Monday, April 23, 2012

Final Presentations

This past week in Sexson's class has to be one of the most entertaining experiences I've had in my collegiate career. The presentations were so wonderfully diverse, unique, and immersive that I found myself utterly enraptured. Who knew one assignment could produce such an array of results?

The fact that such disparity was evident between our presentations made it even more apparent to me that there is no correct (or incorrect) answer to the question: what is a perfect romance? How could there be when each of our answers involved such vastly different components? Of course there were connecting threads that ran through each of the presentations, tying many aspects of the class together, but for the most part they were quite unique from one another. In all honesty, I love that there seems to be no answer. Perhaps there is no such thing as the perfect romance. Perhaps there is no romance at all. I do not know, but the fact that we spent an entire semester discussing it means there is something substantial to the idea, something fundamental to be learned. I've toyed around with many different answers throughout my blog, most unfounded, some quite ridiculous, and others I threw out there just to earn a couple extra points on my final blog grade. Something occurred to me the other day. Professor Sexson was telling the tale of his Shahrazad of the airways and had concluded the class with the words, "She made it all up." Now we have since learned this is untrue, but I found myself immediately internally wondering, "If she can make up this entire story, whose to say Professor Sexson has not completely made up this tale as well?" It would make perfect sense, and the idea of a package from this woman sitting unopened for years, leaving students hanging from mental cliffs as to what it could possibly be, seemed to perpetuate my line of thinking.

This thought bothered me for several days, before I realized what the entire point of the class was: discovering the use of stories that aren't true. Who cares if Professor Sexson had fabricated this tale, and who cares if the perfect romance does not exist. These stories, these romances, however false, impact our lives, our imaginations, and our very souls. There are true, because we make them so.




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