Essay and life
Jun. 21st, 2008 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI had to apply for a scholarship for next semester: typically, the question for the essay is what inspired me to get a college education. Since I am in my third year of college and facing down the fourth for next year, that answer is a lot different than it would have been fresh out of high school.
I needed to write something, so I wrote this. And, now I guess I'm posting it.
An Answer to the Question,
“Who or what has inspired me to pursue a college education and why.”
My grandmother did not have room to breathe. You can see this in the huddled way she holds herself, looking out at the world through eyes grown dim with a certain mistrust. An intelligent and scholarly woman, Ruth was born in an era when intelligent women of a certain class still did not get to do much with their minds. After a brief marriage that ended when she drove away into the night, in a car loaded with her two daughters and a small collection of books, her life began to close in on her. When her husband and the father of her children died two years later at the end of a struggle with mental illness and alcoholism, Ruth was left on her own. She had two young girls to take care of, and that did not allow her the time to do want she wanted to do: expand her knowledge, explore, and seek out a world of the mind beyond Montana and southern California.
Stories from my mother's childhood show me now that my grandmother still wanted all those things, despite the fact that there were not enough hours in a day to ever find them. Ruth was fiercely protective of her books. Sturdy, lovely volumes of Shakespeare, the Quran, and Mary Shelly perched on plywood shelves bought at yard sales as a testament to her only way out of the constrains of her narrow life. They were a tiny fraction of the world she wanted and would never get to have. The life of the mind was a luxury that circumstance of poverty and gender had forbidden Ruth. After a long time of fighting, she gave up. Like a Japanese carp circling forever in too small a pond, my grandmother became stunted by the boundaries of her world.
I do not know the woman my grandmother was before the world finally broke her. I have only seen her afterwards, when she began to give away her books after years of fighting to keep them safe, to keep her hopes hers in a world that said she had no need of them, had no need of thinking. I have only known my grandmother constrained and petty and small. She is resentful when she hears me talk about what I am learning in my fancy women’s college. She is jealous. She’ll butt in to change the subject to something that grates less on her old wounds, and tells me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Her eyes look out from between the bars of a cage to which she is so accustomed that she no longer even sees it.
You have chosen for me a word that I can use well in this essay, because I am a student of languages and of religion, as my grandmother always wanted to be and never was. Inspiration in English means either “to create in someone a passion for a task”, or “to inhale, to breathe in”. Both these meanings come from the Latin spiritus, which, like the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruah of which it is a Biblical translation, means both ‘soul’ and ‘breath’. My grandmother was inspired, but life did not have give her room to breathe and that suffocated her soul.
I cannot undo what time has done to Ruth. I cannot go back to my mother’s childhood to give Ruth the money to pay for college so that she could go out into the world, and learn, and grow as she so longed to do. I can only try to do those things for myself, and hope that I will be able to redeem my grandmother’s suffering by stretching myself beyond what I am now. I am the heir to my grandmother’s broken dreams, so I must honor what I have that she did not. I have no illusions: I cannot save her. But I can save myself from her fate. And so, as I walk down the long halls of my college’s library, I think of my grandmother’s treasured books and I breathe in as deeply as I can.
I needed to write something, so I wrote this. And, now I guess I'm posting it.
An Answer to the Question,
“Who or what has inspired me to pursue a college education and why.”
My grandmother did not have room to breathe. You can see this in the huddled way she holds herself, looking out at the world through eyes grown dim with a certain mistrust. An intelligent and scholarly woman, Ruth was born in an era when intelligent women of a certain class still did not get to do much with their minds. After a brief marriage that ended when she drove away into the night, in a car loaded with her two daughters and a small collection of books, her life began to close in on her. When her husband and the father of her children died two years later at the end of a struggle with mental illness and alcoholism, Ruth was left on her own. She had two young girls to take care of, and that did not allow her the time to do want she wanted to do: expand her knowledge, explore, and seek out a world of the mind beyond Montana and southern California.
