We should embrace reading texts for class that we have already read. I’m shocked that I’m even taking this stance now. In high school, I struggled to avoid rolling eyes when my teachers would encourage rereading the books from our curriculum as we grew older. I hated reading about creepy Raskolnikov and annoying Socrates. Why would I willingly put myself through the trouble of reengaging with them?
At the time, I also wasn’t completely sure if my future Colgate classes would even feature the classic literature from my high school. I also had no idea that classics would be my field of study — a major which values the art of reencountering texts in both English and in its original languages of Latin and Classical Greek.
As somewhat of a surprise, almost every semester, my classes have reintroduced the texts of my not-so-long-ago past. The first time a class required me to experience this confrontation of the past was for Core Conversations in my first semester. Admittedly, when I realized that the book lineup was significantly composed of works I had already read in middle and high school, I was excited. This class offered me the comfort of familiar reading experiences while transitioning through unfamiliar college experiences.
Upon discovering this familiarity, the following question surfaced: What if I just skimmed through my high school annotations of “The Odyssey” instead of reading about that famously exhausting journey home again?
I couldn’t wholeheartedly commit to the bit of not rereading, even as inconsequential as doing so seemed for that class. After I realized that the class’s conversations rarely traveled to the book’s pages by closely analyzing words or sections together, but stayed in the abstract of ideas largely gleaned from summaries and not as they appear in books, I surprisingly missed my high school experience, in all of its misery.
Two-hour-long classes every day are now absent from my academic experience at Colgate. In retrospect, strictly talking about the texts was crucial to making each class novel and memorable, and it led to discussions that were grounded in the concrete words of authors. Because I found myself longing for those detailed discussions, I read Homer’s epic once more, keeping in mind that the experience would be in conversation with my prior one.
With a gap of two years between my distinct academic reading experiences of that ancient text, not too much had changed in what I comprehended, but it was enough that my opinions, the comments of my classmates and the story within the context of the class allowed me to reconsider my earlier impressions.
I recently had an analogous experience when I listened to a song I hadn’t played for some time. Now that I’ve grown up a little more, I hear the song differently. It was as if I hadn’t really heard the lyrics properly the previous times. It’s not that I was necessarily wrong earlier; it’s just different now.
Next semester, I’m set to reread Plato in English for a writing and rhetoric class and read its original Greek in depth for the first time in an upper-level Greek class. I’ve already read the author’s works in both languages several times, both at Colgate and in high school. But it’s Plato. I’m sure that after four years since I first read “The Republic” and “Five Dialogues,” what I notice and say about these philosophically dense texts will likely be different, so I’m prepared to undertake the challenge of reading them again.
Maybe, after all, my high school teachers’ original encouragement was not advice to immediately discard. As I brace myself for next semester, I’m curious to both learn more about the words themselves of those ancient texts and myself, as I continue to grow. There’s only one way to know, though, and it begins with opening those books.
