veering into gratitude

As I've been thinking about this course over the past few days, trying to sum up what we've accomplished, it's been hard to ignore my profound feeling of gratitude for the space that we developed together. We began our course with a discussion on veering, and the texts--both literary and theoretical--that we read constantly veered into new, and often inhuman, spaces. I am grateful for the insight and attention my fellow classmates brought to these works, and for all that I learned from them in discussing these texts. If I am being honest, however, I am even more grateful for the affective environment created in our class than I am for the rich intellectual one. In ways both positive and challenging, this semester reminded me that our lives veer, too, as do those of the people we love. I frequently felt the weight of the world on my shoulders this term, and it was an absolute gift to come every week to a class that was almost unbelievably free of ego, to meet weekly to ask questions and play and make things with a group of such considerate, smart, and compassionate people. Seemingly without anyone's intending it to, our class became, for me at least (and I think for others of us as well), a place for working things out, a simultaneously rigorous and gentle intellectual space to engage--in sometimes almost overwhelmingly affective ways--with a marvelous group of texts and a singular group of people.  Thank you all.