Passion and Commitment

Today has been a day of passions. I have five hours of class today (which is a lot, for me) and all three classes contained professors who were Passionate (with a very capital P) about their topics. Whether it was 19th Century Photography, Milton's Paradise Lost, or autobiography in Alice Munro's short stories, these teachers of mine were fairly bursting at the seams with enthusiasm for their topics. Not only did they care, not only did they want to teach, they really believed that what they were teaching mattered.

In fact, they cared so much that their excitement actually got in the way of good teaching. Ironically enough, the topic meant so much to them that they couldn't impart it to us as well as if they felt ambivalent about it. They talked too fast, interrupted themselves and others, went off on tangents, didn't notice that their students were getting bored or needed to leave for another class.

And there were certainly enough bored students today. It's kind of sad, actually, to see a professor holding forth on a subject that means the world to them in front of students who care more about their hunger, or the pictures they took of last night's party, or the essay that's due tomorrow.

For my part, I was enthralled. Not because I intrinsically love Milton, or Munro, or photography, but because I looked at these professors and thought "I want to feel that one day. I want to have something that I care about so much that it doesn't matter if I make a fool of myself. I want to care so much that I'm afraid of failure, that I talk too fast, that I really commit."

And I suppose that's the realy issue here -- commitment. I'm a 22 year-old student: I've never spent more than a year doing one thing. I know what it's like to have new ideas flying at me all the time, everyday, constantly. I can, through dint of experience in the schooling system, contain all that newness. I can take the ideas and mold them into digestible units, form opinions on them, remember them or forget them.

But I can't do, and don't know, is long-term association and commitment. I don't know what it means to "settle down," in the broad sense of the term. I don't know what it's like to spend 20 years studying one thing, to teach it every year, to know it and make it a part of your life. I have no conception of the depth of knowledge one can acquire after decades of adult study, discussion, reflection, and engagement.

And so I am drawn, like a moth to flame, to those teachers who disply real passion. I came out of my classes today wanting to study photography and Milton and Munro not because I inherently liked them but because I wanted to bask once more in the reflected warmth of my professors' passion. I wanted to understand, if only in an incomplete, vicarious way, how you could feel when you had something memorized, when you really did know it inside and out. How does it feel to get comfortable, to settle down, to be devoted enough to "spend your whole life" on one thing?