teacup plotlines

last week, over mugs of hot tea, a friend of mine, also an english major, posited an intriguing theory. she said that she believes the divorce rate for people who were english majors in college is probably higher than for people who majored in other disciplines, simply because our chosen field of study practically sets us up for loneliness and dissatisfaction.

and, i’m sad to say, i think she has a point. our course material includes some of the best the english language has to offer, and though our private reading lists may contain more contemporary fiction, all of it, taken too much to heart– as it most certainly will be, given the nature of the people who become english majors in the first place– has the potential to make us unfit for decent emotional connectivity. we study the aesthetics of idealism and heartbreak. jane austen’s novels present romantic attachments too good to be true, poe’s narrators are forever killing women who then refuse to stay dead, and shakespeare contains his own superbly complicated versions of both ends of the spectrum: comedies and tragedies, both extreme and unrealistic, but moving enough to affect us at our core.

by this point in the process, only a few credits shy of a degree, we’ve become convinced that human interaction is best as an exchange of elegant, lengthy monologues constructed with pocket thesauri, and that when visiting historic locales, like lord tennyson at lyme, we’d rather be shown the exact spot where louisa musgrove fell than be told of the duke of monmouth. but despite the mandatory cynicism we develop– as it does happen to be a degree requirement–what we want more than ever is to be swept off our feet by a kind of ultimate beauty and worldly romance that just doesn’t exist and the idea of which manages to eclipse the more subtle wonders of real life.

and yet it isn’t the stories that cause the fatal idealism- it’s more likely our own propensity to absorb whatever suggestions the stories make about the nature of human development. characters that find themselves happy don’t have to prove that their happiness is sustainable- the story ends, and we’re stuck, forever picturing their full and contented days stretching on to infinity. and those that find themselves sad, pathetic, and broken at the end of a story will always be that way. their stories don’t go on beyond those last pages of despair and so we always imagine them there, unfulfilled, in dark corners, trying resignedly to fill the void with endless cups of black coffee… oh, wait, maybe that’s us at the end of the semester when there are three papers to write and length requirements total something like forty-five pages!

either way, we live our lives as if we’re forever mounting towards a pinnacle, after which we expect to reach a point of cessation and stagnation, when all loose ends will be tied, where we will discover our fate– either to be happy or sad– and settle into it, like a figure in the last chapter of a novel. we have incorporated plot diagrams into our theories of how the world is supposed to be, and like all good english majors, we have the textual evidence to support our thesis statement.

point is, while we try to navigate the treacherous waters of day-to-day life, we, like the rest of the world, wonder why life isn’t like it is in books, only, unlike the rest of the world, we’ve made a study of those books, and so the disappointment registers deeper and more poignantly for us, i think, thus rendering us generally more likely to be painfully idealistic and/or disengaged, and consequently, dissatisfied.

**this is a terrifically depressing post, not to mention pretentious, but i hope you’ll forgive me, as the alternative was to tell you: how annoying it is that girls on my hall leave their hair all over the bathroom; that sometimes i’m too lazy to walk all the way to the rubbish bin to dispose of used teabags; that today, being monday, marked the return of the painful knot of stress in my left shoulder; and that i’ve perfected my halloween costume. at a prohibition-themed party over the weekend i was a 20s muckraking journalist, but tomorrow, i’m going to be a 20s muckraking journalist who got too close to the truth and was consequently strangled to death with a rope, leaving deep and bloody ligature marks across my neck. every costume gets better with some death.