Everything That Rises Must Converge

On Monday, I turned in my final "mid-term" paper. It wasn't my best work, but it was the best I could do before that due date. This meant that on Tuesday, I could return more seriously to trying to write the Cather paper that will be used as my PhD writing sample. This paper has been coming together in my head for about 7 months, and now all I have to do is some concluding research before I can sit down to write it. I am ready to be done with it already, but I am excited to see how it will turn out. I have put a lot of thinking into it, and even if it doesn't get me into the PhD program, I will be glad that I spent time trying to produce the best paper I'm capable of writing.

Also on Tuesday, I received a letter from Willa Cather. It wasn't written to me, obviously (it was the Mencken letter I wrote of earlier), but it felt like it might as well have been. She describes what she was trying to do with One of Ours, and this complements the arguments I'm trying to make. There is also an unusual excitement that people like me get from seeing these "authentic," personal thoughts written by novelists we greatly admire. Literary critics will argue back and forth about whether a text has an "aura" or not, but when I sit down with a photo copy of a letter Cather wrote in 1922, or read the notes that Katherine Anne Porter wrote in the books she read for pleasure, it is an exciting feeling. With the Porter books, it almost feels like the notes have been written to me, because some of them were written after she had agreed to donate her books to UMd. Sometimes it feels like she writes things that she was hoping someone who is interested in her MIGHT find somewhere down the road. With Cather, it is quite the opposite, because she was so protective about her personal thoughts. It's exciting to be reading them, but it also feels kind of wrong, because I know she would object to this invasion of her "privacy."

Every time, I find that eventually the different things I'm working on come together. Some of the ideas I've been researching fall away and the ones that are most important rise to the top. I'm really excited about writing this paper, which is helping to get me through the mountains of other work I have piling up as we speak. I took on a lot this semester, and with about 6 weeks left, I'm already ready for it to be over. But Mrs. Murray, my 10th Grade English teacher, once told me that "the only way out is through." I can't remember how this came up, or what book it might have related to, but I've carried it with me. There's no way to get around all this work I have to do-- all I can do is to accomplish, every day, as much as I can. Eventually, I'll be through to the other side.

(Everything that Rises Must Converge is Flannery O'Connor's final short story collection. In the title story, a young man struggles with relating to his mother. The title is also a reference to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and it is furthermore the name of an artistic installation created by Sarah Sze.)