Free The History of Great Things by Elizabeth Crane

what he thinks about you auditioning and he says he thinks it’s a marvelous idea, so you go in, and though you are not yet trained, they remark that they are stunned that you yourself are not a Fulbright scholar, and they offer you a few solo lines in the recital.
    This, of course, is one of those life moments on which an entire future hinges, and you simultaneously know it and don’t. It burrows down into you, this recognition, locks in there the way a butterfly screw opens up behind the wall, and you are sure that this is the thing that will truly give you to yourself. You practice for four solid hours a day. You have never been so excited or nervous in your life, not going to college or getting married or even flying on an airplane to Europe. The performance goes well; you get to take a small but special bow, during which five seconds the applause goes down into that place in you that makes you feel absolutely alive; it is one of the greatest things in your history of great things. You are swarmed afterward, and Fred lets you have your moment, but he’s beaming almost as though it’s his own. You cannot stop smiling, write home a handwritten, five-page, double-sided, exclamation-point-riddled letter about it. All the faculty thinks I have a bright future as a soloist if I want it!
    Two weeks later you take an overly long afternoon nap. You don’t feel ill, but you don’t feel well, and you have no name for this odd, uncomfortable unwellness, for a second you think you might be with child, but you have been cautious about that, marking your calendar diligently and counting the days, so that surely can’t be it, and it passes, and you are terribly relieved when it does.
    â€”This is quite accurate, so far.
    â€”I do have the letters you sent to Grandma from then.
    â€”Oh! I didn’t know that. I’d like to read those. But, wait, I wouldn’t have written to Mother about anything like that last thing.
    â€”I know.

Matters
    J unior year, one Saturday night in your dorm room at GW, it seems like a good idea to drink a six-pack or two of beer because you have a paper due for rhetoric class, and halfway through the semester you still don’t fully understand what the word “rhetoric” means, much less how to write a paper on it. What does “rhetoric” mean? you ask your roommate. Kimmie is practically a hippie compared to you, wears peasant blouses and patched dungarees, ends a lot of sentences with the word “man.” Is that a rhetorical question? she asks, laughing a bit more than is warranted, handing over a small ceramic pipe. No , you say, it’s not, I don’t think I get it . It just basically means persuasion , she says. You exhale a lungful of smoke, say Huh. I thought it was more, like, philosophical than that. It could be , she says, but in itself it just means how you get your point across. You’ve now got a buzz on that prevents a real understanding of what “in itself” means here. In itself , you say out loud, and then it starts to ring around in your head, with added visuals, you picture same things in same things, books inside of books, pens inside of pens, pipes inside of pipes inside of pipes, infinite same things in infinite same things. Whoa , you say, a minute later or three hours later, one of those; neither of you has even a remotely accurate perceptionof time right now, and if you can’t understand the concept of rhetoric you definitely can’t understand the concept of time. In itself. What does that even mean? Okay, look , Kimmie says. What is your topic? Rhetoric. No, your paper topic. What are you going to write about? I don’t know! Well what does it say on the syllabus? Syllabus? Yeah, the syllabus, that piece of paper they give you with due dates? I don’t know if I still have that. It usually helps to have that. Syllabus. That’s a weird word. Syllabus. Sillibus. Sllbs. That’s a weird