Like most people, the news of the spreading corona virus has led me to some serious life reflections and considerations. What is essential? What am I prepared for? What do I view my life to be in the short term? How can I keep my family safe? For all of the unanswered questions, there's one that seems to nag at me the most, waiting in the wings: Is this it? For quite some time now, I've abandoned any millenarian theological interpretations about world events. My study of history--especially within the last hundred years--has shown me that as bad as things are, there have been times in the past where things were significantly worse than now. As a Mormon, I'm part of a millenarian church, but one that's been rather cagey about the end of the world, for the most part. After all, plenty of people--inside and, of course, outside--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have made predictions about the pending apocalypse. My favorite would have to be the Great Fire of London in 1666. England, which had long thought of itself as God's Chosen Land™, was on edge about the whole year "666" thing. (I say "England", but really it was the more puritanically-inclined people; those who were less religiously devout/superstitious likely didn't mind it as much.) What better year to really show his demonic power off than in Satan's own year? Dire warnings about God's judgment were rife, particularly since the monarchy had only been restored six years prior and was still a sore spot for the revolutionaries who had believed in Cromwell's dictatorship. With a plague outbreak happening a year before, London was feeling like…well, that it was the end of the world. On 2 September 1666, in the King's bakery on Pudding Lane, a fire broke out. Due to a long, hot, dry summer, London was ripe for the roasting and soon half of the City was on fire. Attempts to detonate buildings with gunpowder to provide a fire break occurred (which is, in hindsight, rather an amusing picture), and despite their best efforts, by 4 September 1666, only a fifth of London remained standing. Even St. Paul's Cathedral was destroyed--the one that we all know and love today, that survived the Nazi blitz of World War II, was erected on the same spot in the aftermath of the Great Fire--and though only a handful of people died in the blaze, hundreds of thousands were left homeless and destitute. It was a catastrophe by every mark. (If you want to read more, here's a nifty article.) Who of that time wouldn't look at the great city of London succumbing to flames and think, "This is the end of the world"? On the first day of July 1916, the British launched a bloody and ill-fated attack on German positions near the Somme in France. The battle turned into a lengthy bloodbath, the likes of which have but rarely been seen since then. When I think of how we're behaving now, how convinced we are at the prospect of facing the End Times, I think of this footage. Filmed at 0720 on 1 July 1916 by Geoffrey Malins, this explosion at the Hawthorn Redoubt saw 40,000 pounds of explosive detonate underground. Watch this short clip and ask yourself: What does the end of the world look like? Surely seeing an 80 foot-deep crater, longer than a football field would be part of it? I see an image like this, and I'm reminded of Book 6 of Paradise Lost, when the rebel angels' cannon-fire pushes the loyal angels' ingenuity, and they begin to hurl entire mountains at one another: Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power When I think of the End of Days, I consider how, in the years between Hitler's rise and fall, human beings were turned into purses and riding pants, how Japan's Unit 731 experimented on Chinese prisoners with anthrax and vivisection, how Turkey yet denies having slaughtered a million Armenians…
…if that's not enough to spur Christ's return, why would a twenty-first century flu be sufficient? There's an entire cottage industry of predicting (thus far, wrongly) the end of the world, the Rapture, whatever one wishes to call it, up to and including the creation of a pet-service website for after the apocalypse comes. Mayans were believed to have predicted the end of the world in 2012, of course, and there's hardly a Sunday-gone-by where I haven't heard someone lament about how much more wicked the world is than in those idyllic yesteryears of yore. But I just don't know if that's true. Yes, the world is different, but it's been in a perpetual evolution since Day One. But more wicked than the wholesale enslavement of 16 million human beings from Africa? More wicked than systemic exploitations that led to children dying in mines and factories? History is replete with heinous behavior; why should this be it? The Mormon in me wants to believe that the end is nigh because there are many promised blessings. But the humanist in me wants to believe that we could have chosen differently; we could have aimed to save people, save our planet, save our future--that Christ would come not as a deus ex machina to prevent us from self-annihilation, but because we'd made the world safer, kinder, more loving, more caring, less violent, more equal…more heavenly. When I think of all the despicable things I know from my small store of historical knowledge, I can't believe that twenty-first century problems are what St. John the Beloved was looking at in his great uncovering of the end of the world. Maybe what really worries me is that if the Holocaust isn't sufficiently evil enough to trigger the Second Coming, what will be? Lots of tweets and social media posts are showcasing the major personal events of the past decade. I threw together a quick list myself, but thought that it could be worthwhile to go through with a bit more detail. As far as I can remember, here are some of the interesting things that happened in the twenty-teens.
