Last Blog

I just finished writing my final blog for the emergent class so this in fact is my last blog for a Sexson class at MSU. Unfortunately that means the last time to communicate to those of you who I don't normally share many words with in person. I hope you take the following words as the believers take communion-- with the understanding that you do it in the remembrance of me. Like I said in my last blog for emergent I'm not the best at being elegiac but I will try to provide some sort of closure... even if the best closure I can provide is open ended.

This class was different than what I expected. I came into it thinking that it was going to be the greatest class I had taken at MSU... well, I'm not sure if it was the greatest but it was surely a solid way to go out. I've enjoyed all of my time spent listening to the ideas of Dr. Sexson and the talk of you all. Each of your perspectives has supplemented a missing piece of the puzzle and it will be a shame to be departing from you in what now seems like such a hurry. I just got here didn't I?

I think that during the course of this class my favorite text was... wow, this is harder than I thought. I simply loved Wind in the Willows, Araby and The Dead, and Hamlet is just a classic if not THE classic. Out of all those I would probably have to suggest that The Dead was my favorite. It was fascinating to look at Joyce in his more lucid narrative style in this story while also looking at Finnegans Wake in the Emergent lit. class. Also I had done some background research into some of the criticisms behind The Dead which made the reading more rich.

I enjoyed everyone in the class as well. I do wish that the class had been smaller and was in a more round-table discussion format. It would have been kind of nice to hear from you all in a different format than the blogs and the few times that we had presentations or other reasons to stand up in front of the class and talk. Everyone's perspective and individual passion helped make up for those of us who weren't always the most impassioned about some of the reading. Having the rest of the class there was always someone who managed to be super stoked about what we were talking about which made the rest of us pay more attention and learn more. It makes me sad that perhaps I won't hear from many of you anymore and I have no idea what you are all going off to do besides participate in the eternal fight of the English major.

To give you an idea of what I will be doing this summer I will be going on a bike trip across the U.S. with specific attention to this region-- Wyoming, Montana, Idaho maybe, Utah maybe, and other places like that. I'm excited to get out and to re-discover the greatness in America that I feel like I have been detuned from. My only solid companion will be Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass or, as some critics consider it, "The American Bible". It should be pretty easy for us in a class about epiphanies to understand why I would choose this text to bring along with me. Hopefully the hospitality of people, the sights on the road, and Whitman will bring epiphanies at every turn.

I guess this class and this blog are like the final pages of a novel I've been in for the past four years. It has taken many twists and turns. Many characters have come and gone leaving only me up on the stage pushing a tassel across to the other side of the cap. In that moment where I push my tassel across the breadth of my forehead is supposed to symbolize the last four years. One moment summing up all the moments of time spent here at MSU. This surely is a novel or at least a story of some sort and there is only one fitting way to end any story-- The End.

--Adam