“Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.” SpiritualityFictionTeachingAttachment Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd Source: The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
“I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.” StillsHelpingAbleTurnsCoursesFoundLiteratureTermFictionTeachGoneWrittenStudentsHelp MeVillageSaneDepressingConstructsNaivePonderingTruthfulnessEvaluationHardyIndustriousFreshmanEliotCounterarguments Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd Source: The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd