Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

[rsadelle]

I've had the line "If you mean you and Thomas, it's been three years." (417) running through my head for a bit. On Sunday night, I pulled Pamela Dean's Tam Lin off my shelf, thinking that I've read it so many times before that it would be a quick read. I was barely two sentences into the first paragraph -

The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged. Chase and Phillips's A New Introduction to Greek was the favorite instrument for wedging; majors in the Classics used the remedial math textbook, but this caused the cases to develop a slight backward tilt, so that doughnuts, pens, student identification cards, or concert tickets placed on top of them slid with indistinguishable slowness backward and eventually vanished dustily behind.

- when that bit of self-knowledge jumped out at me from around the corner. boofuu, upon preempting me by donating a copy of Tam Lin to the Di-Phi library when she graduated (she'd read it because I'd given it to someone else for Christmas; probably ee970, but possibly archivecats), described it as "the way you think college should be but isn't." She's absolutely right. Here's where the self-knowledge comes in: I chose to read this book now because I want to learn something, and this is the book that had the greatest influence over my college experience. Because of it, I looked only at schools that had a Classics department. I'd always thought that it planted in my head the idea of taking Greek, but I didn't settle on it until we read The Bacchae in one of the Classics classes I took. But on Monday I came to page 238, and discovered that even that comes from Pamela Dean: "Janet became aware, in the fourth week of the term, that she had decided to take Greek 1 next term, if somebody decent was teaching it. She pinned the decision to their reading of Euripides' The Bacchae." I had to put the book down for a moment and integrate that bit of knowledge.

My college education is not the only thing this book influenced:

"I cut my hair off," said Susan. "It made me feel like somebody else. It was down to my knees. I estimate I won't be the girl who was heartbroken again for another two years." (205)

I had grown my hair out from the time I was six, and sometime in high school, because of Susan's solution to a broken heart, I decided that I was going to cut it short when I went away to college. On the Friday of my first week at Carolina, I walked down Franklin Street until I found a cheap hair salon, and got my hair cut. Twice in the last year when I've been desperate for a change but haven't had a way to make the change I really want, I've gotten my hair cut in a different style.

In the hour and forty-five minutes I had to read before bed on Sunday, I made it only 138 pages into the book, which is a lot slower than my usual rereading pace. In addition to forgetting how much of an influence the book had over my life, I'd forgotten what a rapturous experience reading it is. I wanted to savor every word, every sentence, every paragraph. There aren't a lot of books I feel that way about. Usually, it's just the story I want. In this, it's the writing too.

Comments

[norwich36.livejournal.com]

I have never read Tam Lin, but I think Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night had the same effect on me in terms of affecting my collegiate decisions (I deliberately chose a school that had an exchange program with Oxford, though that turned out to be basically defunct, and I took Greek for a year because that was my impression of college).

[rsadelle]

Amazing what influences us.