Dear Lord Byron . . . Postscript

Friend:  What was it? Do you know now?

Me:  I wanted to be able to say that I knew what Byron thought and felt and meant in any given moment and any given text, but since I didn't mean to write the next biography all of that did not serve me well. I failed to digest much of what I was consuming and I didn't know how to stop except by teaching other people.

Me:  Though, you know, there were times when I did know. But that was mysticism and not academically allowed.

Friend: Matt, so the obsession was mastery--and you achieved it, just not in the exact way you envisioned.

Me:  Mastery is an illusion, but I once believed in that illusion.

Dear Lord Byron . . . .

I've been teaching some books about specific obsessions, and in order for my students to understand that I was not judging or maligning the authors for their obsessions, I made a bit of a joke about understanding obsession myself, about being obsessed.  I mentioned my nine years in graduate school and detailed how I'd not only read and annotated all that Lord Byron had written, published or not published, but also had read and annotated the thirteen volumes of his letters that we have and had read and annotated the letters sent to him and had even started reading and annotating all that Byron himself had read . . . in chronological order.

(And that's not counting the bookcase or two full of literary scholarship on Lord Byron and English Romanticism and European history and heroism I also read and annotated.)

What started out as a joke became a little more serious: I do understand obsession.

I survived mine, but not everyone does.