My second story. ^^ This was
inspired by the whole "Sabin powering his way
through university" thing. I figured he couldn't get out of every single
class... Anyway, I couldn't find any concrete timeline of him between Victorian
and modern eras, so I kind of took some liberty with that. Hope
that's okay.
Your Gaia Name: Kuronue-chan
Medium Used: Text
Post or Link to Entry:
Old Friends
How do you explain? How do you explain to this blithering
imbecile of a professor before you that you know more than he does about
nineteenth/twentieth-century literature? He looks at you the way he looks at
everyone else—no, worse, because he thinks you’ve bleached your hair and filed
your teeth. He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know you read Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
before you turned thirteen.
He can’t imagine you devoured Alcott’s Little Women
a mere three years after it was published. You would’ve read it sooner, but the
English was still a little hard for you to understand.
He can’t imagine.
While still fighting your demon, you listened to a reading
of Anna Karenina.
You made short work of The Origin of Species when
the ideas were still fairly revolutionary. Of course,
you were in your twenties then, and the book had been out nearly a score of
years, but the thoughts were still fresh.
Long before you ever touched American soil, you knew about
the Wild West from your copies of Bret Harte’s
stories…stories you bought off of a visiting American in 1885.
You poured though every Mark Twain novel ever published…as
they came out. Even the bad autobiographies.
You spent long nights discovering Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil by candlelight.
You were a tremendous fan of Emily Dickinson. You thought
it a shame she had died only a few years before you could meet her, for you
moved to
Rudyard Kipling thrilled you. You delighted in his quick
reads, from The Jungle Book to Just So Stories. You looked
forward to each new volume.
You mentally fought alongside the characters in Crane’s The
Red Badge of Courage.
You laughed your way through Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of being Earnest, back when the jokes were still fresh.
You laughed twice as hard while reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
You met the man shortly before his death, and you had half a mind to show him
what a true monster was.
You knew of the harsh north from Jack London…you had the
serialized stories clipped from their newspapers and sent to you.
World War I paralyzed you with horrified awe. Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et
Decorum Est” struck a chord within you that you were
unaware still existed. By the time World War II rolled around, however, you
weren’t disturbed by war anymore.
For a while you were obsessed with poetry. Sandburg,
Eliot, and Cummings were your constant companions.
Faulkner. Steinbeck. Fitzgerald. You knew their works
before they were classics.
You stood on the same street as Ernest Hemingway once.
You met Ray Bradbury when he was still a very young man.
You’re not sure if you are proud or ashamed that you were the inspiration for
one of his first sensational horror stories.
You, yourself, are woven into literature. You wrote
countless critical reviews under pseudonyms. You have already flipped through
your book for this course, and have found yourself referenced eight times.
You know nearly all of the works in the textbook by heart,
and could recite them if called to. But no.
The professor leers at you from over the top of his
podium. He is secure in the knowledge that he knows more than you. It is his
fault you are stuck in this classroom instead of simply testing out of the
class.
Because, surprisingly for a man so well read in all of the
wonders and mysteries that tales can hold, he can’t imagine.
But it is no matter.
You will simply be revisiting old friends.