Reading: My Life-Long Vocation

This is really the second part of my previous post about staying in school too long. When I first went off to college, I didn't really go very far. My initial plan was to become an architect, something I'd been encouraged to do while still in what we used to call junior high school. I enrolled in the local community college, what we then referred to as a junior college, and began taking the first required courses in drafting and drawing. My intention was to complete the first two years of architecture courses on the cheap, then transfer to a regular university to complete the degree. But while I was still in high school I had discovered another interest: literature. And the pull of reading and writing was stronger than any lingering interest in drawing and design.

I have no actual regrets about my decision, although I am sometimes curious to know how things might have turned out differently if I had stuck with architecture. I came from a working class family and had no direct experience of any profession, but I guess teaching was more familiar than architecture. I knew only two architects, one very successful (a relative of one of my high school friends) and one not (the father of one of my friends from church). But then I only knew one college teacher of literature, who was also my former Sunday school teacher and a very educated and proper woman. But while I was taking my first college courses in literature and history I was bitten by the same bug that bit Larry McMurtry and the ill-fated hero of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (which should have been a warning to me).

And so I confronted my adviser in architecture and consulted with my mentor in English, and after much anguish changed my major. This meant quickly enrolling in a number of required academic courses I had neglected to take as an architecture student, including a foreign language. Like many of my peers in high school I had taken two years of Spanish (and even learned a little, but not a sufficient amount to place out of introductory college-level courses). Moreover, even as a young boy I had always had a love of classical literature, the epics of Homer and Virgil and wonderful myths told by Ovid. Thus I decided it was time to begin my long struggle to master Latin and perhaps even learn a little Greek.

My reward for this change in direction was that I would now be justified in spending much of my time reading literature -- something I had wanted to do anyway for as long as I could remember. It seemed to me then, as indeed it does now, that if you can contrive to get someone to pay you to read, you will have achieved something quite remarkable. And before very long I achieved just that. At first I was not paid very well; in fact, I often wondered if we would be able to survive, much less thrive, on such wages. But from that time on I was essentially paid to read (and to teach and write about) literature (as well as other humanities disciplines) for the rest of my working life. As I said, it's been a good gig.