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End of term is not kind to students.

My birthday is in November. Two days after Halloween, actually, which made for wonderful themed parties when I was younger (my poor parents got very used to making food that looked like bloody limbs and finding ways to gently scare but not terrify the guests). Now it usually means that I have a round of essays due the next day and I’m so sleep deprived that I enter the next year of my life staring at the ceiling and laughing hysterically about something that is not in any way funny. And November turns into December all too quickly, midterms melding into finals seemingly without breath or reprieve.

Being a perfectionist (and maybe, just maybe a bit of an obnoxious overachiever) and having one semester at another university is a bit of a recipe for an Erin-shaped disaster. Be kind to yourself, the international students services office says to you, over and over again, as they attempt to prepare you for your departure. Take care of yourself. Go for a run and call your parents and eat your greens and stop punishing yourself for not being at 100% all the time.

YOU BETTER MAKE IT COUNT! Says my inner saboteur.

Let me share with you a little anecdote about how that is going, so far.

Imagine a pleasant Saturday afternoon. The leaves have fallen but the winter cold has descended lightly, the sun shining and glinting off the frost-iced grass. I have been trapped inside my beige box of a room since morning, trying to come to grips with Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (a journey which I embarked upon ready and willing to receive supreme truths, I swear, but the man has an unhealthy love of the comma.) It is at about 3:30—having paused my descent into punctuation-induced madness for a stretch break, coffee refill, and agenda check—that I find out that I do not, in fact, have a copy of the play I will have to have read for my (early morning) Monday class. (Having had two essays due the week previous, we will have to be lenient with me in regards to this belated realization.) This is cause for some muted embarrassment, but no great dismay—until, having walked across campus to the bookstore, I become aware of the fact that the campus bookstore closes at 3PM on Saturdays and isn’t open on Sundays.

Northampton is not like Ottawa. For all that I love its small town charm—independent bookstores and coffee shops, a quaint, brick-bedazzled “downtown” that reaches maybe 10 blocks—there are moments, like this one, where I miss access to things like Chapters. It is because of this (and yes, perhaps a generational expectation of and preference for the instantaneous), that I scurried first over to the internet to employ all of the Google-searching skills I have developed throughout the course of this degree to try to find a PDF version. It turns out, however, that unless you read Greek, it is very difficult to find a copy of Euripides’ The Bacchae online.

(There was a very brief moment when I wondered if I could possibly get anything out of Google-translating the whole document. Sleep deprivation, people, is not to be taken lightly.)

Sunday morning led me on a hunt through the second hand bookstores of Northampton—surely, I thought, surely someone who had taken this course before me (“Western Classics in Translation, Homer to Dante”: my professor admitted to us the other day that the course curriculum had been designed before the second world war and really hasn’t changed much at all since then)—surely someone had cast off a copy of this play, surely it was lurking on the bottom shelf somewhere, hidden behind a stack of Grisham novels.

(I am entirely sure that there are indeed a million copies of Euripides’ The Bacchae hiding in this town, in the bottom of $1 bins, and that the universe was just punishing me for my own stupidity.)

After not finding anything in the first couple of hours of my search, and having another essay due the following Tuesday, I finally had to give up. I was going to just have to go in—to my “the-best-thing-about-liberal-arts-college-is-the-class-sizes,” nowhere-to-run-nowhere-to-hide-the-professor-WILL-call-on-you, class of seven other students—armed with only Sparknotes and bravado.

Sunday night—actually, probably early Monday morning—is when I sat bolt upright in bed, the answer having been brought to me seemingly from a dream: The Library. That lovely old institution, open 7 AM – 11 PM, 7 days a week, a hall filled with books!

I actually managed to start and finish the play before my 9 AM class the next morning, but that is really not the point. The point is… the point is that I obviously have a limited amount of intelligence, and that I am (this being the only possible conclusion) a failure. I have failed at life. I no longer understand how to live in the real world, the world of tangible objects. I considered emailing the Killam foundation to ask if they would rescind my fellowship. I texted my parents and told them not to mourn for me when I die of the shame for having forgotten about libraries.

