When Seamus Heaney died, I was sleeping. I found out about his passing when my friend texted me during the computer science course I’m currently taking to fulfill my lab requirement as a senior. I kept my expression neutral and locked eyes with the professor as I slid the phone out of my pocket, but had to break contact when I checked the message. I didn’t believe the text at first, but when I figured out that she wouldn’t joke about something like this, my first thought was: what are we going to do now?
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995 and would have been awarded the Stellfox Award from Dickinson College this spring if he had lived long enough. Maybe it’s telling that my first emotion after finding out about his death wasn’t sadness, but slight irritation. Though my reactions to hearing about death and bad news have always left a lot to be desired, I felt particularly callous at the moment. Hadn’t I been more affected by the news of 9/11? But then, maybe not; I was little and impressionable and probably just reacting to the emotions of everyone around me. His death, certainly a loss for literature and humanity at large, is not a personal matter for most people who will learn about it. The legend can easily become inseparable from the man.
Magnified tragedy like this often leads to a decrease in personal reaction and an increase in mass mourning. The grief becomes almost addictive, the need to mourn overpowering rationality. Groupthink increases, evidenced by the terror many experienced after the Twin Towers fell, even those furthest from the blast can still claim they felt aftershocks. Heaney’s death has been clunking around my head the past few days, despite the fact that I can’t remember ever reading one of his poems. That would have changed, I’m sure, by the time I would have been waiting in line for him to sign my copy of whatever poetry collection I annotated and clasped between sweaty palms. I’m waiting for discussions in my literature courses about what this means for the canon and imagining administrative meetings summoning the folder branded “Plan B.”
If this seems hyperbolic, remember that the Stellfox Award is one of the most visible and widely attended celebrations of literature and, to a lesser extent, the humanities in general on campus. The departments in East College receive less money and attention than many others that have been labeled as “profitable” and fast-tracked for marketing purposes. To be fair, English is still one of the top five most popular majors on campus and the work produced is consistently high quality, so there is not danger of the department sinking into obscurity. However, it is indicative of a frightening shift in Dickinson’s academic focus away from the core humanities values and towards a more modern, general approach. Which makes sense in so much as Dickinson is a business, but administration’s willful neglect still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. All this amplifies the importance of the Stellfox because it creates the illusion of a space devoted to literature at least once every academic year.
The department will find someone new to come, maybe even a playwright or author as prestigious as Heaney. It’s not really okay, of course, to treat humans lives like game pieces that can be swapped around, but it is realistic and helps coping become a little bit easier, perhaps. When my grandfather died in fifth grade, I tried to use grief as an excuse to get out of going to school the next morning. My mom pulled the blind up to let the morning light into my room and told me I was going anyway. It’s like that: isolate the practicality of grief and harness it.
