Apology Ponderings

As I think more about my apology for literature, I am trying to pin down exactly why I love my major. I began to form a list of the reasons why I love English. I actually found it harder than I would imagine. I don't know exactly why I bacame an English major, other than the fact that I love to read and talk about books. When asked why I am an English major by other people, I usually answered with just that. When people pushed the question, which was rarely, was when I had to dig a little bit deeper. Why do I love to read and talk about books? What do they do to me, where do they take me that after almost twenty years of being a bona fide reader am I still so enchanted by these pages bound together to form a book?

I think a lot of it would go back to the fact that I am just a dreamer by nature. Books transform my world and take me to lands beyond my imagination. If I had to go an entire day without being catapulted into a different world by literature, I may go insane.

Literature does not only take me to another world, being exposed to so many different ways to live a life has opened the world in which I live. I have never lived outside of Montana (though I have traveled), but my view of the world and the people of the world is drastically different than that of some of my peers. I have met some bizarre, complex people just in my readings. I am by no means an expert on any world culture, but I do feel more accepting of the people surrounding me. The fact that I am more accepting may also stem from the diversity of my peers in this major. Everyone is different, and everyone has had a different literary background. No two English students have read all of the same literature, which makes discussions almost always fascinating.

These were just a couple of ideas I have been tossing around.