It could happen with anything you're studying, anything you're doing, even if it is out of a conscious choice based on what can bring you the most happiness, the highest fulfillment. You could have that one black smudge, the one subject, area, task, you just hate thinking of, and cannot ever compel yourself to enjoy doing. When I think of my decision to do a BA, to do it in English Literature, then my black smudge would be tomorrow's exam.
Till a few minutes ago it was paper IV - an unhealthy, vague, presumptuous pool of literatures not meant for the cauldron they've been wearily stirred into. I do not like most of it, and I certainly have had an eyebrow raised this whole year on the why, how and what of its structure. More on this later.**
But tomorrow's paper is worse. It is a wild frenzy of areas that has captured my heart and left it pitilessly gasping for more. Tomorrow's exam is a sin, because of the way all that sheer magic and restless wonder will be mutilated to serve a purpose I refuse to recognise has anything to do with my education.
What does it mean to write an answer to a question you feel you may never be able to answer fully? It's not simply about the fact that I feel I haven't read or experienced enough. It's more to do with the withering inadequacy of words. "Without contrariness is no progression", could you apply this idea to Yeats' The Second Coming and Sailing to Byzantium*? I keep madly dithering between the nervous intensity these words make me feel, and the shove to write a genuine answer that won't haunt me later as written "in partial fulfillment of her Bachelor's degree in English Literature."
My best 'answers' have been written during the mayhem called Prelims. I had no fear of being judged by our professors, I wrote what I truly believed in and got away with arguments I tonight surrender to cynicism. What if I get a uni-dimensional, tea-deprived, answer-key automaton for a checker - this previously lighthearted rant is what now has the power to stop me from being honest, from being ready to take a chance on my beliefs, from being open to perceptions and different angles of looking at things, from being creative, a little cheeky and insatiably in love with fresh ideas. What on earth am I doing then?
Answer: There seems to be no end to the hypocrisy we face in our education, and what it means to be educated.
