Today we talked about the idea of losing things, an idea we'll explore throughout our study of Joyce' The Dubliners. Some characters in this story experience loss that is more literal: the loss of a valuable possession, that loss of a loved one; others, in contrast, experience loss that is more metaphorical: loss of innocence, of faith, of romantic ideals. No matter the character's loss, Joyce asks us to consider how people choose to cope with those losses and also how we're affected both positively and negatively by those experiences. Before we get his take on these ideas, I want you to consider them in the context of your own life. Write about a loss--concrete or abstract--, how you dealt with it, and how it affected you.
I'll start...
I've been sitting here, staring at my computer screen, trying to put this experience into words. I don't even know how to define what I lost without telling the story; maybe you can define it for me. The year after I finished my undergrad was a strange period in my life. I was living in a house with 8 girlfriends from college and working on my master's degree in San Antonio, the same city where I completed my bachelor's. It was a strange experience because I felt I had one foot in the college world, another in the world of adulthood and I couldn't seem to reconcile the two. I spent the whole year toiling with this idea, feeling conflicted about attending college events when I felt I was now supposed to be an adult, even though I didn't feel quite ready. This feeling climaxed when I finished my graduate degree and packed my things to return to Colorado. I new that, without moving, I would never experience the end of all that and that it was time, but it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. I remember sitting in our big empty house the night before I moved, taking pictures with friends in front of our jam-packed UHaul truck before we drove away, and, most memorably, driving through Texline, a 1 gas-station-town in West Texas as we listened to Roger Creager's "Fun All Wrong". I cried a little because we both knew it. It was the end of all that and the beginning of something else that we couldn't quite point to, but weren't entirely ready for.
