The Floating Opera
Posted Friday, December 08, 2006 @ 01:20 AM
It's hard for me to believe that a semester has come and gone; I have only four exams, all next week, and I'll be half done with my freshman year.
There is a passage in John Barth's The Floating Opera which I think of lately, each time I come here to write:
"It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn't be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They would catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they'd have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they wouldn't understand what was going on at all, or they'd think they knew, when actually they didn't. Lots of times they'd be able to see the actors, but not hear them. I needn't explain that that's how much of life works: our friends float past; we become involved with them and they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we either renew our friendship—catch up to date—or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more."
I feel like college has taken me upriver, farther from the bank than I've been in a long time, which is at once exhilarating and flat. The excitement of unwritten moments doesn't counteract the sense of loss as I drift away from the bank, recording almost nothing of my first few months on my own. You've yet to really meet my first college professors, to understand and appreciate my room mate in all her Texan glory, to see a photo of The Boy. The campus which has fast become home remains as foreign to you as the shape of my parents' front yard, but that isn't what matters. Rather, I fear that by not writing—by drifting away from the bank—moments may blur together or slip from memory when I look back at them. Or that when I do float back again, we'll find we don't comprehend each other any more.
There are, I've discovered, great risks in boarding a river boat. But I don't suppose anyone would get anywhere without it.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
If you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to future updates via this RSS file.
we have the stars
we have the trees
we have everything we need to feed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSdl6L8SBDM
10 Dec 2006, 10:29 AM.