2010 The decade began with me and a fellow teacher doing a short film Winterim. (Winterims will be brought up in each year for the simple reason that they're actually something different in my otherwise pretty consistent teaching career.) This was my second year at the school, but the first year as a full-time teacher. By the time March came along, my second child was born, which was a different experience than the first one--having a wireless baby was new and exciting. Not only that, but the delivery wasn't as hard on my wife, which was great: I couldn't understand how women could have more children when I saw how badly it hurt my wife to give birth our first. With Number Two arriving, I comprehended that births usually don't lay up the mother for a solid week. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of hospital stuff that year. Son Number Two had a condition called hypospadias, so he had to have a minor surgery along with a circumcision. Not only that, but Son Number One had his third--and, thus far, last--heart surgery to correct his tricuspid atresia, which consumed the entirety of June. At the time, we lived in our townhome, which fit our family just fine. We kept going forward with work and school (I was taking night classes to get an endorsement in history). I began work on what I thought would be my magnum opus, Writ in Blood. This would consume my writing for a couple more years. Come August, the curriculum I had taught for the past two years shifted a bit, pushing the 10th grade toward a broader swath of history. Instead of going from middle ages to the Victorian era, I now taught from the Italian Renaissance up to modern day. This shift was (so far) the biggest change in my curricula that I've had to adjust to. I'm glad that we did, as I much prefer what I teach now. Still, it was one of the biggest changes in my career. Just before Thanksgiving Break, the school moved buildings. We went from a refurbished bowling alley to a custom made school. Though I've moved rooms a couple of times since those days, I am happy to report that we haven't had to move the entire school again. That's a relief, I must say. 2011 I started this year teaming up with the same teacher as the previous year. This time, we did a Garage Band Winterim, where we set the kids up in small bands, had them compose a song, and then perform it for the parents at Winterfest. This was fun, as it gave me a chance to play the guitar more than I normally do, and the students did--for the most part--a really great job. Most of this year is pretty unremarkable, save for a couple of things. One, I pressed on with Writ in Blood, which remains one of the books that I'm most proud of, despite the fact that it was flatly rejected during submissions and rather ruined when I went back and tried to tinker with the thing. The second is that this is the year that I deeply studied World War II. That gave me a whole new way of seeing this monumental event, which is something that I try to transmit to my students every year, even now. I believe we went to Disneyland this year for the first time with our oldest. He loved it to pieces. 2012 Thus began one of the biggest pivots of my life: I taught the Harry Potter Winterim to nine students. Then, with them, my wife, and my coteacher, we flew out to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The class was inexpressibly impactful, and it ended up changing not just how I viewed the book series, but sent me down a path I never expected: I started playing quidditch. This came about because we learned how to play with the Winterim, but the enjoyment of the sport led to creating an actual team. I joined the Crimson Fliers during the summer of 2012, which I pursued for four years or so. I still love and deeply miss quidditch, in part because of its connection to such a special experience (the Harry Potter Winterim specifically, but Harry Potter more broadly, too), but also because the people I met during quidditch are some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. It's a scar--one that will likely remain with me for another decade. I continued working on Writ in Blood as I finished up my history endorsement. Back then, I would go to class on Saturday mornings, take three hours of notes, eat a high-calorie, low-cost lunch at Burger King, then slam out a chapter or two at the UVU library before heading home. I really enjoyed this, as it allowed me time to write. By this point, I had stopped teaching three sections of Socratic Seminar and instead had things like mythology or two sections of creative writing to help round out my teaching day. That sort of flexibility remains with me to this day, meaning I have two sections of Socratic 10 and two elective classes of different stripes. The election of 2012 was a divisive one (aren't they all?) and it was the first time since '08 that I was more than just dimly aware of politics. Because I'm Mormon (you know: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was, I think, an assumption that I'd be voting for Mittens Romney; I didn't. I think about that election a lot--how the GOP tried a nice guy approach and was soundly defeated, so they went with the most vile they could and won--and how the world might be different had Baseball Mitt had taken the White House. At the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with Agent Orange. 