The Green Fig Tree

law school

I finally got the rejection letter from SMU in the mail today, so I guess law school is not in my immediate future.  I am not surprised, though I wish they could have just told me back in March instead of stringing me along on the waiting list twice for six months.  Oh well.  I may try to apply for next year or the year after that.  I am taking some classes at UTD this semester to finish up my literature degree that got postponed while I was pregnant, and maybe that will boost my GPA up to where the law school would like it to be.  For anyone interested, here is the essay I submitted with my application:

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The thought of books burning makes me sick.  It sickens me not because it is a suppression of the freedom of speech, which it is, or because all people have the right to knowledge, which they do, or any other socio-political reason.  The thought of books burning makes me sick simply because I love to read.

When I read, I am no longer myself.  I become the characters in the stories, or the poets, or the authors of essays.  As if I had a time machine, I leave the world in which I live for other worlds, other times, and other places.  Books are my drug; reading is the ultimate escape.  However, it is impossible to escape fully into the worlds the authors create without a historical background in both the time in which the author is writing, and the time about which the author is writing.  Friends, family and co-workers frequently question my choice to obtain two bachelor’s degrees, one in history and one in literature, asking if I could not have simply completed one degree in less time.  It is obvious to me that these people do not understand; they are not true scholars of the written word.  Literature is the history of both the time the work is written in and the time the work is written about.  History alone is hollow, an empty set of statistics, without the stories that comprise it.  History is meaningless without literature.

To completely understand a work of literature, one must be able to empathize with both the author and his characters.  That empathy is not possible without the knowledge that comes from studying history.  In W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, the main character’s life is representative of the time and location in which she lives.  If I knew nothing about the British Empire at its peak in the 1920s, specifically regarding the area of Hong Kong and the Far East, or of British society at that time, how could I empathize with Kitty when she is given the choice of public scandal or certain death?  I would not have been able to struggle with her as she comes to realize the person she had been for most her life.  I would not have been able to fully understand how her character grows through the novel, nor the relationships she has with the other characters and their meaning.  The novel would have lost its impact.

History is literature because, put simply, history is the story of the people of a given time period.  Peter Greenaway’s 1988 short film Death in the Seine epitomizes this idea.  As I watch a catalogue of twenty-three drowned men, women and children, the images of these people being dragged from the water, examined by the morticians, and then laid naked in front of the camera, I fight myself.  I must force myself to choose between simply noticing the facts, that out of the 306 people who drowned in the Seine from April 1795 to September 1801, only twenty-three were actually examined by the morticians, and hearing the monologue that is read over the images, the story of who each person was and the morticians’ speculation of how they came to die in the Seine.  However, instead of the camera panning over still images of actors who are “dead”, Greenaway shows actors attempting to lie perfectly still, who are just playing dead; their chests move up and down as they breathe, their eyelids twitch in response to the changes of the lighting, and at one point, an actress sits up to take a drink of water.  Greenaway wants the audience to know that though the people from the catalogue are generally only remembered as statistics, they were real people, people who had lives, people whose stories make up history.  He wants me to notice that I am fighting my natural reaction to simply absorb the statistics; he wants me to see that these people are history.

I study both history and literature because they are inseparable.  There is no literature without the history that surrounds it.  There is no history without the stories; they are the literature of the people who were there.  The study of law is also the study of history and the peoples’ stories that make up history.  In a radio broadcast on May 1, 1958, the first “Law Day,” Charles S. Rhyne stated that the study of law is the study of “man’s relation to man.”  The law is a continually growing record of the interactions between men, as is history.  The situations that have arisen in the lives of the people within any given community are the earth from which law springs.  Each matter is a story of the circumstances of a particular situation between men; with each written law, a story from the past emerges.  The most universally recognizable example is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960.  Though set in 1930s Alabama, the novel deals with the ongoing civil rights conflict that permeated the late 1950s and early 1960s.  It shed light on the reality of the injustice that occurred in the past, and forced the reader to be aware of the current injustices that were considered by many to be acceptable at that time.  Though it cannot be conclusively proven that To Kill a Mockingbird had any direct influence on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965, it is certain that the novel made an impression.

By repeating history through her novel, Harper Lee was able to turn the public’s eye to a critical issue at the time, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe did in 1852 with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, addressing slavery, and Henrik Ibsen in 1879 with his play A Doll’s House, with regard to the issue of equality of men and women.   Like a historian, Rhyne mentions that “the lawyer is the technician in man’s relationship to man.”  Unlike a historian, however, the lawyer is a participant in creating today what, in the future, will be looked back on as history.  The lawyer is not only someone who collects stories and knowledge of times past; the lawyer actively applies those stories, and the laws created from them, to situations of today.  Like an author, the lawyer takes history and applies it.  However, because I am not an author, in literature, I can only participate through the characters others create.  As much as I love to read, I want to take history and apply it to critical issues of today; I want to give history meaning.  Regardless of what kind of law I decide to practice, I want to be an active participant.  I have gathered historical knowledge, and I have lived many lives through the work of others.  Now I want to live my own life, a life that has the ability to make history in a positive, creative way, as an attorney.