think think think

I've been thinking a lot again, over the past few days, about the day in Venice when my professor Kathy - who at the time was 67 with bad knees in a city with no cars and lots of steps - sat with me and my friend Jess at lunch and talked frankly with us about how she had been struggling with feelings of what she termed "intellectual alienation" for most of her life.

Some background: When she was 18 or so, Kathy left home and moved to India for three years, and only came home after giving birth to her first child. Before she was 30, she was living back in the US with an MA and PhD in Literature from Harvard, writing and publishing youth travel guides with her husband, and she had another kid. Eventually she got divorced, and since then she's taught everywhere from Italy to Russia to Turkey to Thailand. She worked at Ramapo for years, directing the telecommunications center (that a lot of people don't know exist) and teaching. A lot of people who had her as a professor said she was awful, but as a person, she's unbelievable. She's mainly retired but she still runs the Venice trip every May, and she still knows the city well. She lives in a gorgeous little house in the Bronx right on the Hudson River with a view of the cliffs and the GW Bridge that'd knock you silly. She has a dog named Pablo and a cat named Ringo, and her house is decorated with things she's collected over the years from all the places she's been: masks from Venice, ganeshes from India, street paintings from Africa, hand-carved wooden benches from Bali. This is her backyard. I want it.

But anyway. Kathy is as liberal and sharp-tongued as most Ramapo comm professors, and she would always talk to me in Venice about how she gets slack for being intellectually curious and holding a mix of knowledge and experience in higher regard than straight academia and bureaucratic bullshit. She said she's always felt a bit on the outside for thinking differently from most people, and she realized a long time ago that that struggle never ends. The first time she told me this, I groaned and told her that's depressing. She fixed me with an earnest stare and said, "Well, it's true. I don't want to lie to you. It doesn't go away."

It was reading week, this week, and I didn't have class. I didn't catch up on reading or get a head start on my papers, like I should, but let my brain rest for a week. I love my classes, I really do. But at the same time, even though I only have 6 hours of seminar a week, they exhaust me. I find myself questioning everything, all the time; in a sense, turning everything into a struggle of ideology and social issue and so on and so forth. I look at something and I can't just appreciate the basic aesthetic value; I immediately start deconstructing it. I find myself placing even the most mundane things in academic or critical frameworks, and it's tiring. I really appreciate having the opportunity to be here and learn and be made to feel totally lost and clueless on a regular basis. Seriously. It's a great experience, so far. But having this time off this week also made me realize that I am a much, much happier person when I don't think so much about things.

And then that makes me wonder: which is the better way to live? Blindly accepting of the problems in the world, of the various "meanings" of works of art, unaware that they exist, and relatively happy? Or trying to learn and grow intellectually and constantly questioning everything, but struggling all the time? Where is the joy and wonder and excitement and passion in "intellectual alienation"?

I think I'm gonna go to church next Sunday.