Read the words

Many times, the teachers that speak to us the most are the ones that we find very hard to please. For me, that was my literature professor, Hugh Ogden. I couldn’t get a good grade from him, no matter how hard I tried. I loved all the readings he assigned, but apparently, didn’t understand a word of what I was reading.

I remember one time I sought his counsel about a paper I was writing. It might have been on Wordsworth or someone else from around that same era. I hard received a C on my first draft of the paper, but he was offering me the opportunity to rewrite it.

He wanted to understand that I understood the meaning of the work. I went around in circles. Thinking back to my being about 21 years old, I’m not sure how he took my likely errant meanderings, exaggerations, and outright guesses as to the meaning of those words for probably an hour. He must have been a saint.

I remember the air being quite thick with smoke. He almost always smoked in his office and let his cigarettes burn much too long, until the ashes fell on their own, down on to his desk or shirt.

“Miles,” he said slowly, “You have to read it. You have to read the words – really read the words.”

It was the literary version of “Just Do It.” There is no other question of how you have to accomplish the task – you just have to do it. It’s hard, but you just have to do it.

And you know I probably wasn’t really reading the words. I was likely interjecting myself everywhere, giving myself distractions and tangents that distorted my perception into a murky, muddled confusion. Young people usually don’t know how important it is to see things as they are, nor how difficult that can be.

There is no trick to most things. If you want to be a good reader, you have to spend time reading. If you want to sell, you have to make sales calls. If you want to market, you have to produce and distribute content. If you want to be a good runner, you have to run.

How much simpler can it be to achieve what we want? It’s usually a lie to think that we don’t know what to do – we are usually just deciding, consciously or unconsciously, not to do it. We have to read the words. I’m still trying to follow this advice.