Ninth Grade

I came across this excerpt.

I was an awkward child. My principle interests consisted of Dungeons and Dragons and the vivid fantasy world I inhabited. These were related but distinct. My fascination with Dungeons and Dragons revolved around designing and populating adventure scenarios rather than actually enacting those scenarios with others, which was always an exercise in disappointment. The fantasy world, on the other hand, stemmed from imagined re-enactments of daily life, which became imagined acts generally, then developed into a vast, personal mythology in the order of Walter Mitty. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have friends, I certainly did, but there was always an element of distance. I was focused inward to an alarming degree, a fact which school pictures from this period bear out. Here was a boy who paid literally no attention whatsoever to his appearance. My hair was maintained rather than styled, evoking a median or park hedge. My clothing was accumulated rather than chosen and begged for peer disapproval. Amongst my fellow students I was quiet, but not too quiet; studious, but not too studious. I cultivated the role of spectator. I was forgettable.

For whatever reason, Mrs. E had divided the class into two or three groups, I can’t remember, and each had read a different book. Each group took turns gathering with the teacher to discuss what they had read. My group had been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird. There was a strict lesson plan. She’s called Scout because she’s like a scout and she’s exploring new ideas. Every name had some godawful, heavy-handed symbolism behind it, and this infuriated me. I couldn’t let it go. Clearly, this was the information we needed for the quiz laid out neatly. It didn’t matter and I didn’t even like this book. Karen and Paul happily fed her the clearly telegraphed responses she sought, but I demanded to know how she could make these claims. There was something base and vulgar about it, some belittling element that pulled the humming string of meaning too tightly and held it too long. I didn’t understand the source of my indignation. I was content to believe that she was stupid and unfit; unable to see what I could see. It was easy to dismiss Mrs. E on these terms as I would proceed to dismiss hundreds of others, thousands, with youthful conceit untempered by perspective or humility. I hated her and I hated my class and I hated being a drab boy in a drab place with no control over what happened around me.

It is tempting to engage such memories armed with the vocabulary of critical theory, but that would solve nothing. Such description is a violation somehow; an act of confinement in which a live, formless thing is conquered and made to die. I struggle with how to logically conclude about this experience, which though not particularly important in my life is nonetheless representative of many such moments. I want to say that what Mrs. E was doing, passing tidy judgment on Harper Lee’s fantasy, represented a very real threat to the imaginative core that fueled me and maybe draw some larger parallel. What I do know for certain is that, many years later, I still remember this room and I remember this day and I am still wary of explanations about literature.