Explaining "Scourge & Minister," intentions

A delayed, formal introduction to column useful in understanding motives

TYPICALLY, EACH week, I get a few comments about whatever it is I happened to have written on for this article.

Generally, they’re along the lines of “Hey, good article this week,” or “Hey, I saw what you wrote in the paper! I agree!” — mostly little compliments, conversation starters, invitations to small talk.

Last week, I got very little of that. Maybe school was just on all of our minds, or maybe work, or maybe our social schedule — but I doubt it. Indeed, what response I did hear, from a few friends and others, was a resounding “WTF?”I realize, and perhaps realized in submitting it, that last week’s article was ultimately pretentious, unsatisfying and just difficult to follow.

I apologize to anybody who had to read it, and commend those who made it all the way through.

Maybe this is a good time to come clean about my intentions for this article; I’m quite aware that I’ve never made a formal introduction or explanation of what exactly I’m trying to accomplish each week.
The title — “Scourge & Minister” — comes from a moment in Act III of Hamlet, just after our protagonist has killed Polonius.

“I do repent,” he says, “but heav’n hath pleas’d it so to punish me with this … that I must be their scourge and minister.”

Hamlet sees himself as both the executor and recipient of a divine wrath, both part of a larger cure for the world’s transgressions as well as a kind of plague himself, a manifestation of all these sins.

My perception of this article and its function is not nearly as solemn and not nearly as morbid.

Rather, I mean the title to serve as an indicator that I acknowledge my own fallibility; it is a message that the reader should take everything I say with a giant block of saltlick — I certainly do.

Last week, I suppose, qualifies as a supreme expression of these potential failures.

But don’t misread this — please — I’m not nearly as interested in myself as I might seem thus far, not nearly as interested in the reaction to this article as the preceding material might suggest.

Rather, I mean to use this as a microcosm for what seems to be a larger ailment.

Midterms are coming and going, and it’s getting to the point of the semester when it’s difficult to tell exactly what week of school we’re in, but from what I hear, we’re somewhere near the halfway mark.

Finals are a ways in the distance, but simultaneously, the beginning of the semester is long behind us.

The Fresno State football team gives up another game — this time to Hawaii, with a final score of 68-37. Each week, the margin of defeat seems to grow, and the losses become progressively more disappointing.

And in a way, it’s how I feel about myself: this article, just getting to class, and getting to class with work for that class, and getting to class with work that I’m proud of.

Right now, and maybe around this time every semester, there is just the abstract but overwhelming sense of things getting more difficult.

It gets harder — “it” being used as a truly universal pronoun: school, work, life, anything — from week to week.

I’m finding it progressively more difficult to find a balance in the topics that I’ve been choosing between things that I think are both interesting to me and hopefully also somewhat entertaining to read, and maybe even a little relevant.

It’s not just me, either — those of you who’ve been playing close attention to the opinion columns are probably well aware that articles on the relationship or non-relationship between language and gender are wearing a little thin.

And it isn’t limited to what goes on in these columns; classrooms that exceeded their enrollment capacities during the first week of school sit half-empty now, and the football team just keeps disappointing us. Each week is harder.

Today, around 3:30 p.m., I will have a midterm that will almost certainly have me identifying characteristics of Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry.

Consider this part of that interpretation, my own elegy — a lament for things gone awry and for a time when things were just so much easier.

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