—Who actually wrote that “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” poem? Was it Longfellow?
—I don’t know. I sort of thought it was just some crap that had bubbled out of America’s collective unconscious.
—Yeah, but it’s surprising how often you think that and it turns out to be Longfellow.
I Googled it and J. was right; Longfellow all the way. I couldn’t read very much of it, because my subconscious kept revolting and suggesting alternate lines to close the couplets.
Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
He turned into a dinosaur.
Two weeks into my course. It’s a testament to something (not to me) that these young men and women are actually willing to show up at eight in the morning to hear me honk about the “Ancient Mariner” in front of the blackboard; I don’t know if this will continue through the semester. So I can consider myself invested in the classroom and then feel like shit for being the proximate cause of everyone’s boredom, or I can divest myself and take it as just something to be done two days a week, less unpleasant than a lot of other jobs I’ve had. That’s okay for now—I don’t even mind getting up early—but I don’t know what a career of divestiture would mean for the state of my soul. I was feeling all triumphalist over the summer because no one was making me do anything just then; but lo, we are engines of dissatisfaction.
In three days I turn 29, which means no more or less than the brute fact itself. Family is driving into town for a visit. The spider threads of our thin communities, stretched along the highways.