2013 This Winterim saw me making comic books with the students. Like almost all of the Winterims of the decade, I taught with another teacher. This time, it was the art teacher, who's also a big comic book fan. It was a fun experience, but in the aftermath of what 2012 had done for me, it wasn't particularly memorable. By the time 2013 rolled around, I was pretty established in my career. There was a reputation at the school to maintain, plenty of stuff to keep me busy, and the addition of our third child--another boy, bringing our family to its full allotment. I turned thirty that year, which meant a lot to me at the time. I think the idea of having finished my twenties with every goal checked off save one (being published) was significant. I think this also gave me a bit of an existential crisis, as I didn't really have a lot else to try to do. Not that this year specifically stands out to me, but I should point out that every year, Gayle and I went down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, both during the summer and again in the fall with the students. We had family vacations of all different sorts, though I'm hard pressed to remember what we did each year. I do know that in the fall of 2013, though, I got a new assignment: Teaching the Shakespeare class. I remember this specifically because I sat with my newest son on my lap, reading Twelfth Night aloud to him as he slept. It was a pleasant experience, to say the least, but it was all in preparation of teaching the Concurrent Enrollment English 1010 class with a fellow teacher at the school. So it was equal parts preparation and pleasure, I suppose. The Shakespeare class was greatly enhanced by what came around at the end of the year and beginning of the next. Over Thanksgiving Break in 2013, I left the country for the first time: I took a short trip to Paris to better prepare for Winterim 2014. This was surprisingly impactful to me, and I rely on my Parisian experience whenever I'm teaching my students about Les Misérables or French history--especially the First World War. There's something profound about being in the places where history happens, and I'm hopeful that someday--not that I've any idea how it'll happen--I can return to Europe and England. 2014 This was the Winterim that has the largest effect on me, followed by the World Wars Tour (2017) and my first Harry Potter (2012). I and a dozen or so students flew out to England and had a literary tour. We visited the big tourist sites (and sights), including the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. But we had special additions: Seeing John Milton's grave, visiting Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's grave, and the Harry Potter backstage museum in Watford. We saw the Eagle and Child (where Tolkien and Lewis would meet and talk about their fictional worlds that have made such a large difference in my life), Cambridge, Oxford, and many other places that will always live on in my mind as foundational. It was truly a remarkable experience. With that sort of a high, it was difficult to return to the normalcy of 2014. I had finished Writ in Blood sometime between 2013 and 2014, and having spent over three years on a single book, I decided to no longer try to write sprawling behemoths. Instead, I began what is my normal way of working, which is to make a novel that's between 50- and 100,000 words. The first experience I had with that was writing Chelsea Washington and the Pathway of Night, my only attempt at a young adult novel. I'm still pretty happy with it, at least in terms of what I was trying to accomplish, and it really helped set me up with the idea that I can start and end a novel in the same year--in this case, it only took a couple of months. My experiences with quidditch continued apace, and I went to Quidditch World Cup 7 in South Carolina that April. It was wonderful to see so many committed athletes, to try to play better than I had before, and to go through something that I never thought would be a part of my life: Sports. Despite going to England for nearly two weeks, I'm pretty certain we went to Disneyland this year. I know we went at some point around here. Strange to say, it's kind of hard to remember. I do know that it was at the end of this year--right before Thanksgiving, I think--that a couple of important things happened. One, we decided to move out and rent our townhome, thus allowing us to save a bit of money with which to--we hoped--spend on a newer, bigger home. The five of us were feeling a bit cramped. (Also, my calling as Elders' Quorum president had been eating away at me and this would get me out. It's selfish, I know, but that's the truth.) Two, I self-diagnosed myself as having depression. It came about slowly, as I realized that what a lot of people on Twitter were describing was similar to my own experiences. Once I realized that I have some sort of chemical imbalance in my head, a lot of my life started to make more sense. I didn't do anything with this information, per se, but it was an important start. 