So, a little background: I went from not doing anything and bumming around at home to both working full-time and taking classes part-time within the span of a week.  I accepted an offer for a job, accepted admissions to grad school a week later, moved that weekend, began school the following Monday, and started working the following week.  It should be pretty understandable that given this sudden change, I barely had time to unpack my bare necessities, before jumping into a busy schedule, which continued until my class ended last Monday.  After I took a couple days to relax (this was while continuing to work full-time), I decided that I would continue the unpacking process, which had been suspended for a couple of months.  

While unpacking, I decided to go through my boxes (four in total) of old school papers (yes, I keep all of my hard work from the past), to re-organize them, and to verify/observe the potential damage done by those nasty bookworms/silverfish.  This was when I took a little trip back into the past.

While going through these papers, I recovered an old handout from my English class with a poem by T.S. Eliot on it, entitled The Hollow Men.  I remembered how little I appreciated this supposedly great work, which appreciation gradually grew as my classmates and friends would tell me about what they saw in this poem.  It wasn't told to me all in one setting, but as the years went by, there would be references, here and there, back to this poem, which caused me to make a note to go back and read it.  In short, these references pointed out the superficiality of man, or our modern culture, in general.  I wholly agree with this.  In fact, this is so because everything other than God is vanity.  I think T. S. Eliot and some of my friends saw the vanity, but didn't quite see the answer to their longing.  

Having uncovered this sheet of paper, I proceeded to read this poem once again, carefully, at least more so than that time so long ago.  This time, I could understand a lot more of this poem.  What used to throw me off was the fact that there seemed to be a point to this poem, but there were so many sentences and phrases which made no sense.  This time through, I figured out the key: disregard these nonsensical phrases - they were probably meant as a simple demonstration of superficiality.  Of course, I don't know for sure if this was Eliot's thinking, but having disregarded the nonsense part, the rest made a lot more sense, which conclusion I have already stated above.  

What is the lesson to be learned from all this, if there must be something to be learned?  Don't throw away your old English handouts, because one day, you may want to go back and re-read some of them.  I still have my trigonometry cheat sheet from Pre-calculus, which I took in 11th grade.  Believe it or not, a couple years and a bachelor's degree later, I still make use of it, sometimes, whenever I solve problems in my classes.  

Aside from that tacked-on lesson, I just felt that this experience was pretty special in my usual mundane routine, and so, I wanted to write it down.  It may be that I may want to re-read this one day.