—so that is how the semester is going, so far.

All of that being said, it really is in the fury and rush of readings and assignments, alternating between despair and epiphany (and hysterical library-forgetting madness, coupled with the soul-destroying fatigue that takes away the ability to even move but for the mindless, involuntary swiping of thumb on phone screen, the mind empty but for what is placed there by the social media powers that be)—it is in the midst of this almost-done-yet-so-far-to-go academic whirlwind that my favourite part of the semester really starts. Deep in the anxiety pool, churning out pages of analysis by the hour, you can achieve a total, dream-like immersion, and all of a sudden: things start to connect.

What I mean is this. In my “Sound in Cinema” class, we have been talking recently about the voice, about lip-synching in film specifically, but as part of this discussion we read an article about the uniqueness of voices. We forget about this, because we are often so caught up in understanding the words being spoken that we don’t realize how much more than mere words arrives at our ears.

At the same time, in a class on language—entitled “Imagining Language,” which really means “strange things artists do with language and dead philosophers who had a few thoughts about why we communicate in the ways that we do”—I was reading Gottfried Herder’s “essay on the Origin of Language,” which compares Hebrew and Ancient Greek. Because of its omission of written representation of vowel sounds, Herder argues that Hebrew is somehow more “alive”: the vowel is the living breath of a language, and Hebrew concedes, with this omission, that there is something in this living breath, the expression of the unique human voice, that eludes containment in representation.

And this then led me to a kind of epiphany in my vocal performance class—you are told constantly, in classical voice training, to sing through your vowels, to open up, to hide “ahs” in your “ees” and “oos,” and in light of my other classes, suddenly this lesson took on a new construction for me; I began to imagine breath and life and unique voice bouncing between consonants in my arias.

And then Aristophanes hiccupped his way out of the Symposium and out of my Western Classics course into a discussion on pre- and postlinguistic uses of the voice in my film class; meanwhile Alice Munro, the subject of my seminar class, forever manages to alight gently on every thought I’ve ever had, Dante and the voice and my Grandmother’s childhood. And it’s here that it happens: as every subject—every thought—begins to seep out of its own self-defined borders, I start to, in spite of myself, have a strange kind of fun.

In moments like this, it is like… I am standing on a platform, on a hill, and I am alone. There is music only I can hear but somehow I am in control, I am all powerful, with a flick of the wrist I coax fireworks out of the ether to burst into stars at strategic musical climaxes. I am concocting the greatest conspiracy theory of all time: it is all connected, don’t you see? And I feel like I am conducting the world. (It’s also somewhat like how I imagine Oprah felt giving everybody in the audience a car.)

—and then I forget how libraries work.

And of course, it should not be all that surprising to note that there are places where my courses overlap; moreover I know, having taken a few psychology and cognitive science courses, that seeing patterns where there are none is something the human brain just does, a cognitive bias. But it’s hard not to ascribe something more to this feeling—especially when it starts bleeding out of the academic sphere, becomes a kind of permanently altered brain-state where everything I learn from every corner of my life starts to connect and intertwine.

But there is a kind of naïve optimism afforded to BA students, right? And perhaps now I can take shelter under that expectation to wave my own little banner. The world has been a little hard to look at head-on, as of late, with Paris and San Bernardino and Syria and everywhere else, the list growing and changing by the hour. And so I think I’m going to make a choice here—I’ll decide that this feeling that I have is not the result of sleep deprivation or anxiety-induced hysteria or even cognitive bias. I’m going to decide that this is actually a kind of greater truth that I’ve discovered—that all of these lines we’re continually drawing in the sand are sometimes useful, maybe, but only ever as tools and not truths. You can’t separate ideas or disciplines or people quite so easily into categories; our differences do not cancel out our similarities, the connections that can be made if we let ourselves go there. You will forgive me if, in my anxiety, I seem to have misplaced my tinfoil hat, because it seems to me that it is this—this connectedness, as I continue to say, for a lack of a better term—which seems to signify some kind of greater truth, a message from the universe transmitted to me from wherever I happen to look.

(And please. If you find an online copy of The Bacchae today—don’t tell me about it.)