2015 Winterim this year went to The Lord of the Rings, which involved not only studying the text closely, but having the students try to pull a Tolkien and invent their own languages and secondary worlds. It was pretty fun, and I know that I enjoyed it. Much like the comic book Winterim, however, it hasn't stuck in my mind as strongly as some of the others. This year saw me and a coworker joining forces to tackle the Shakespeare class again, which was necessary because I'm still without a Master's degree. Still, I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in this way, with the texts being the foundation for the different styles of writing that we were teaching the students. Quidditch World Cup 8 happened (again in South Carolina), which I attended with my team. It was fantastic--the Crimson Elite finished 18th in the nation, which is no small thing, in my view. It also marked the last time that I was to play a tournament with my quidditch friend. I retired from quidditch some time between 2015 and 2016 (I don't remember when, exactly). I don't regret that--it was sweet while it lasted, but it couldn't remain. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it. Living with the in-laws was far from an ideal experience, but it did help the way we'd hoped: We were able to get some money saved up for our own house. While we were basement dwellers, my oldest son turned eight, which meant that he decided to be baptized into the Church. I hadn't really anticipated it happening in my in-laws' ward, but my wife and I bought the townhome in January of 2008--eight or nine months before the housing bubble popped. That slowed down our ability to move on from "Old Place" (as we now call it). That summer was a new chapter (lol, pun) in my writing, as I finally mustered up the courage to ask my wife if I could abandon her for the better part of a week to have a writing retreat. I went in the middle of June and wrote most of what I later called Conduits. I wrote 34,443 words (I made a spreadsheet that kept track of the numbers) and had at last figured out how I can best work: Highly focused, in a single place, where my responsibilities can't reasonably be split in any other direction. Since then, I've had numerous retreats, all of which having done a great deal to help my writing along. Oh, and I also started my annual NaNoWriMo tradition this year, too. 2016 This Winterim was really great for me, as it was a chance to teach about dinosaurs. I teamed up with the biology teacher and we had a great time talking about dinosaurs, having the students come up with their own museum layouts, and learning about the terrible lizards. We even visited St. George for a day or two to see some dinosaur-related things, and we got lost in the Nevada desert with a bus full of kids. We made it home all right in the end, and it was a great adventure for us all. By the time spring rolled around, our renters were ready to move on and so were we. We sold our townhome and, with the equity (not much, but some) from it, we were able to move into a much bigger home. New Place (as we call it) is where we still are, and where I'm writing this now. Our first summer in New Place was a busy one, as we moved in on the fifth of July. We had a lot of settling in to do, as well as adjusting to the new commute we'd have every day. Not only that, but I used a week or so right before we moved to go out to the cabin and have a writing retreat. It's become a staple of my summers, now. By the time November came around, Gayle and I were preparing for another European trip--packing bags, making sure we knew where our passports were, getting schedules settled--and then the election came. It's fair to say that I was much more attentive to the entire thing, and the feelings I had about the election are still raw. We had started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack during our move, and so there was a sense of optimism that I'd been harboring for a few months. When the election came out with Clinton having over three million more votes yet still losing the presidency, I had a really hard time believing that America was on the right track. I've yet to change my mind on that. 2017 The World Wars Tour was supposed to be a really powerful and profound experience--and, to an extent, it was--but there's always an issue with time. We spent far too much of it traveling from one place to another, rather than really soaking in what each place had to offer. I definitely would do the tour differently if I had a chance to try again, but the trip wasn't a disaster by any means. It was, as I've mentioned before, an incredible experience that changed my life. Walking through a death camp, through a battlefield, through a museum of collected artifacts, of talking to a man who saw his own father die on the family room floor because of Nazi shells…it was unforgettable. My Shakespeare classes were changing again--we were doing a "Stage and Page" version of the class now--but other than that, there really weren't a lot of big things going down. My writing continued, with some weekly progress in the form of my creative writing classes, though without any sort of progress on the publication front. I'd finished a couple of other books, though I was still reluctant to edit them in any sort of noticeable way. Then summer came, and I brought my writing group along with for a writing retreat. It was very successful--in that month, I wrote over 77,000 words--and it also brought into the world War Golem, the book that I think is the most prepared for some sort of publication. (Whether or not that ever happens is unknown--doubted by me, believed in by most everyone else.) That summer was also remarkable because it was a Disneyland year. I remember this fully, as I got to visit an old high school friend who lives in California. We had a great trip with the Mouse and my friend, including a visit to Blizzard Entertainment campus and seeing