Stories from my mother's childhood show me now that my grandmother still wanted all those things, despite the fact that there were not enough hours in a day to ever find them. Ruth was fiercely protective of her books. Sturdy, lovely volumes of Shakespeare, the Quran, and Mary Shelly perched on plywood shelves bought at yard sales as a testament to her only way out of the constrains of her narrow life. They were a tiny fraction of the world she wanted and would never get to have. The life of the mind was a luxury that circumstance of poverty and gender had forbidden Ruth. After a long time of fighting, she gave up. Like a Japanese carp circling forever in too small a pond, my grandmother became stunted by the boundaries of her world.
I do not know the woman my grandmother was before the world finally broke her. I have only seen her afterwards, when she began to give away her books after years of fighting to keep them safe, to keep her hopes hers in a world that said she had no need of them, had no need of thinking. I have only known my grandmother constrained and petty and small. She is resentful when she hears me talk about what I am learning in my fancy women’s college. She is jealous. She’ll butt in to change the subject to something that grates less on her old wounds, and tells me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Her eyes look out from between the bars of a cage to which she is so accustomed that she no longer even sees it.
You have chosen for me a word that I can use well in this essay, because I am a student of languages and of religion, as my grandmother always wanted to be and never was. Inspiration in English means either “to create in someone a passion for a task”, or “to inhale, to breathe in”. Both these meanings come from the Latin spiritus, which, like the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruah of which it is a Biblical translation, means both ‘soul’ and ‘breath’. My grandmother was inspired, but life did not have give her room to breathe and that suffocated her soul.
I cannot undo what time has done to Ruth. I cannot go back to my mother’s childhood to give Ruth the money to pay for college so that she could go out into the world, and learn, and grow as she so longed to do. I can only try to do those things for myself, and hope that I will be able to redeem my grandmother’s suffering by stretching myself beyond what I am now. I am the heir to my grandmother’s broken dreams, so I must honor what I have that she did not. I have no illusions: I cannot save her. But I can save myself from her fate. And so, as I walk down the long halls of my college’s library, I think of my grandmother’s treasured books and I breathe in as deeply as I can.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 06:27 pm (UTC)a) be honored
b) grab you immediately
no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 08:48 pm (UTC)That said, thank you very much. As you've probably guessed by now, I really like writing and admire your way with words, so hearing "eloquent" from you gives the words a great deal more weight.
This was an absolute blast to write. Having them stick the word "inspired" in the question apparently tapped something I've been keeping in my head for a while, and once I'd gotten the rough draft done, I sort of sat back and just gloried in it for a little while. (Then I had to fuss with the margins to get it to all fit on two pages, per scholarship instructions. Kleinigkeiten, oder?**) I have so little Greek and Latin and I desperately want to learn more, but whenever I can pull out linguistic roots and play with them makes things just sort of klick*** in my head. (This, by the way, is what makes German so much fun!)
I felt much better about my grandmother after I wrote this. We don't get along, and she came into my family home just as I was leaving, so we were never really forced by proximity into dealing with each other and getting over our various petty disputes. The above sentiments of sympathy owe a lot to my own mother's endless efforts to just get it into my head about how broken my grandmother is, and how lonely and limited her life has been.
So now I spend a lot of time thinking about duty (even more than usual), and what I can do with myself. I kind of want to write and ya know, make money off of it. And maybe eat, occasionally.
*Right? (Ha! I will subject you to just as many linguistic footnotes as you inflict upon me! Mühähähähähä....)
** English: Trivialities, right? (oder does NOT mean 'smell' in German, but rather 'or'. Stuck at the end of sentence, it means 'right?' or 'don't you think?')
***This only sort of real German word, but it should be spelled like this in English to increase its levels of awesome. Abolish the superfluous letter C! Up with S and K!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 08:53 pm (UTC)(Gah. I can spell check my little heart out, but I always end up leaving out a word!)