It’s the day after Labor Day, which means—at many college campuses, including the one where I teach—that fall classes are starting. In constructing the syllabus for my poetry workshop, I’ve leaned, as ever, on Philip Larkin. In his indispensible essay “The Pleasure Principle,” Larkin satirizes the ways in which poems are usually written and encountered, and then adds, in earnest:
But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute.
For years I’ve offered this passage to students on the first day of class. They always agree to play the part of the pleasure-seeking audience, not the dutiful mob, and then we get on with business. But something feels different this year, this semester, this morning. You see, yesterday I watched Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and I think it’s changed my life.
I won’t try to review the movie—wiser words than I could offer have been posted here and here and here—but I will say that I can’t stop thinking about the film, can’t entirely escape its hold. It’s moving, and fascinating, and devastating, and affirming—and it ends on a day like this one: the first day of college. Watching the film’s central character, Mason, attempt to figure out who he is and who he wants to be (while his new roommate yawps barbarically in the distance, and his new maybe-girlfriend turns the idea of carpe diem deliriously on its head), I thought: There is no dutiful mob. There are just people, and moments, and possibilities. And what a joy to witness all of it, to even play some role—a role that, in Whitman’s words, “is what we make it, as great as we like, / Or as small as we like, or both great and small.”
Because when Whitman looked forward across the centuries, he didn’t see a mob, either; he saw each of us, individually (or at least that’s the effect of his art):
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Linklater considered Ellar Coltrane (and also me—or so I felt yesterday, weeping in the theater) for a dozen years. Whitman has considered each of us for 160 years (and counting). Welcome back: students, teachers, time-travelers. Let everything that’s new and impossible start and start again.