On his first semester of grad school: Last spring, Dr. Allison mentioned to me that the highs of graduate school are higher and, inevitably, the same can only be true of the lows. For my first semester in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo, I could not have agreed more. Life after undergrad has used angst to prove the law of conservation of mass which may very well follow from the ending of OWU, the beginning of grad school, and the short months between them, but the feeling after the first semester is like wanting to get back onto a roller coaster I had been needlessly screaming on, and realizing afterwards that I had actually been laughing. Some of the most fulfilling classroom experiences arrived after trudging through some of the most perplexing material, and I would be mistaken to call this fulfillment and these perplexions mutually exclusive. Perhaps more than anything, it was learning the patience for delicate, almost surgical close reading that painted the past few months in this color. Particularly one seminar, in which our professor would read three pages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason over the course of about two hours, comes to mind. It sure doesn’t sound attractive, but the course demanded a sort of patience that profoundly reconfigured my understanding of what reading might mean. What first felt like blankly staring at a sentence eventually became a sort of lofty gaze into the ideas inscribed upon the face of each word. This was the sort of patience that began reflecting well beyond an academic lifestyle and transfigured each seemingly menial chore. The pairing of patient close reading and a plethora of pages became a feeling of going so fast that, through time, everything around you would appear to slow down. If anything, graduate school, its lifestyle and its highs and lows have felt monastic. Buffalo’s windy air, overcast sky and its heady curriculum only add to the fact, yet this peaceful intensity is an unusual kind of meaningful.