some of the neat things they have there. On the way home, I picked up a copy of It from the Barnes and Noble in St. George. That book, as any frequent reader of my essays knows, has also fundamentally changed my life. 2018 I had originally planned on doing a Shakespeare Winterim, but it fell apart at the last minute and I ended up needing to dust off an old one and resubmit it: Thus I taught, for the first time, a repeat Winterim. Ironically, it was the same one that I'd taught my first year--now almost ten years before. The Video Game Winterim was really enjoyable--we played VR games, students invented their ideas for their own video games, and I blew their little minds with some light theory. I wouldn't mind doing that one again, though not for another year or two, methinks. I'd prefer a fresh crop of students--no double dipping. This year marched along in pretty familiar strokes. We did manage to go to Moab for a family vacation during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun. My second son decided to get baptized. My wife and I kept teaching; I kept doing the things that I'd normally do (going to LTUE in February, for example, as I've done every year since the beginning of the decade--I guess I should've mentioned that in 2010, yeah?). One thing I started doing differently in 2018, though, was writing in my reading journal about the things that I thought about whilst reading a book. I don't do that with all of them, but getting into that habit meant a lot. When summer came around, I decided to reread It, this time with pen in hand. Some of my most honest and profound personal thoughts came because of that experience, which is why I love It. I had my writing retreats--solo (56,000 words) and as a group (33,000 words)--and pushed out War Golems, the sequel (it has a plural on it, see?). I haven't looked at the book since I wrote it, but it's never too far from the back of my mind. I'm still not certain how I feel about it, which is probably a good thing--it's not settled, as it were. One remarkable thing about 2018, however, was that I was accepted to a special training at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I went there with a coworker and had a fantastic experience. I saw much of the city, the monuments, and the Library, as well as some time in the Folger Shakespeare Library and I got to handle original, 17th century copies of Paradise Lost. It was definitely a highlight of the year and of my whole life, honestly. 2019 That brings us to this year. My Winterim was on fantasy literature, so we got to go to my wife's happy place, Evermore, and I got to enjoy a lot of time in some of my favorite pieces of literature. Both this year's and 2018's Winterims saw me teaching by myself--there wasn't time to pull someone in on last years, and this year's didn't need another set of hands--but I still had a good time. It was not, perhaps, the most incredible experience I've ever had, but not everything has to be. One of my writing group friends suggested that we pool together some cash and rent an Air BnB for a winter retreat, which we did at the end of January. It was successful, despite being shorter than I'm used to, and I finished up a NaNoWriMo book, as well as worked on a novella I've been picking at for over a year. I ended up with just over 15,000 words for the day and a half of work. A surprise came our way when my wife was offered a slightly different teaching job for the fall of 2019. Instead of teaching six classes of eight grade science, she would only teach three classes and spend the rest of the time as a teaching coach. She decided to go through with it, despite her reservations about the new administration at her school. Summer saw us at Yellowstone National Park--which the boys in particular loved; I liked it, despite having conjunctivitis--as well as a couple of writing retreats (75,000 words between the two) getting some of my novella-project taken care of. The new school year started without me teaching creative writing for the first time in almost a decade, as well as a CE class and a Shakespeare class--separate this time. It has been a fairly straightforward year, though the decade has treated me differently than I had ever anticipated. Never would I have thought that I would be a world traveler; not on a teacher's salary--and, strangely enough, I only went because I'm a teacher. My family has blossomed and continues to grow. My oldest now comes to school with me (he's in 7th grade). I have written over 1.7 million words since I got married, with the vast majority of those being written in the last decade. The one great regret--the largest failure of my goals and thoughts about the future--is that I'm still unpublished. I know that everyone has a different path, a different journey toward being published. Knowing that, however, doesn't really take the sting away. I do hope that I can change that…though I don't know how I will. I'm not really sure what the future holds. For now, it's enough to look forward with some hope, some trepidation, some familiarity, some newness. In short, there's a life in front of me. I now only need to go and live it. I reread Pride and Prejudice for the seventh (I think?) year in a row. My annual trip to Regency England--enjoying Netherfield and Longbourn and then on to Kent for a visit to Rosings and, later, a visit to Pemberley in Derbyshire--is a treat. Part of it is because the month is already rather gray: With the end of Winterim and the continued poor weather (this year, it's comparatively warm, so though there isn't snow with which to contend, the death-yellow hue of the lawns and the naked silhouettes of the trees beneath the fingerprint-smudge of Utah Valley pollution don't make for particularly picturesque world), I end up feeling a need for a pick-me-up. Pride and Prejudice gives that to me every time.
