Exam Prompt: Channeling Peter O'Toole

The late great actor Peter O’Toole expressed something I feel is worth remembering:

"I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.   I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity."

How can we use this quotation to help us to understand the characters, the actions, and/or the outcomes in the books we’ve been reading? Connecting the quotation to Melville's Captain Ahab seems fairly easy, but what of Queequeg or, say, Ishmael? To Shakespeare's Prospero? To Kem Nunn's Ike or Preston or Hound? Would such connections be true ones or mere poses? Or . . . ?

Go deep into one long text, or use multiple texts in your response. Use clear references to explore O’Toole’s statement and its possible application to what we’ve read.


(Thanks to Jay Trinidad for leading me to the quotation; thanks to Peter O'Toole for the words and the life lived.)

Double Trouble: Recurring Dreams in Tweed (a bit threadbare) and Iron (a bit rusty)

Strange dreams last night: two different recurring threads as I slept and woke, slept and woke, slept and woke, over and over.

The first thread? Classic teaching dream: final exam time, but I've printed out, copied, and distributed the wrong semester's exam to the wrong class. Good students: they tried to answer the questions, tried to grapple with the topics, until someone came forward to point out that they hadn't read this material at all. I try to salvage something from the situation as I return over and over to this situation in the night.

The second thread? Much more heroic, no less anxious: I'm the squad leader of a band of soldiers, garbed in wool and leather and iron, armed with swords or axes, as we move through ruined battlements, a ruined city, at nightfall, seeking some sort of goal, seeking not to be ambushed in the deepening fog and shadow.  Light comes from the moon and from burning buildings.  Smoke chokes the throat, obscuring that moon and those flames.  Something is hunting us, a troop of men? a monster? The anxiety level is high as I struggle, here too, not to make mistakes, struggle to salvage something from the night's foray, even though in the dream I don't quite know, can't quite grasp the things I know I should know, and there is absolutely no one to ask . . . .

Test Prompt: Is Roxane Worth The Trouble?

When I teach Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, I end up wanting to write lots of letters.  I also always assign the following topics--or roughly similar ones--for in-class or take-home writing:

Is Roxane really worth the trouble?

Is Cyrano just a fool?  (Use evidence from all parts of the play to support your position.)

Does the Comte de Guiche have any redeeming qualities?  And if so, are they enough, really, to redeem him?

Stuff like that.

The first is a particular favorite, and those of you who know the play understand that in the beginning, Roxane, aside from her beauty and liveliness, doesn't seem to merit such devotion from Cyrano and Christian.  In fact, in the second and third acts, she can seem petty and hurtful.  And yet if you keep reading . . . .

I also like to direct students to the balcony scene as a crescendo in the arc of the play.  What really happens amidst all those words back and forth?  Is it all just the "pretty nothings that are everything," as Roxane claims earlier, or is there something of greater depth at work?

Oh, Roxane--


I've also found the following quotation helpful in considering the overall arc of the play:


"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
--Horace Walpole (1717-1797)


--a handful of thoughts at the end of a long day.

Totem Pool

Study session in progress.

(And what did Melville's Ishmael claim?  "I have swam through libraries . . . .")