Page 237 - WhyAsInY

toWarD a unifieD fielD tHeory
I was dating, but I don’t recall any particular girlfriend. I don’t even recall dating Peggy, who, as I will relate, was to become very important to me. As I recall it, I had taken on a rather heavy course load for a junior.
In addition to being enrolled in English Literary History (which was really Shakespeare 2 to us), Chaucer, and Philosophy 71 (Methods of Inquiry), I was also taking Introduction to Literary Scholarship (the “Senior Seminar” in English).
Living in the house, which, I forgot to mention, did have carrels in it, did not do much to improve my study habits. Procrastination was still the name of the game. This habit gnawed at me and suggested that something was not right. Although I had been a successful student, I had accomplished a lot, probably too much, under pressure in all-nighters. And I had learned that I had cultivated the ability to write, to write quickly, and to write myself out of a spot, even on exams. Some, myself included, might have said that I had cultivated a talent for “bullshitting.”
Now, on examination, I would say that not all of my academic suc- cess, such as it was, was due to my ability to write, and to write under pressure. I had, for instance, done well in Science 1–2—and even Math 1–2 (with some slippage when it came to a section on Boolean algebra). (On the other hand, when I have the nightmare that involves having to go into a test without any time to study, the subject is always math, never anything susceptible to BS.) I had not, it will be recalled, done swimmingly in French, however, and you’ve heard me rationalize con- cerning my lack of agility when it came to foreign languages. There was, therefore, as the prescient among you would have foreseen, a seri- ous potential problem lurking in my fifth-semester syllabus: the Chaucer requirement.
Chaucer might be known as the father of English literature, Chau- cer might be the first poet to have been interred in the “Poet’s Corner” of Westminster Abbey, Chaucer might have been required reading for all English majors, but Chaucer did not write in English. He wrote in Middle English, which, though arguably close to English, is not at all an English cigar. To me, trying to read Chaucer was akin to trying to learn a foreign language, and it was certainly not something that I could easily
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