Yes, it can be a bit laborious to convince the boys (if we're going to rely on stereotypes) that it's a story worth reading. I'm being genuine when I gush about how much I love Austen's little masterpiece, but I likely wouldn't go on quite as much if I didn't have to hard-sell the idea that it's okay to talk about emotions--feelings of love, desires for companionship and marriage, and other important themes that are tucked into the book. This isn't unique for Pride and Prejudice, mind you. Shakespeare is a hard sell. Milton is a hard sell. The length of Hugo's Les Miserables is a hard sell. Even Dante can be tricky: Though brief, he's talking about a concept of the afterlife that most students have never entertained, which takes them by surprise. Still, part of the joy of teaching is helping students come to some new understanding about the world, and since kids often dismiss emotional things as "cheesy", it means that there's a ripe opportunity to help them mature through the book. Not only that, but I use The Annotated Pride and Prejudice and holy cow, that book is amazing. Shapard uses his prodigious knowledge of the minutiae of daily life for the Regency era to give an entirely new point of view on the life and times of the characters. It's a beautiful addition to any Austen lover's library. Buy now…operators standing by. One of the things that Shapard uses that helped me this time around is to ensure that I understood the purpose of the entailment of Longbourn. The Bennet estate had been legally and lawfully bequeathed to the Bennet males, in perpetuity, provided that the primogeniture passed through the male line (as was common at the time). The idea that it was a legal arrangement--one that could have been broken only had Mr. Bennet had a son--that detailed the future of the estate was something I had always understood on a surface level. However, as I was reading it, I realized why this was such a brilliant set up for Austen's novel. Now, I haven't watched any modern adaptations of the novel, but a quick pass through iMDB about the recent "LDS-version" of the book shows that this crucial detail is lost--and I think it may be something that Austen relied upon her audience knowing and comprehending immediately, and thus had no reason to dive into it at all. However, the entail is more than an "in-passing" implication. With five daughters, Longbourn is to be inherited by the sycophantic and irritating Mr. Collins. This is more and more repugnant the longer we spend time with Mr. Collins, and since we, as an audience, would wish for better people to be around the characters we're coming to love and appreciate, we're anxious that Elizabeth find a better match. But that's missing part of the point. When Mr. Collins proposes--fully confident (as Mr. Darcy will be later in the book) of Elizabeth's acceptance--he does so not only because he's supercilious enough to think she'll say yes, but also because it's a life or death decision. While Mr. Collins, as a churchman, may be counted on not to be too abrupt with the eviction of the Bennet family upon the death of Mr. Bennet, he's under no legal obligation to take care of the six women (if one counts Mrs. Bennet, which one must). The very real prospect of financial destitution and desperate--perhaps even immoral--choices faces all five of the Bennet sisters. With no social safety net and, based upon what we learn of the capriciousness of the people of their little village, small likelihood of neighborly assistance, it's not at all impossible that the family would end up in the gutter. Jane Austen isn't wont to dwell on such things--again, her society wouldn't need her to, because they'd understand the implications fully. But for us, with over two hundred years of static to contend with, we are too likely to fall into "sacrifice for love" as the primary motivator for Elizabeth's actions. Admittedly, Elizabeth is aware of the repercussions of her refusal of Mr. Collins. She chooses to reject him anyway. But instead of it being simply an expression of her unwillingness to "settle" or in anyway aim at a mercenary marriage, it also shows how deeply she's opposed to marrying for the wrong reasons. This isn't just her future that she's walking away from when she leaves Mr. Collins' company. The entire prospect of the family rests on her choice, whether the rest knows it or not. When Mr. Darcy proposes, then, there would be, I would imagine, an expectation by the intended audience that she would absolutely accept. She'd tempted fate once by rejecting Mr. Collins; surely she wouldn't roll the dice again? But she does, and the result is that the book continues and, to be honest, a poor marriage was avoided. I say this because I don't think, had Elizabeth taken Mr. Darcy's first proposal, that she would have been very happy. She may have grown into some admiration for Fitzwilliam, but it wouldn't be the same kind of love and respect that she gains through the second half of the book. She, as a person, was in the wrong time to marry--as was, it should be said, Mr. Darcy. Thrillers are built on the idea of a close call, a near escape, an almost-lethal decision. Despite its prim and proper trappings, Pride and Prejudice has its own version of the same kind of thrillers…we just don't always see it. One year ago, I had just returned from my third trip to Europe. During the time that my Winterim studied the World Wars (though, to be fair, it was much more focused on World War II), I tried as hard as I could to suck up as much exposure, experience, and history as possible. Occasionally, I would stop and simply marvel that I, an average high school teacher from the empty expanse of the American West, stood in places that I had only heard about. It was simultaneously humbling and inspiring.
