the interpretive apparatus. It would make it say the message it was used to hearing.
I worry about these things. I constantly wish I could be more artistic or enjoy art more. I want the intellectual-emotional fusion I thought I would experience daily as an A.B. major. But the unartistic me has this consolation: I'm protecting myself. I don't get misinterpreted . . . because I don't say much.
Maya Rock '02 is an English major from Scarsdale, N.Y.
'A Glimpse Within' is a weekly column in which we ask members of the Princeton community to share personal experiences. The 'Prince' welcomes submissions of about 650 words to The Newsroom.
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