A life transformed by literature

BY MIN LEE ’23

Ionly remember a few things about Kevin, my first English tutor: He was tall, he wore grey, and he was filled with joy.

He would pull a tattered volume out of his bag and begin to read aloud, and the room would well up with wonder. “Let us go then, you and I,” his voice echoes in my memory, reading from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” every syllable seeming to bring him sheer delight. Yes, when I think back to that smiling young man who changed my life, I remember pure joy, an almost biblical rapture as the words of long-dead poets built cities of song in that plain Korean apartment.

Kevin’s exultation in literature convinced me that there was something fantastic in the ordinary, something glimmering just under the dull fabric of our pedestrian lives. It shone through whenever he read aloud. The world came alive with words –Dostoevsky and Eliot and Lorca and Mann and Hesse painting the world I thought I knew so well in entirely different colors. I crammed my mouth full of syllables, letting them fill up behind my eyes and stain my sight like multicolored glass.

Literature was powerful because it was evocative. One could say, “T.S. Eliot’s poetry encapsulated the disillusionment of a postwar generation.” But this statement, however reasonable, could never transfigure one’s view of the world the way Eliot’s own words could: “‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / ‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? / ‘What shall we ever do?’”

Do you feel the wind lifting the hair from your neck? The endless days that stretch out before you, with nothing left to do but clasp your dressing-gown about you?

Do you feel the distance of the past, when one stepped out properly dressed and slipped into a car, fragrant with the promise of elegant nights to come?

I feel it. I feel each word I read, and so I am able to live a thousand lives in literature. When Kevin left, I read on – 20 books in a summer: Roth, Bulgakov, Anaïs Nin, Austen, Hinton, Koestler, and so many others. I found the entire canon of literature waiting to buoy me up, help me dive in, and gather great armfuls of the sublime disguised in the ordinary world and hidden in the past that gives substance to the present. Walt Whitman put it best: “The powerful play goes on, and [I] may contribute a verse.”

When I read, I feel that I am part of something greater than myself, and that the powerful play of the world is going on: word by word, from the song of the Homeric bard to the clumsy, earnest sonnets I write in school. I feel how someday, the verses of my time will color somebody else’s world – that someone will exult in the words written today and connect with me, just as I connected to T.S. Eliot’s disenchanted masses.

When I read, I wonder what my own line will be, and it fills me with excitement for my future. “I want to be in death with the poor who had no time to / study it,” wrote Neruda: His words kindle my aspiration for a career in medicine. “Love is the only rational act,” wrote Levine: I tell my friends I love them, rationally, out loud, on purpose. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” wrote Fitzgerald: I mutter his words like a mantra, and they give me hope through the hardest and busiest of days. I throw myself into life because the flame of transformative joy burns on inside me, lit when literature dawned in my life and undying as long as the powerful play continues.

c.1919

As we look forward to the opening of our new Schmaltz Family Wellness Center this spring, we delved into the St. George’s Archives for an image depicting physical fitness sessions of the past. Archivist Val Simpson shared this photograph, from the scrapbook collection of H. Gates Lloyd Jr., Class of 1919, of students performing morning exercise on the lawn in front of Arden Hall dormitory.