Depressing Life Advice From English Professor
Today, my English professor who is an accomplished poet and a life-long artist gave the following advice to our class:
"I don't recommend that you become an artist. As you grow older, you are surrounded by less and less people who appreciate you and fewer and fewer fellow arists. All the greatest artists die young. Instead, you should just get a good job out of college."
I find this advice very depressing and odd because this professor is extremely awesome, while this advice seems very lack-luster. It seems like being an artist and being able to make a living off of that would be great. If given the opportunity, I would still take the artist's life over a "good job" despite this advice.
4 Comments:
Not to be too glib about this, but it sounded like it was simply your professor's time of the month, if the professor is female.
If the professor is male, see Chris's comment.
It's not sexist if it's true.
Yeah, I didn't realize that I somehow avoided any gendered language in this post. The professor is indeed male. I should ask him about what he thinks about Clint Eastwood. For two interesting pieces on artists and their relationship to society, see Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and "Josephine the Singer or the Mouse Folk". These are the stories that prompted this life advice.
The more I think about it, we can take this life advice more as a text itself. Therefore, it is not necessarily imperative to take it literally. I wish I had recorded the original audio of his delivery of this speech so we could take a look at his diction, imagery, sentence structure, etc. The text of the speech here, although I chose to enclose it in quotes, is more of a "recreation" of a longer speech, focusing on the main points (a la Thucydides or Herodotus).
On a side note, I am delighted to see the increased participation from Dan on the blog. It was becoming The Chris Show for a little while there, and while still amusing, Dan's reasoned tones were certainly missed.
So keep up the good work.
Socrates: "Wisest is he who knows he does not know."
B.J.: "I don't know, people. You tell me."
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