What I pulled from the shoebox was a vivd fragment of a conversation from almost a year ago. A discussion with my AP Lang and Comp class about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Teacher points out how Biblical allusions and imagery are irremovable parts of his style that reflect who he was. Teacher then goes on to make a connection to-- is it a poem?-- by another guy who says that writing is like breaking off a piece of chalk from the white cliffs of Dover and using it to write, in that writers break off pieces of themselves when they write; using pieces of themselves to leave more than words behind when they write.
One of the many discussions that changed the way I saw writing forever.
I should find that poem she was talking about, I told myself last night.
So the search began with Google. With terms that included (but were not limited to) white cliffs, Dover, poetry, poem, writing, chalk, I searched in vain for a piece that was both titleless and authorless to me. A position in which I've been found MANY times, but usually with more success than I was having with this particular piece.
So I contacted someone who was in the class with me last year. After warning that my question would be both random and oddly specific, I explained the situation and asked if he had any idea where to find my latest literary Holy Grail. He told me he had no recollection of the conversation I described, but suggested I check Matthew Arnold's poem. We discovered it to be irrelevant to my search criteria--and when his internet cut out, so did his help in my quest through this Inferno for the context of my fragmented memory.
Then my friend Beatrix (Beatrice, if you look to her counterpart from Dante) came online, and I thought, Maybe she'll remember something. I explained the conversation to her, but she did not recall any such discussion either.
Only then did I consider the unthinkable; the possibility that revealed to me the Inferno-esque nature of my search.
What if I've inadvertantly "remembered" and entire, detailed discussion that never actually took place?
Coming from someone who can barely remember her own cell phone number, I was not ready to accept that my sanity might be so questionable. I can handle having anger issues, impulse control problems, and having the attention span of a goldfish. But not vivid memories of things that never actually happened. Not the possibility that, under that logic, I could be missing other bits of my memory--and what they might include.
No--this had to be real. I just had to keep looking.
So I turned to my English major pal at BYU. Having eliminated Arnold, Kipling, and Miller, my own research had left me with Chaucer. I explained my quandry to her, and asked if she was familiar with Chaucer.
Limitedly, she said, but that doesn't sound insightful enough to be Chaucer. Good luck with that though.
I downloaded The Canterbury Tales eBook from Gutenberg.org just in case. Ctrl + F of "Dover" offered nothing remotely close to what I needed. By this point, I'm getting worried that the possibility I fear might actually be Reality, the great Tarnisher of the glittering pretties I preserve in my shoebox.
There had to be another answer.
So when my Quaker friend and co-lover of literature came online, I approached her as well. Maybe she'll know something, I reassured myself as I prepared to give her the same information I had given everbody else, in the exact same words.
I think I remember reading something like that in my British poetry class, she said. Wordsworth maybe?
So we checked him too. No dice. (Although we did find this interesting little jewel.)
And then I realized I only had one viable option left: e-mail Teacher, and explain the situation to her that might just be a private case of insanity. And believe me, this is the last woman you ever want to admit private insanities to; not after you've spent two semesters attempting to gain her respect.
But I sent her a message. And while I was hoping--I suspected--beyond all hope, I put myself and the quest to rest for the night.
... and this morning, I woke to this message:
You did not imagine the discussion. The selection is an essay titled "A Piece of Chalk" and was written by G. K. Chesterton. I attached a link to the essay (I think, I didn't read the entire thing to make sure it was not abridged)http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/essayist/chalk.htm. It is one of my favorite essays; I'm glad you remembered it.
And I emerge from darkness of my Inferno with Grail in hand; the certainty that while I have many things wrong with me, delusions are not one of them.
The contents of my precious shoebox are safe after all--including from my doubt.
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