Dear English 303 students:
As you'll have heard by now, our class is cancelled tomorrow so that we can observe a national day of prayer & remembrance. We will simply pick up where we left off on Wednesday, and figure out what to do about the syllabus from there.
In the meantime I'd like to share with you an email I sent to friends and colleagues today. The Tennyson quotation is something we'll be reading next week:
I don't know about the rest of you, but the events of the last few days have left me not only stunned and angry but grateful, in a small way, for what we do. In the face of human tragedy and evil, it helps me, at least, to know that we spend our days with works of great beauty and truth, and to think that creative artists have faced tragedy and evil themselves, and continue to face them, and that the ways they face them give us something to think about in the present moment. (If that makes me an Arnoldian right now, so be it.)
In one of my favorite parts of In Memoriam, Tennyson writes:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel:
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
I don't myself have "words like weeds" to "wrap me o'er" for this pain, but my father wrote a sonnet on Tuesday, finding "a use in measured language." He's in New Zealand on sabbatical, feeling very far away from what's going on in the U.S. and yet feeling it with us. I am sharing his words with you, with his permission.
best,
EG
September 11, 2001
To be away when horror grips my land
And have no way to speak, to hear, to share
With many others - not to understand
An act unthinkable, but to compare
My thoughts with theirs and so to hear again
What must be said and heard repeatedly
To be believed as true - for only when
I see with others can I really see.
I want to cry, to scream, to make a plan
For vengeance, hit and hurt, as I - as we -
Are hurt, but isolated here I can
Do nothing but reflect. Humanity
Itself is questioned by this deed, and I
Am one with those who kill and those who die.
--Christopher L. Webber