During the past few days I have had to process some rather difficult family information; after reading several blogs, I feel it appropriate to apply the idea of pleasurable difficulty to my familial turmoil, and thereby, the world outside of literature. Reading has always been a sort of salvation for me, an escape from the difficulty of life; instead of encountering frustration within literature, I often find the “real world” incredibly more complicated. After mulling through my latest domestic crisis, I realize that Salvatori and Donahue might lend of bit of wisdom toward the difficulty of life and literary struggle alike.
As Salvatori and Donahue concur, the necessity of dealing with difficult text accompany many learning experiences, particularly many reading experiences that include processing hearty pieces of literature…or in my case, tough bites of family news that seems to choke me when I’m deep in the middle of grading a stack of month-long overdue essays or, say, composing a blog for graduate school. Digesting a thick bit of literature, whether read once or reread several times, seems quite like the continual cud of turmoil some people (related to me) chew over and over and over…and through genetic ties, I too feel I am digesting the same saliva-coated crises over and over and over.
What’s a reader—or a relative—to do? Learn. Without difficulty, to put it simply, life and reading becomes too clean and tidy—too unlearned. When my students and I get elbow-deep and dirty in a piece of literature, I feel that we appreciate each other and our learning experience with a greater sincerity. Like family, we bond over our shared struggle and surface together, alive and stronger because of our diligence and reverence to difficulty.
Last week’s reading, “Taking Learning Seriously” helped me draw another comparison regarding the analogous difficulty of literature and life. Shulman professes that learning “is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal” (2). Problems with family—and difficult literature—are best picked, plucked, made public, and hopefully, understood. Or, at the very least, accepted as unsolvable, perhaps pleasurable, slices of learning.
-Jennifer Carter-Wharton