“I worry about America’s boys. They are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, and contributing to a shift in college demographics that would have been unheard of even two decades ago. The average college campus in the U.S. is now nearly 60% female. As a woman I imagine this is suppose to make me feel proud, excited, vindicated. But as a member of a society peopled with young men, I mourn for them. I don’t think it’s the material they can’t handle, but the relentless scheduling and monitoring of strategic, time-sensitive goals so out of keeping with most boys’ natural temperaments. Girls, for the most part, love to make little to-do lists, to jot them out in purple pen in their best cursive with a heart at the end of the tasks they deem most special. They love to work their way through those lists and cross them off with a smack of their glossed lips. Long-term planning is a gift born of estrogen, of the knowledge that every 28 days is a matter of life and death. Boys, by nature, live in the moment. At a time when we ask them to declare what they want to do with the rest of their lives, all they’re thinking about is what they’re going to have for lunch and if the throb in their bodies will ever be relieved in an acceptable manner; they want to laugh and jostle and feel mighty and herd buffalo and we want them to sit very still for long periods of time and think. Hard. As if their lives depended on it.” (Elijah & the SAT, p. 107)
Another voice of Elijah
“We, the culture of the self-made man, tend not to talk about vulnerability, as if it’s something that can be outsmarted. It can’t. Since the dawn of man, each and every one of us has been only one crushed vertebrae, one unrequited love, one dark alley, one mottled cell, one blown megadeal away from being less than we had planned. And it is only in the recognition of that common weakness that we begin to find our way home.” (from Elijah & the SAT, p. 174)
One of the voices of Elijah
The epigram for Elijah & the SAT is from a song lyric by Kate Campbell:
We need an older angel
If we’re going to make it through
One who’s been around this block we’re on
A time or two
There is another song of Kate’s which was, for me, the soundtrack to the writing of the book. The lyrics are in the final chapter but I wanted to share with you her beautiful voice singing “The Prayer of Thomas Merton.”
Pax
Heather Choate Davis 