Another dimension...

Literature class is starting next week for me.

Today, I somehow grew impatient with reading my penguin's edition of Russian Short Stories and decided to start on Edward W. Said's Reflections on Exile, a thick tome of collected essays on topics such as literature, art, colonialism, the Arabic world, and Palestine issues. About high time I took this out too, because I think I bought it 3-4 years ago and never read a page of it.

On the long train and bus ride from AMK to NTU, I couldn't even finish his introduction to the book. I discovered that I have quite lost the ability to make sense of literary writings, or to grasp the overall topical concerns of just that one chapter. I can't remember what 'reification' or 'antinomy' means anymore, what are the different critical perspectives of writers like Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Horkheimer, Habermas when Said dropped their names all stringed up in a single sentence. And there are some parts of the writing when I just skipped totally out of exasperation from non-understanding.

I only could empathise with certain topics and writings on them now, and vaguely grasp the logical strands of literary arguments related to keywords such as 'Immediacy' or 'Historiography'. I still delight in reading perverse sentences that describes too much in an attempt to fix its meaning exactly, such as this:

...there is the sense of dissonance engendered by estrangement, distance, dispersion, years of lossness and disorientation-and, just as important, the precarious sense of expression by which what "normal" residents find easy and natural to do requires in exile an almost excessive deliberation, reiteration, and affirmation that are undercut by doubt and irony.

It seems that I'm trying to fit myself into the rarefied atmosphere of the literary again (specifically, the complexities of modern/postmodern discourses), going back to reading such torturous texts hoping to discover some benign epiphanies everytime I find myself understanding its dense arguments.

Undoubtedly, I have grown stupid and lazy since my days as an undegraduate. Then again, wasn't that always the case, and that I didn't had that much erudition and intelligence to start with?