Discussing
libraries with a friend, one thing she mentioned was that she never really used
her University's library. People went there to study, but did not really use
the collection there.
While
that probably changes based on your major, this was largely true of the Knight
Library at University of Oregon too, but I personally
had three exceptions.
One
happened during that horrible summer where I tried staying in town despite not
being enrolled in classes. Just needing to get away I went to the library and
got lost in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I didn't end up finishing
the book until years later, but that memory stayed with me. It was kind of an
oasis in a really bad time.
Another
exception was for my seminar. Every history major had to complete a seminar
class. There were weekly reading assignments that would be discussed in class,
plus a twenty page research paper. The reading assignments were often articles
from various historical journals, and each class member trying to track them
down individually would have been impractical, so Professor Taylor had a shelf
set up with what we needed, and that worked. Even if you ran into one of your
fellow students, there were usually four or five articles, so it was workable. That
term I was in the library every week.
If
the first use was essentially pleasure, and the second was totally coursework,
the third one was somewhere in between. I took a French Literature class on
Balzac and Stendhal. My memory says I bought the required books of course, but
I just did not understand one of them, Balzac's Une Affaire Ténébreuse,
but part of me wonders if I tried saving money by not purchasing the books and
just checking them out. What I know for sure is that I tried reading it in
Spanish. (They did not have it in English.)
Technically
my French is probably better than my Spanish, but I was kind of desperate.
Eventually I realized that was how the book was supposed to be. There is a
plot, and subterfuge, and the whole affair is murky, which is basically what
the title tells you is going to happen.
I
struggled with that one. One thing that had really stuck out to me though is
that there were two female characters who seemed remarkably similar to Louise
de Rénal and Mathilde de la Môle (from Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir),
in both physical description and personality type, and then in their respective
fates.
I
went on about this in the final comparison essay, trying to reach five pages,
even though the professor said it did not really need to be five pages after
requesting a five page paper. That made about an extra page of rambling that
she felt was pointless.
Reading
that I though but there was a point, because really it was like both authors
were showing a previous and a current model of French womanhood, and while both
would suffer greatly only the newer one was strong enough to survive it, and if
you have that coming from two different authors, that would seem to reflect
something, which would have made a lot of sense to try and articulate in the
essay, but the idea had still been forming there. I knew there was a
connection, I was still getting it.
Anyway,
if discovering Un Asunto Tenebroso was not particularly helpful, there
was quite a bit of other Balzac there, in various languages, and his range was
surprising. I did not read everything available, and I don't know that I really
like Balzac enough to try and read all of La Comédie Humaine. After reading
through The Girl with the Golden Eyes, I at least get why they sneer
"Balzac" that way in The Music Man.
(It's
not every day that you go to murder your lover only to find her already
murdered by her other lover whom you instantly recognize as your half sister.)
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