"un moment émouvant"

My laptop is way too heavy to carry around to all of my classes. So I don't. Then I justify this with all sorts of excuses: "with a computer in class, I'll just be distracted!"..."taking notes by hand makes me feel like a real student!"..."motor memory...yay?!" (irrelevant when you can't read the notes afterwards because they are only a mass of sleepy scrawlings all over the notebook pages...sigh).

But...let's be real - the one true reason is that carrying my laptop around is cause it tips over the weight limit of my backpack from heavy to backbreaking. I have a weak back, I think.

But Thursday, April 28th was a day that truly made me regret this silly habit of never bringing my laptop to class. It was a day when I wished I could write as fast as I could type - to capture all the words falling from my French professor's mouth, from her brilliant brain.

FREN 3032 was my daily inspirations class of the semester. I mistakenly thought it was going to be taught by a TA, but it turns out that Claire Lyu is not only NOT a TA, but a science genius tri-lingual lover of French poetry - basically the adult I want to be when I grow up. And on this past Thursday, our last real class of the semester since we're taking our final test on our actual last class, she was more full of beautiful words than usual. She wanted to send us off on...good feet, I think. Or something. Obviously I am far from the eloquence that is my French professor.

She said that she had experienced "un moment émouvant" - an emotional moment, a touching moment - the night before, while reading this collection of literary criticisms. The passage she wanted to share with us was about the song of a bird. I know it sounds super sappy, but no worries because honestly I didn't get it all either and thusly will not expound upon it...hahaha. But she was talking about how powerful some literature can be - how some works have the ability to switch up the power dimensions of a relationship you can have with it ( :P kind of like this). Usually when you're reading something, you're in power. The subject is you and the object is it. You hold it, open it up on the webpage, pick up the book that contains it and control it. You read it and judge it and analyze it and finally pronounce that it is good or rather bad or quite mediocre, while it sits quietly and looks up at you and simply exists. Naked and vulnerable.

But...Claire Lyu shared with us that some works of literature take that power position away from you. Totally and surprisingly. You had no idea it would happen, but then there you are - suddenly pierced through the heart and defenseless, and the thing is staring at you instead of you looking at it. Suddenly it knows your heart and what you love and hate and mediocrely like. And to sum it up, she read to us from the book. That

"On ne sorte pas indemne de ce gen de livre."
"One does not escape unscathed from such a book."

And that that's why we study literature. Because sometimes, it has this power to make us buckle at the knees and cry or laugh, or stay completely quiet. Because it has the power to make you reveal your soul to it and to others - and that is the difficulty of humanities classes (gross generalization - please excuse me). I know I (self-destructively) stand right alongside the engineering school kids when they joke about our School of "Arts and Crafts" classes, but truly, humanities classes are difficult in their own way. When you analyze a piece of literature, even in just discussing it, you're revealing a piece of your soul: what you think about this piece of someone else's brain, heart, and how you believe it applies to your brain and heart. When you create a piece of art, you're undressing a little bit of your secret self and representing it concretely for whoever happens to walk by to see - it's bravery at its finest. When you write an essay, analyzing and synthesizing (at least when you do it right), you're investing a chunk of your brainwaves to this clean slate of paper and bringing into being not just some inky letters but an idea, a new thing, fresh and alive into the world. It's an emotional thing - you invest your heart in it a little (or a lot).

When was the last time you were brave enough to get naked for a math equation? Do molecular structures inspire you to tears or pierce through your heart or render you completely helpless and reveal a part of your soul (not counting those times when you despaired like a baby because you didn't get the concept)?

These are the questions and affirmations that Claire Lyu inspired on the second to last day of my French class. As we all responded in the various ways that we usually do - from yawning to acting cool/like we understand everything she just said to sitting on the chairseat edges trying to engrave into our minds every pearly bead of wisdom that fall from her mouth - Madame Lyu remarked that maybe it's because of all the talk of bird songs, but that she felt like a mama bird letting all her babies fly out of the nest.

buh-bye!

And with that image, I said a bittersweet goodbye and floated out of room. Feeling broken into, a little bit taken by surprise, and a tiny bit...more naked than I had felt going into class on that fateful Thursday afternoon.