Forgotten

I am losing what I´ve learned. That´s what it feels like: loss. I often pick up my old school-books, to browse through old notes, to keep my mind awake to the words I used to study, to that other world that I had started to explore.

Yesterday, I had a big volume of 20th century British and Irish poetry on my lap. I stared at it for a while, read through various pages of T.S.Eliot´s poetry, reviewed the introductions and felt.......blah. At first, I inspected every word, read through the footnotes. But then, after about half an hour of intense concentration, I realized that it was useless. I was useless. I had nothing left to say or think about the words on those pages.

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas"
and my notes.... ¨the climax of the poem¨ Why? What did I have to say about it? ¨Fear of castration,¨ elsewhere...but why? Where did I get that?

And that was just "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock"-perhaps the most widely studied poem in the English language. The margins of "The Waste Land" were fuller still. More scribbles: allusions to other literature, literary terms, speculations.
Take that silly grin off your face: ´tis no lasting accomplishment!

Few things are more depressing than realizing that you´ve forgotten what you´ve learned. And the futility of trying to recover it. As a student, I was aware of my limitations: I knew that I could only try to capture a tiny corner of all of that knowledge, all those facts and the beauty and poetry of words. But now... just a few years later after celebrating some sort of a completion (however fractured!) of that learning, I have lost my grasp almost completely. It´s not just forgetting what the words mean: it´s forgetting how to figure out what they´re there for.

I am so desperate to recover the enthusiasm; to dive back into the deep, deep pool of literary studies. So, I brush the dust off the books, I take them off the shelves, and for a few short minutes I am hopeful....... fooled into thinking that there is something there that will spark my memory, that will make it all "click". And then the words become a blur and my eyes & mind start to hurt. And my heart hurts more, still. I mourn the loss of what I knew once, of what I discovered. While I studied, I knew I´d never know quite enough.
But now...even the simpler poems are riddles...and that stings. It stings, because it´s about more than discovering some of the endless rest of it; it´s about recovering some sense of the beginning.. of the top layers.

The years have dried out my brain. I had hopes of just picking up where I left off..... but now I fear I must start from scratch. And when I get somewhere, when I have gained enough of an understanding to call myself a scholar, at least, then I must find a way to hold onto it. To keep the thoughts alive, to remember what the words meant.