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C H APTER 27 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Not the Thing, But the Thing about the Thing THREE THINGS NEW TO MY EXPERIENCE DOMINATED MY FOUR YEARS OF GRADUATE study at the University of Illinois. One was the physical cold ofthe winters, another was the growing mental illness of my wife, and the last was the way Illinois graduate study taught me to look at literature. All finally fell together into a heap. I was constantly shocked when I had to venture outside a warm place to move to another building and face the wind cutting across the prairie full of ice and snow. I witnessed a growing separation between my wife and me as she moved further into herselfand away from the world ofdaily life and other people . I was made to realize by my well-published and nationally recognized professors of English that what was important were not works of literature but what had been, and what could be, written about those works of literature. It became all of a piece for me. These brute facts defined my existence and melted into one: the harshness of the barren winter prairie; the violently oscillating mood swings of the woman with whom I brought children into the world, and the fact that the time I had to devote to intellectual pursuit had better be spent on determining and absorbing what somebody had written about a poem, a novel, a play rather than reading more original works of the imagination. In the springs and summers, I dreaded the Illinois winters to come and the bleakness those dead times represented to me. In the increasingly rare moments between my wife and me when we weren't regarding each other as though we were different species forced somehow to live together, I expected at any point to descend into shouting darkness. When I stopped on the way to my carrel in the stacks of one of the major tllliversity libraries in the world to sneak-read an tlllassigned novel or some other work irrelevant to the success of my pursuit of the doctorate, I felt I was perfonning a secret act of mental masturbation . ''0 NOT THE THING, BUT THE THING ABOUT THE THING 111 In my four years in the middle of the state of Illinois, I moved from apartments ro houses ro apartments with my growing family. I badly taught hundreds of uninterested freshmen the rudiments of writing dull essays on dull topics. I consumed all I was assigned to read from the works of scholars writing about other scholars writing about writing, while surreptitiously dipping into novels not in my field, and I wrote a doctoral dissertation about a subject in which I had no interest simply because it was a topic not yet plowed to JXlwder by others. I realized the depth of my despair one night at a New Year's Eve parry with a bunch of other graduate students and their wives, the children of that dnmken btmch asleep in piles in back rooms. At the hour of midnight, the couples around me and my wife paired offfor the kissing traditional to the occasion . I turned toward my wife, and we simply l

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