Hamlet was reading words

Tonight I was reminded of why I am an English major. I love words. We string words together and we use them to describe things and we line them up and erase them and find new ones and fish out old ones and we communicate with them. Words are magic. They can mean nothing and everything. Sometimes I read something and it wakes me and makes me different. Sometimes I write something and discover things that I never expected--an excavation of myself.

I took Shakespeare 382 (course number?) from Rick Duerden. One day in class he asked how many of us had gotten "so-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that?" questions about being English majors. All hands went up. He asked how many of us were worried about getting jobs once we graduated. All hands went up. Then he did something very Mr. Keating-esque: he made a speech. I can't remember much of what he said--but he talked to us about how studying like we were doing was teaching us not only to think, but to think for ourselves. He talked about how we were studying Shakespeare at a high level (perhaps the highest) and it was up to us to decide how the world would interpret Shakespeare. And he talked about when he met and dated his wife. He said, "we fell in love, and suddenly the world was reinvented." I don't remember why he was talking about that, but I remember feeling this rush somewhere around in my ribcage. Using his words, he made me believe again in literature and yes, in studying English. I hadn't felt that way in a while. It seems that the farther along you get in your studies, the more disillusioned and jaded people get. It was so unexpected and just cool to find someone who still... believed.

I'm thinking about all those great books I read when I was twelve to sixteen. Those books that seemed to open a window in my mind and shoot off a firecracker and gave me a knew lens to see and think through. You know, a lot of Newberry medal stuff. Walk Two Moons and The Giver and Mick Hart Was Here and The View From Saturday--those books. How could they not be magic?

At any rate, today my love for words was lit up by a note someone had written on their profile. We hear so often that "words can't describe," or "I don't have the words to tell you," and that kind of thing. And sometimes that is completely true. But sometimes words can get pretty close. They can allow us to hold our thoughts and feelings and experiences in the palm of our hand and extend our arm to someone else, someone outside. We can uncurl our fingers and let everything we have sit on our hand, a still firefly.