Fencing Bear at Prayer

That's it, I quit. I am sick of living on the edge, always on the brink of failure. From now on, I'm only going to do things that I feel comfortable doing. Chicken of me, I know. But I just can't take it anymore, constantly judging myself inadequate, constantly looking over my shoulder at what I might be when I'm not. I'm a failure, fine. But I'm going to be a happy failure. I used to be pretty good at things, back in the day. I always finished my homework on time; I knew how to study for tests and make near perfect grades; I was a good student, really. And that wasn't all. I could swim and play the piano and read books and draw and bake cookies and arrange furniture and navigate for anyone who was driving. I felt, if not brilliant, at least competent, secure in the belief that given the opportunity, I would know what to do. But it's been a long time since I've felt that way, and I'm tired of it. I'm not really sure when it hap...

Fencing Bear 2018, with the book that I was starting on the summer I wrote this blog post It is difficult to describe how heart-constricting this question is for a scholar at my university. It is, in a word, the single most damning thing that someone can impute of another's work, suggesting at a stroke not only that one's material is uninteresting, but, even worse, that it is insignificant, irrelevant to the Big Questions that Real Scholars should be asking themselves. Having struggled for eight years to transform my dissertation ("narrowly" focused on the way in which the Song of Songs was used in praise of the Virgin Mary for the better part of seven hundred years) into a Big Book (physically, at least; almost 700 pages) on the origins of the early and high medieval European devotion to the Virgin Mary and her son Christ, I had thought myself at long last immune to this question. Naively, as it turns out. There I was this spring at a reception for some of...