The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores, which hung on the two deepest lines like plummets and, on the others, he had a big blue runner and a yellow jack that had been used before; but they were in good condition still and had the excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around as a big pencil, was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.
Now the man watched the dip of the three sticks over the side of the skiff and rowed gently to keep the lines straight up and down and at their proper depths. It was quite light and any moment now the sun would rise.
It has been a long day. Days are starting earlier and earlier, and the sun sets later and later. I suppose Santiago would love all this daylight. More time to be out on the sea.
Yes, I am talking about weather. I am settling into summer right now. This happens every four or so months. Each semester, I rearrange my life, change my hours and schedule. Different classes at different times, fall and winter. Sometimes summer. In a couple weeks, the second summer session at the university starts, and I'll start teaching a section of Intro to Film.
I spent quite a few hours today revising my syllabus to meet quality standards. Something to do with the switch to a Gen Ed curriculum a few years ago. If you don't know what that means, I'm not the person to explain it. Long story short, Liberal Arts education is going the way of the woolly mammoth. And that's not a good thing.
I don't have anything against STEM classes. But, nowadays, there seems to be a devaluation of art and writing and music and poetry. And math and physics and biology and other "hard" sciences are, for some reason, prioritized. Poetry? Forget about it. Better to know how to program a computer or name all the bones in the human hand. Practicality over creativity.
At the end of the day, however, most people don't sit down on the couch and consider commutative and binary operations in abstract algebra. Nope. They watch movies. Read books. Listen to music. Go to plays. Science may keep us alive, but art is what we live for. What gives our lives meaning.
That's my wisdom tonight, as we approach the summer equinox. After I'm done typing this post, I'm going to read some poetry before I go to bed.
Because Saint Marty needs to dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment