Back-patting
I know that I'll have more to say about the past week later, but knowing myself as I do (just like an old friend, am I), I figure I should go ahead and write something, after all.
First in my mind, still, is the oral exam. I drove up to the school so very nervous. Once in gradschool town, I had to drive out to the Kinko's to get my signature sheet copied thrice onto fancy cotton paper. I had forgotten many of the larger landmarks--such as the mall, which calls itself ____'s Senter. Seriously. Senter. Yeah. So I arrived at the shopping center home to Kinko's, and I was thrown. The Albertsons that anchored the center was gone. Not merely closed, mind you, but in the throes of destruction. While the rest of the center was still in operation. Very odd.
I made it back to campus and holed up on the third floor of the library to study for a couple of hours more. I was worried primarily about the detail of questions about The Rainbow. So I crammed on it for a while, reviewed Death in Venice and reviewed my flashcards of the major works and themes of all my graduate classes. All of which served to make me even more nervous. By the time I sat myself down in my advisor's office for a quick chat before the exam, I was pretty much vibrating. It sucked.
Wonderfully, with the first question, about why I had chosen Mina Loy's poetry as my thesis topic, I relaxed into the interested excitement I always feel when I'm talking about literature. Now, if you were to set me down at a table of serious students, I'd eventually come off as the dabbler I am, but I can generally hold my own for a while. The thesis defense, scheduled to last thirty minutes, stretched beyond forty-five. Then, I talked about my classes. Okay, I really only talked about five: each of the seminars led by the three committee members, plus another couple. Thank God, we didn't reach the Romantic poetry class. I would have had to admit some serious slacking if we had.
Instead, however, our discussion remained centered on the Modernist period, with brief comparative forays forward to the Post-Moderns. We talked a lot about churches and how they are portrayed in lit. From Eliot and Hopkins to Larkin, we explored notions of the sacred. Indeed, sacredness played a major role throughout the exam, from schools of criticism that seek to deny the spirit in literary text, to James Merrill's exploration of the afterlife, to Loy's take on Futurist/Bergsonian notions, to Levertov's glorification of the everyday.
As the exam time wound down, I felt supremely gratified in my committee selection. These three were the professors whose ideas and suggested readings have stayed with me through all my semesters of procrastination, and I was pleased that I didn't disappoint them. After less than a minute of closed-door discussion, I was congratulated and well-done'd. Best of all, the reading copy of my thesis was treated very kindly, with no argumentative or structural changes suggested--only the odd typo. All in all, I'm very pleased. And in December, I will be hooded, with my diploma following soon after.
Yes, I'm pleased with myself. I miss that life, a little. It's nice to feel wistful without the guilt of the unfinished task to marr it.