spontaneous overflow

Tomorrow is the last final of my undergraduate career. And while I know I should be studying my hardest and making all attempts to give these last moments of my college education every ounce I have left... I struggle. I spent the majority of yesterday in great attempts to study but found myself listless, restless, and in huge avoidance thereof. Which is kind of funny when you think about it considering I'm studying for Romantic Literature. This is a course I have adored, filled with work by some of the greatest writers of all time, in my humble opinion, and yet I simply feel overwhelmed by the amount of information needing to be covered. I mean, when you think about it- they're just books- just words. And I feel threatened by words, of all things? And maybe that makes sense.

I agree with Calvino that there is a sort of limitation of words- that one can never truly express how he or she feels via words because there are no turns of phrase that can fully encapsulate the complexity of human emotion or experience. Yet, there are those moments when words leave us completely transfixed or paralyzed- like nothing in the history of language could ever sound or feel as beautiful as that combination of vowels and consonants so perfectly placed together. Like the way I feel when I'm reading Jane Austen, or Keat's extraordinary command over the senses in his series of Odes, and certainly Wordsworth whom I think said it best when he wrote, "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Powerful feelings. Why shouldn't I feel overwhelmed when confronted with the powerful feelings of 10 exceptional literary talents?

Yet here I am, simply procrastinating further, avoiding the material at hand. So perhaps I'll go try, one final time, to study until this brain cannot retain any more information, and then tomorrow I'll greet the morning writing about those works of literature I so adore. Maybe it won't be so bad after all? Gosh, am I really this much of a nerd?