Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.