With sincere apologies to Virginia Woolf …

When one thinks how commonplace university education is, how equivocal the syllabus that it prescribes, how arid the lectures, when a young writer of fiction enrolls himself, wishing that the undiscovered landscapes of classical as well as modern literature are to be disclosed to him, and in return, he gets nothing but the dung heap of Marxism-Feminism-Structuralism-Poststructuralism sprawled across the pages and pages of cheap photocopied handouts, the wastes and deserts of term papers one complies from a pastiche of patchwork plagiarism disguised as a meaningful work, the landfill of linguistics with its schwa/rhotic sounds and labio-dental consonants, he is obliged to view everything with unrelenting skepticism, and wish that the ancient and obsolete minds spared him the horrors and terrors of everyday college life, and for an instance, insanity or even death seems to be a respite, a relatively reliable refuge, one cannot help but wonder about the value of teaching literature and drilling the dull facts of poesy and criticism into the young craniums of today.

Inside the classroom, the opaquest language of boredom speaks: absolute expressionlessness—eyes widened, jaws slightly drooping, heads nodding at times lest they fall asleep—along with the most traumatic expression of the prehistoric professor; the grinning rows of beetle-stained teeth; you look at him, and a pang of remorse hits you: if only that dry voice meant anything to you but the caterwauling of cats in a cellar, (or as one ex-pat poet of high modernism had put it: rats’ feet on broken glass), or the wind ruffling the tufts of your hair just like the crisp breeze blowing across Kansas prairies from one story you read as a child but have already forgotten its heart-wrenching climax or the reversal of fate or the recognition, or the fly buzzing at the Boston poet’s deathbed, forever mocking her vain struggles and yearnings; if only that longitudinal wave—the regular compressing and re-compressing of outmoded knowledge through the air—meant anything at all.

The oldest cowshed of a university takes you back to your childhood, when you were a student at a private school, one of those short-lived mushrooming types, and while you were in that bourgeoise institution, you always walked into its stylish library and opened a book to dream into, enter it with unlimited trust, lose yourself into its words and sketches, mingle with its characters—Peter and the Wolf, the Scarecrow and the Tinwood Man, Sinbad the Sailor, Stingy Scrooge and the ghosts of Marley—and walk with them into the unknown lands, exchanging niceties, greeting them every day for forty minutes, the only time allocated to the library reading; nonetheless, a respite from the laborious eight hours of meaningless classroom teaching, the former rekindles a hope into your tiny heart, the same hope culminates into a desire, say a fetish for reading and scribbling: the good and bad angels of idleness who disturb your waking hours and chill your dreaming nights: you become Dr. Faustus—you sell your soul to the Liberal Arts.

In the meantime, in your dingy university, you see a ray of hope—probably some foreign-educated not-so-old lecturer who seems to harbor some spoils of alien soil—and submit one of your stories, wishing to get some feedback; and may I ask what do you get in return?—well, nothing but a sermon that preaches you to write short, Hemingway-esque sentences relying heavily on the subtext, the blasted Iceberg theory of storytelling, the tip floating with no literary grace or nuances, so to speak, with nothing but a medley of nouns and strong (?) verbs—minimalistic method, forever emulated by novices, half-baked, stripped bare to the bones, demented and destroyed by the douchebags of literary educators—then one always views the works of Poe or Woolf with disregard, scorning at their length of sentences, mocking their choice of adjectives or neologies: alas, the tragedy of university education that teaches nothing but asinine polymers of subjects and verbs, the mindless nibbling at the icy top of that Hemingway rag!

But

OOO that Hemingway rag—

It’s so drab

So, crap!

Your life becomes a parody and pastiche—you wallow in derivates, you feed on dead authors; you succumb to duplicity—and you wonder: what good has university education done to you except prescribed you a course of studies, which you could have easily plodded through on your own, sipping a cup of tea, smoking cheap cigarettes; if only the education you got would make the words flow out of your fountain pen with the same elegance as the serpentine smoke curls up from the cigarette you are holding now but are too lost in thoughts to take a nice drag?—almost instantly, you realize that ninety-nine percent of the people who walked in the gates of this hallowed/hollowed university with ‘radiant, cool’ eyes lost their fiery grace of yesteryears and succumbed to the fact that they were meant to serve some private schools in Kathmandu (who constantly abused them) or toil as migrant laborers in distant lands (and send back homes thick wads of cash), their degrees suffocating in a thick canopy of dust.

When one thinks how one can run away from this tragedy, from all of its cells and spaces masquerading as courts and palaces, its Beelzebub and Mephistopheles disguised as the disseminators of humane education, one cannot help but wonder how one came or say forced to be inside its premises in the first place, with no prior knowledge of its world, with no consciousness attached to the mind of the convict: what then, you scream, is the way to redeem one’s soul?—if you are an escapist, the answer, like all ancient wisdom you neglected as you kept perusing this vacuous field of humanities, lies buried deep in the works of Marlowe: Homo, fuge! O man, fly; say you are a rebel of sorts, and you want to fight till the last ounce of energy remains in your body, Conrad might be your messiah, and follow his command: exterminate all the brutes!—what if you are neither of them?—then you throw up your arms in despair, and like me, labor through this infernal avenue of dreams deferred and demented and destroyed until your mind and body refuges to trudge along, and you crumble and fall, only to be blown away by the wind across the sweeping corridors of this great establishment, this leading university from this most exemplary republic.

Sharma is passionate about reading and writing, and he’s committed to making the world a better place — one word at a time.