Skipping Class

Will Landschulz
Am Lit Per. 2
Mrs. LaMagdeleine

Esther is coming to grips with the fact that she, herself, does not have any plans for the future.  The possible things she had in mind, like being a professor and writing poetry, or being an editor and writing poetry, do not sound like cohesive plans for the future, they are intangible as the city hanging outside her window the night before, all bright and shiny and beautiful, but no closer than the stars for all the good they did her.  This leads to her required classes at her college, which leads to her talk of the sciences.  She likes botany class, loves it, in fact.  She falls in love with the aesthetic shapes under the scope, the "heart-shaped leaf" that occurs during the sex cycle of the fern, the reality of it all.  And then "when I went into physics class it was death."  Gone are the real shapes of fern and bread mold, and here in their place are theoretical symbols for time and acceleration, things standing in for other things while they attend to the rest of the world.  She loves the realness of the shapes and diagrams in botany class, but she rejects the "scorpion-lettered formulas" of Physics.  She knows Chemistry will be worse because of all the elements, such as gold and silver and platinum, reduced to "Au," "Ag" and other two-letter codes, abbreviating and compromising beautiful things, in her view, for convenience.  She thinks that replacing something with something else is a betrayal of the original thing, and thus rejects the theoretical sciences.