What I Learned In Summer School, Part 1

“What’s up with Virginia Woolf? What’s up with this anthology? Why does everything we read have to make me feel worse when I’m done reading it? Where’s the stuff that’s supposed to make me feel better? Virginia Woolf? Are you kidding me? It’s loser depressing people doing loser depressing things until they die loser depressing deaths. She killed herself in ’41? Well, she should have by God filled up her coat pockets with rocks and walked into a river in ’24 because then none of us would have had to suffer through Mrs. Dalloway. Where’s the C.S. Lewis? All he did was broadcast the lectures on the radio that would become Mere Christianity during the London Blitz in World War II. But oh hell no, we’ll have none of that in the anthology. Nothing from anybody who tried to make the world a better place. Oh no, instead we get somebody so afraid of the Nazis—ooh ooh ooh it’s all about me!!!!—that she had to kill herself instead of doing something anything for anyone else. I’ve had it. I’ve had it up to here! SHE. MAKES. ME. SICK!!!!!!”