Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University: On Banality
D I S P A T C H 9
On Banality.
By Oronte Churm
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My students seem a little embarrassed to tell me they did “nothing special” for spring break, meaning they stayed home and worked. No one, it turns out, flew to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of Thackeray and Trollope, hoping to catch up in a Victorian-novel class while sitting on a beach. No one abandoned the novels to go scuba diving with a girlfriend who’d never seen the ocean. When they returned to Chicago, no one had to wake her parents to tell them their daughter had the bends, an $8,000 malady that insurance wouldn’t cover. Nor did anyone have to ask their parents for directions to the hospital with a recompression chamber, which is in a bad neighborhood of the city, or to let them borrow their Pontiac Parisienne to get there, so the station wagon wasn’t lightly damaged that night. Choosing banality is sometimes a mark of maturity, and I’m glad I never did any of those things, either.
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