It’s been a
rough week. Sprucing up my comp book entries at 1:00 a.m. because about half of
them weren’t finished and/or good until the night before they were due. Doing
chem problems until 2:00. Spazzing about whether to be a pirate or Trinity from
The Matrix for Halloween (which I
still haven’t decided, by the way). I’m sixteen, but I feel like I’m sixty. I
wake up like a zombie every morning, and I can tell that my mother is deeply
concerned about my sleep schedule.
What has the swirling tempest of
pressures this week taught me? Not to procrastinate? Unfortunately, no. It’s
taught me that the great American Romantics of the 19th century were
probably right.
I’ve always loved the music of the
Romantic period. The lilting arpeggios of Chopin’s nocturnes have always had a
way of tearing at my heartstrings and making me cry that love is both the
pinnacle and the bane of our existence, that it is all that is beautiful and
painful.
But maybe it’s just ’cause I’m Polish. I don’t
know.
Anyway, my love for the music of
time gave me a dim hope that the literature we’d study in English this unit
might actually be interesting. And if not interesting, boy was it logical.
The appreciation of the individual
made so much sense. The only reason I subject myself to the horrors of AP
classes I don’t really like and membership in several clubs is to look good in
the eyes of my peers and—let’s be honest—colleges. If I were to do only classes
and activities that interested me (AP Chem <3), I would truly be a happier
person, more of the person God intended me to be.
Romanticism’s emphasis on nature as
a panacea and thing of beauty couldn’t be truer. When I hiked the trails of the
Sleeping Bear Dunes this summer, liberated from my summer reading and people
constantly talking at me on the Internet, the sun and shade casting a wondrous
checkerboard on my face, I felt so at peace, like I was walking in the ridges
of God’s fingerprints.
If we could all just get away from
the stresses of our everyday, pursue our own
areas of interest, plop down in a meadow, and listen to a Chopin CD, I think
the world would be a much happier, more inviting place.
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