To Fly

Dean Hollibaugh,

I very seriously considered not writing this little note. Not because I have nothing to say. I do! But because I know not how to say it.

Perhaps you’ve seen this in my journals throughout the year. They were transforming for me, giving me an intentional space to consider, ideate, write, imagine, love, grieve, pray, and live.

I’m not horribly concerned about my current inability to express. Not because it doesn’t disturb to some extent. We have read the works of so many authors able to express an amazing array of ideas in prose and poetry. Instead, I am grateful for the thing which makes my ideas so hard to express: better thoughts!

I have all of our beloved authors to thank for that. But I am compelled to thank you: our facilitator, our organizer, our summarizer, our teacher, our professor, our dean, and—I hope—our friend.

This class has had all the hope of Achilles appearing on the horizon, all the interesting conversation of Plato’s Symposium, all the sadness of a mourning Electra, all the development of a spiritual Augustine, all the ridiculousness of a Don Quixote, all the wit of Sor de la Cruz, all the adventure of a Dante, all the meaning of a name in Toni Morrison, all the geography of an Odyssey, the rebellion of an Antigone, the beauty of a Sappho fragment, the remembering of Citizen, all the allusions of Parks, all the re-writing of Virgil, the changing of a Metamorphoses, the introspections of Montaigne, the romance of Pride and Prejudice, all the redemption of Dostoevsky, all the pettiness of Dom Casmurro, the mysteries of Woolf, and all the reality-altering effects of the Old Testament and Gospels.

I think everyone in our class can agree: we have changed. And for the better!

Wow. LitHum 14. We have begun the class of a lifetime!

Until our next meeting,

Nathaniel Ijams