I scared myself away, and that totally misses the point. “So study evermore is overshot,” I’m inclined to sigh in honor of Berowne.[1] I set up this blog for creative freedom. As a place to write when I’m not really up for writing the items on my academic to do list. Must we recap? It exhausts me to think about everything I’ve written lately and it’s more exhausting still to think of everything I have left to write. And then, what woe, to scare myself away from my own blog and just when I needed a place to practice the craft without all the pressure.
But I set my own bar and lately I’ve had to confront some self-knowledge that I’d been blissfully denying. I’m an overachiever. And sometimes, so it would seem, this can yield negative results. Like when setting one’s own bar, for example.
Hereby, I will stop citing critical sources![2] And just write! Ah, to cry the charge of so many petulant writers before me! It satisfies. Try it.
And so I resolve to write with abandon. I will quench my insatiable thirst for (anonymous) publication by writing about my ordinary life.[3] But, ordinarily, my mind is on her. She inspires me to work and to rest, both to my fullest potential, and reminds me to learn the really important things first. And so, with Berowne, I sigh: “If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice.[4]”
[1] Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labor’s Lost (I.i.142), 1594.
[2] As a tribute to my students, who teach me everything I need to know most, I also dropped the requirement I had for a works cited page and critical sources from the draft of an analytical essay assignment before I published it.
[3] Which, by the way, totally makes me want to cite an article I just read in PMLA by Joshua Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture, 2011. Also, Modern Language Association, I apologize for totally obfuscating any sense of proper citation format. I’m abandoning it. For the blog’s sake. I’m switching to simplicity-focused footnotes, but only here. Don’t hate me.
[4] ---. (IIV.ii.228).
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