I never liked my literature classes in high school. This is funny, because I've always loved reading. But I think I've pieced together why I never liked those classes. At first I was sure it was the "classic literature" angle that did it, because I can't stand contemporary or classic stuff; call me a philistine, but my tastes are 90% fantasy. I
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Now out of class reading, that was far, far more enjoyable. I spent FAR more time with other books than with the assigned ones.
(That said, I did enjoy A Separate Peace.)
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That's really one heck of a statement to challenge, isn't it? A nasty one to tell a young person, too, who should have a long way to go before getting to their own ending. What do we have to do, compile some statistics on what sorts of "endings" exist in real life, and sort them into happy and sad categories? Doesn't anything ever turn out okay?
I had a teacher who told me something like that. This was in elementary school. I was saying something to xir about how terrible it was to be a child. This teacher leaned close to me and said in a low, quivering, furious voice, "It gets worse." That phrase has haunted me for the rest of my life. Xe promised that no matter how bad it was as a child, it would just get more and more horrible as I grew up. There's taxes, paperwork, responsibility, work, no time for play. Somehow xe glossed over the part where grown-ups usually don't need to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, or that if grown-ups hit you ( ... )
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Of course, how much time that takes can be ugly in and of itself.
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Rob Brezsny's Pronoia talks about this problem at length and tries to help turn it around. You've read it, right? It's all about that very thing ( ... )
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And as far as philosophy of optimism goes, I could really use an approach that holds strong in the face of ugliness; after a while, it seems like staying upbeat in the world becomes an illogical position. It's times like that when I have to have a good lie down to forget why I reached that conclusion in the first place, because it seems like there's no real way to reconcile it.
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