The memories of my unique experiences last year were rekindled when I talked to some students who had gone to Europe for this Winterim. Their purposes were different than those of the previous trip, but seeing their excitement, yearning, and happiness at having learned about other parts of the world--for some of them had gone to Thailand, others to Costa Rica--reminded me of why I keep my European trip's pictures on a constant loop on my desktop. And it reminded me--again--of why I throw around the #imissengland on my Twitter account on a pretty regular basis: England feels like home. Now, that isn't to say that I have a childish connection--or, more accurately, a childish nostalgia--for the country. I didn't get to visit it until a few years ago. No, it's instead something more…primal. With the exception of the traffic (which is terrifying to a Yankee like me), what I saw of England was just…amazing. I know that part of that was the tourist-trap view of the country. We didn't see a strike or have to deal with the harsh realities of being an actual citizen entail. Our experiences were all positive, and that certainly adds to my own rose-colored glasses when it comes to England. But I felt something different when I was there, something different from what I've ever really felt. I've lived in exactly two states in my whole life--Utah and Florida--and those two are so different that it's a wonder they're in the same country. I have spent a little less than a month of my life outside of America. I don't know much about what it's like in other parts of the world. These feelings of belonging, then, are attuned to something more basic, more instinctive. Obviously, my book learning of the places I've visited has given me insights that others of my tour groups didn't understand. Seeing, for example, the obelisk in the center of Paris makes me chilled, knowing that thousands of Parisians were guillotined there, right where the bus is gassing its way past. And don't get me started on Stratford-on-Avon and what it meant to me to make that Bardolic pilgrimage and stand, stunned, at the Shakespeare Birthplace and the Holy Trinity church. That connection of my career as a history teacher to the places I've taught and learned about is certainly part of the whole experience, but I don't feel that it fully explains it. After all, I know about the end of the Second World War and what Hitler was doing to Berlin, yet I didn't feel the same sense of profundity as I do when I'm in Great Britain. Once our ferry docked and we had officially arrived in Portsmouth (I think that's where it was), a blanket of contentment settled over me, the sort of relief that comes when you've had a long day and at last returned to your house and find that there isn't a catastrophe or mess or problem that needs to be dealt with or cleaned or solved. This sort of feeling means that I'm somehow willing to forgive the history of the British Empire its horrors and atrocities, as if their brilliance and beauty were built independent of their brutality. I have a harder time doing the same thing to America, where even saying that we haven't begun to pay back what we've done to the native inhabitants and the descendants of kidnapped slaves puts me at odds with many. I'm definitely American in a lot of my sensibilities (except guns), so why do I feel a tugging within me to get back to England? Indeed, why do I say "get back", as if I'm absent from my true place? When I finally married my wife, I didn't feel as though I had, at long last, found a piece of me that was missing. We had known each other for years before we'd wed, so her presence in my life was a constant for a pretty long time. But I know a lot of people feel like they only became whole once they found their soulmate. It is that particular emotion that I felt for England when I arrived. The hardest part for me to reconcile is that I really can never go to my ancestral home, at least not longer than a visit. Buying a drafty thatch-roofed cottage in Warwickshire, sipping herbal tea and writing as I gaze out at a field of sheep? That's not the kind of life I could lead, not because I wouldn't want it, but I wouldn't want to pay the price necessary to get there. I have a great life in Utah. I have so much beyond what I need that it's embarrassing. My family's roots and experiences are valuable and valued here, and I have a place--a good place, a worthwhile place where I'm making (I hope) a real and tangible difference in the lives of many people. I would never want to give that up. I would never want to try to raise my family far away from the grandparents or cousins that are building the scaffolding off of which my children will construct their futures. To abandon that in favor of a dream that is sweeter in my mind than it would be in my reality is ludicrous. Foolishness. Bad decision-making. And yet… I don't know if I will ever feel really at home here. I guess I'll just have to live with that. |
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