Like most American-trained engineers, I have this horrible guilt associated with my education. For many students, getting a BSEE is a study in survival. At my school, for every 100 students going for a BSEE, only 33 got any sort of engineering degree after four or five years of study. Who had time for "fluffy" classes like history or psychology when you had a killer exam in E&M field theory coming up? "Enjoying" a philosophy class meant enjoying not being an engineer later on.
So I must now-shamefully-confess years later that when I took the required literature classes in college, I relied almost exclusively on those condensed Cliff Notes to quickly tell me what the stories were about rather than "waste" all that time reading 500 pages of some endless Russian novel. I felt guilty, but it was either that or flunk solid-state physics. And when the college students flood Boston every September, I relive this guilt. It's become a pattern for me now. I go buy one of the classics and tell myself I'm going to read it. This time it was a collection of Melville's stories. I start reading it at home:
"The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good opinion."
I ask myself, "What did I just read? This punctuation is murder! Will I be a better person if I decipher it?" I read on:
"As during the telling of the story, Captain Delano had once or twice started at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers, wondering why such an interruption should be allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and in the ears of an invalid; and, moreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host's invitation."
That was just one sentence and I have no clue what went on in it! Who did what to whom and why?? AAAARGH! . . . And then I quietly put the book away until next September, when I'll feel guilty again.
— John Cooley runs the E-Mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com.
