How do we educate ourselves when we're no longer in school? Grad school is my road not taken. I did Stanley Kaplan, took the GREs, applied and got in, but I never ended up going. I don't regret that choice but often wish I were in grad school right now, pursuing that PhD in 19th-century medievalism with the stipend and TA job I was promised back when I was in my early twenties and all that stuff was fresh in my brain. Oh well, perhaps one day I will be the sort of senior citizen who audits classes at the local university (cuz there is no way I could get a vaguely respectable score on the math GRE today—I barely squeaked by the first time around). Till then, I have estate and library sales doing the work of furthering my education, and I don't have to take out any loans to make it happen (at least, it hasn't come to that—yet). For example, I can credit an estate sale with introducing me to the work of Marie Cosindas, yet another photographer I've never heard of but whose work I now totally dig. I'll be featuring photographs from Marie Cosindas Color Photographs (New York Graphic Society, 1978) all week as I regroup after my discombobulating long weekend in NYC. As most excellent poet Sara Teasdale wrote:
I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.
I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.
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