Thinking and Feeling

This paragraph, from a woman who dropped out of college not once but twice, really struck me:

I began to learn the meaning of intellectual insecurity. One day, near the end of her degree, my friend Fiona had me read an essay she had written about Pet Sematary by Stephen King, which was one of my favourite books. As I did so, it began to sink in that I had sidestepped, not only an experience, the way of living that university entails, but also an entire mode of thinking. I could tell that the essay was very good because it was well written and structured (she got a first, if I recall), but I had no idea what it meant or why someone would write it. It spoke in a language I didn’t know – the one I had been frightened of and alienated by, and so had never tried to learn – and about ideas I did not understand in relation to the novel. What had the phallus to do with Pet Sematary? To me the book was worth something because it made me cry and feel afraid. It dawned on me then that all I knew how to do was feel, not how to think, and maybe now I would never learn. This is what it has come down to again and again: that I am all raw nerves, no finesse. As my old nemesis the film studies tutor said so cruelly, I am women’s magazines, not critical theory.

Feel with your heart, think with your brain.  And do both of them.