Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

A Highly Specialized Life

A Highly Specialized Life

A highly specialized life is the life I want too.

Don’t we all?

I want more reading/writing/thinking – and total freedom.

Sounds about as good as it gets.

What life do you want to make?

Understand: You have to keep a tight schedule though.

So, in that time, people such as myself settled for graduate school. Though thousands took this path, graduate school never became a popular subject for fiction. There’s Philip Roth’s Letting Go, my own Moving On, and that’s about it. At the time I don’t think I realized that I was living a highly specialized life, a life which mainly just required me to read. I was friendly with the new purists of the Cope faction but I was more comfortable with old-fashioned scholars such as Alan McKillop and Will Dowden.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)

As a side note, I get why there is little fiction about graduate school.

I mean, where is the conflict? And who wants to read about someone else’s leisure time?

Cowboy novels and spy novels are much more compelling.

First Graduate Year

First Graduate Year

Honestly, my first graduate year was a blast too.

I was 22 and earning an M.A. in economics at The University Of Texas at San Antonio.

I spent most of my days studying and reading in an unmarked graduate office that had not yet been discovered by my fellow students.

For lunch I brought peanut butter and crackers from home and would buy a bottle of Coke from the machine.

I rarely had classes on Friday’s and slept in as late as possible.

Best of all, school was not terribly difficult and I had oodles of free-time to read.

I DON’T THINK I’ve ever been happier than during my first graduate year at Rice: 1958–1959 that would be. Rice was so trusting in those days that graduate students were given keys to the library, though I seemed to be one of the few who took daily or nightly advantage of this privilege. I romanticized my nocturnal ramblings around that comfortable library in All My Friends. I never slept in Fondren, as my character Danny Deck did—I had no need to, since my apartment was right across Rice Boulevard, five minutes away.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell