On a grey screen Burial at Ornans flickers before an apathetic student body. Minds are elsewhere, few are where they want to be. Detached sketches, whispered gossip and silent blankness infest the light-muted lecture hall. The professor is only slightly more eager to be here. His back turned to the blind and deaf masses, he shuffles scrawled night-before notes under a dim sun. He relates the trials of grotesque realism via war paintings. Gustave Courbet silently introduces his work. “I, I remember my fathers funeral. He, he died when I was, was twenty. I had never, uh, never met, met him. I spent, I lived in an, uh, an orphanage. And I remember, I wouldn’t, I refused, to leave un, until they open the casket, and I, I remember I ran my, my hand, hand through his hair, and that was the only contact I ever had with my father.” Abrupt attention, mindful silence and unsettling memories. For a moment we all want to pat his shoulder and offer a kind word. But that’s not why we’re here. That’s not why anyone’s here. Click. Next slide.
Reason for writing:
This is obvoiusly prose rather than poetry, but I wanted to get some feeback. My art history class is usually extremely boring, as it was one day last week, when all of a sudden after showing a slide of a funeral scene, my proffessor just opened up and shared this story about his father's funeral. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence class went on as usual, and as it seems all to often, nobody cared that this man had just shared a private, emotional moment of his. It's a pity that nobody cares about anyone.
Birth sign: Not entered
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