Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Dec. 10 rolled around, I joined the large majority of my class in dropping off a batch of resumes at the Office of Career Services. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school in the next few years but certainly not right away. I have led a fairly academic existence over the past three years (I'm a philosophy concentrator), and surely the fresh air of the "real world" would do my burnt-out mind some good. As I had heard through the grapevine, consulting companies have a secret...
...doesn't die, of course. The moral ofthe story, as we learn in the play's clumsyclosing monologue, is that adulthood is aboutchoice. This idea about the dangers of growing upwas revelatory when we, growing up, actually beganto discover it for ourselves: it was notrevelatory when we figured out that this was thesubject of The Jerusalem Disease, and itbecomes boring by the time Shrier actually forceshis narrator to explain it. The unsubtlety of theplot is compounded by the clumsiness of thedirect-address monologue through which the moralis conveyed: the play begins and ends with thecentral character, Noah Feldshriber--played byJuri...
...words / we wake among words," outlining the windows of perception so densely implicit in Herbert's image-heavy poems. Herbert goes on to describe lost words as being "a small prickly pin / that connected / the most beautiful / lost metaphor in the world." His persistence in revamping sentence and idea structure in order to illustrate experience despite the fragility of language is thus made explicit. His method, however, is not so straightforward, relying on intuition and dream("one must dream patiently / hoping the content will become complete...
...contrasts the thousandmagical fluttering eyelids with "a thousand lidspressed/ tightly on motionless eyebrows,"presenting the ancient Ardennes along with itsidentity as the setting for the Battle of theBulge, and in the end Herbert asserts that even"the dead also ask for fairy tales," eschewing thepost-World War II idea that fanciful poetry is nolonger appropriate, associating fairy tales forthe dead with "a handful of herbs," "needles byrustling / and the faint threads of fragrances":concrete instances of the sleepy and fantastic innature that persists in spite of human history.Herbert would honor the dead with his vision, or"our Ardennes forest...
...imagine them "snug as theburrow of a mouse." Surely that comparison makesthe daily grind of errands and ambition seem likedeath. In one of his most priceless prose poems,"The Wolf and the Sheep," Herbert has the wolfexplain to the sheep that he is about to devourthat, "You have no idea how silly it is to be abad wolf. Were it not for Aesop, we would sit onour hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to dothis very much." After this irony, Herbertcompounds the effect with a ladder which we allought to climb and then kick out from beneath...