Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Literature is the best form of comfort

Tinkering with the idea of having my students dive into Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" tomorrow night. I know it is a bit ambitious for this type of class but I have faith in them. At times, I think we can all use a little of "TTTC".

"All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would."

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