This is the hardest class that I have taken at Evergreen and I couldn’t be happier to say that. I will miss this class a lot. To be completely honest I probably shouldn’t have taken this class because of the amount of work it required which was bound to clash with my work schedule and my scattered attempts at creating an independent lifestyle but I’m glad that I did because, while I’m exhausted after the ten weeks of this program, I feel like I have grown immensely and have a better grasp on how to plan my priorities.

My favorite thing about this class was the seminar time that we had on Monday and Wednesday. I felt like seminar was crucial to my understanding of Proust and I even started reading Proust out loud during the last two volumes because it seemed to help so much in seminar. I also really agree with what Stacey said on the last day of class about how this is an incredibly diverse program and I think that can really be seen in our seminar groups. I have been in seminar style classes a lot in the past five years and never before have I had a seminar that was both this diverse and this interesting. Usually if a group is too different things are too quiet or too chaotic but I feel like our seminar had a perfect balance of agreement and disagreement.

I plan on beginning a full read of In Search of Lost Time, hopefully getting through a full volume every 3-6 months (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a full year for each volume). I really enjoy Proust’s writing and I think it’s a great addition to the other authors (Sartre, Beckett, Hemingway, Woolf, Plath, etc.) that I plan on reading more of in the near future. I think I would have passed up on Proust if it wasn’t for this class, seeing the 4,000 pages of text and feeling like there just wouldn’t be enough time, but if I can get through nearly 2,000 pages in ten intense weeks I can definitely get through the full read in several years, if not less. I feel like I’ve learned more in this class than I am aware of, and I look forward to figuring out just what I have learned from this program.