Coming Out of the Humanities Closet

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

From the time I was a freshman in High School, I wanted to be a doctor.  Everyone in my life knew this was my dream, and the only thing that varied was what my specialty would be.  But then, it happened.  My senior year, I chose to take AP Lit (coming from a small school in Montana we didn’t have too many options for higher division classes) and from this point on, my life would never be the same.  During the first semester of the class, we read Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises and for the first time in my life I understood why someone might enjoy Literature.  In those pages written so many years ago, I saw vestiges of my life and I was hooked.  Finding the flames of my passion stoked but not yet combusted, I didn’t quite change my life plans.  When I enrolled at the university I was a double major, Cell Biology & Neuroscience and Literature, and was still planning on becoming a doctor.  But three semesters in, after taking several English/Lit/Writing courses, I saw the path of my future change.  Sitting in an Organic Chemistry Lecture, I realized that I could not spend the rest of my life looking through microscopes, that my thirst for knowledge was too great to be satiated by a field so narrow.  That very week, I dropped my Cell Bio/Neuroscience major and started looking at English Graduate Schools.  Now came the real challenge: telling my family.  I knew that I had a supportive family who would love me no matter what, but I also knew that none of them really understood what went on (perhaps I still don’t really know) in the English department.  My parents were the first to know and they were about as okay with it as I had suspected, but I figured my grandparents would be a slightly harder sell. In the end, everything worked out as well as could be expected, but I still see, in the eyes of both my parents and grandparents, the remnants of Theseus’s speech shown above.  Perhaps they think that I sit around with my “poet’s pen” and spend my days writing “antic fables.”  And maybe they are right, maybe that is exactly what we do, but there is a larger truth to the whole situation which can be seen in the narrative that I just presented.  If I found myself surprised at finding my life in the words of Hemmingway, imagine my surprise when I realized that Shakespeare also outlined my life in his words.  He described my feelings, Theseus’s words nearly to a tee, when I was in high school; and he described my family’s feelings now, but this just goes to show that the “airy nothings” which find their ways onto the page are more than the simply the words of madmen.  Oh, they are so much more.  These are the words which help to describe the human condition, to illuminate the darkness of both the past and the future, as well as give us insight into the innermost workings of the individual and the society to which he belongs.  In the end, doesn’t this all seem to be accomplishing the work of all the other “real” majors in the university system within itself?