human decency from our lives, even as its expertly tailored tinctures of brainreward keep us coming right on back for more and do their damnedest to conceal every bit of this process from our critical view so that it can impoverish us even more, with our semi-inadvertent connivance and consent. Each year I define for students and their parents why a college education (particularly ours) is still worth the investment, what exactly we are teaching or training students in beyond “content mastery,” why it matters that I still ask students to read books on paper and write by hand, and why, for actual rather than lip-serviced respect of “diversity,” those books must have been written not just in a student’s own time but also beyond the accustomed reach, in culture, time, and place, of what you might at first consider “relatable.” It’s good intellectual practice to be asked to do this, lest you mold your once-pliable mind, like a snail, to the hard shell of protective cliché. It’s good to articulate, to inquisitive minds beyond one’s traditional college “audience,” how the opportunities of a college education can come within their reach, too. Because it is only in reaching beyond our habitual range – in intellectual, social, and bodily life – that we develop that thing called capacity that will enable us to live into what’s coming next. College and the reading-andwriting-and-thinking life it shelters can build that capacity in a way nothing else does, and we stand up for its value in a way nobody else will. We have to say the words out loud, and keep on pushing. What we do matters. Even when it seems like no one’s listening. Last week I heard the radio announcer say fourteen days till the election and found myself on my knees, clutching my countertop edge, praying without words. Everything has changed since January 1, 2020. And everything has only become more of what it already was. This sabbatical time has given me an eerily clear view of the shell-cratered landscape that now masquerades as public life, where climate change, Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, and a poison gas of all-caps narcissism hissing from the White House mean that the stakes for the dwindling number of us in high-
Amy Weldon’s view of Brooklyn Bridge in February, 2020 er education are very high. Because we still have to train and graduate our beloved students in this world even as we work for a better one – and help them swim against the tide of screen-enabled wealth-concentration that counters their own chances of entrepreneurship and success. (Did y’all know Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still have more money than he did before the pandemic? Even as independent bookstores are facing their worst holiday season ever?) I wake each day into greater personal and collective anxiety than I can ever remember about our planet’s, our nation’s, and Luther College’s future. I can’t shake the feeling this year isn’t just a breaking point but a turning point, for me and all of us. So, of course, I’ve got to keep on pushing. “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,” says the prophet Isaiah, “that I may enlighten the weary with a word.” More than ever, in this turning-point year, I feel gripped by the need to write and teach and push on toward a vision of what’s good and true, hoping that the world will heed. And I always ask: is what I’m doing expanding students’ capacities to meet the world ahead? Is it offering them the good companionship of the voices of the past, of the good and nuanced and worthwhile, to walk beside them into the future? Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley is finished, and in Mary Shelley’s own
words, I am bidding my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper. As you can read on my blog at amyeweldon.com, that Alpine glacier moment is now the focal point of the introduction for An Awful Rainbow: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. This summer I signed a contract to deliver a third book, Advanced Fiction Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. An article on the great Southern writer Elizabeth Spencer – my friend, news of whose death reached me in Venice this January with students – is appearing in The Journal of the Short Story in English. Reviews and my essay about my late father, “Gaze Upon This World,” have been released or rereleased in Orion Magazine. My sabbatical has not been unproductive. But I’m hoping it will be useful – now and in the world as it will be ten years from now, twenty, beyond and beyond into shapes we can’t see. In one sense, I had “so much time to write” during a pandemic sabbatical. But in another sense, I don’t have much time at all. As I rebuild my disrupted travel plans and continue to work with my students and to write like hell, I’m also driven to look hard at how we might actually sustain and rebuild ourselves in a world that will never truly “get back to normal” – a world in which we’re learning how shaky the foundations of normal really are. Fall 2020/Agora
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