Why an English major?
I decided to become an English major my sophomore year of high school. I had joined the staff of the school’s literary magazine. We were a large publication, paring over 200 submissions down to 60 fit for publication. Our small editorial circle met every day for two weeks, discussing the merits of one poem over another, critiquing, cutting, and making suggestions trying to make sappy and emotional high school poetry into something literary.
I loved every minute of it. Within the poems and short essays were people’s lives—their fears, tragedies, joys and aspirations. In reading them I felt like I knew them, that I could experience life beyond my own through reading and conversely could express to others my version of reality through writing. In high school I took six years worth of English courses and after my first year at Alma I was nearly halfway through my major.
My goal as an English major was to avoid what I thought of as the “standard life.” I didn’t want an office job at a cubicle—part of the reason why, while I’ve flirted with journalism, I could never do it as a career. I want to surround myself with literature, to have the same emotional connections with strangers I had while working on the literary magazine, and to encourage in others a similar love.
With the exception of my literature courses, I was an A student throughout high school. English was the only subject that truly challenged me. Unlike math and physics, it was not applying a formula. Unlike biology and history, English did not allow for memorization. The discipline forced me to think about why the things that I noticed were important; it made me discover why English—a discipline that seemed to be rooted in feelings and impressions instead of facts and documents—truly mattered.
Part of that challenge is the multiple dimensions that a literary scholar can bring into his work. Reading Keynes, Weber and Freud has enhanced my study of literature, and added greater depth to my analysis. I first realized this in an economics class. The instructor was explaining how one way to keep an economy growing is for the government to spend money on the military: creating jobs and production by violent consumption: bullets and tanks must be made by someone, and jobs always exist for soldiers. Fahrenheit 451 suddenly made sense to me in a new way: why the government continued to fight "The Enemy" in order to maintain their lifestyle.
Another facet of Farenheight 451 that relates to my embracing of the English major, the Books that the main character meets near the end—modern Homers who memorize their classical works, selflessly keeping them alive. I feel that dedication to literature, the need to protect it, enhance it and keep it sacred in a world that may be losing its appreciation.