Ew! What a cruel high school English teacher you had! I don’t blame you one bit for hating that class! Nausea and The Plague, both in one year of high school? That is cruel and unusual!
I loved honors English as a junior, but we allowed to do “mini-courses” we could choose from, which was cool. One was “The Bible as Literature” which was taught by an excellent and deeply Christian elderly lady teacher and it was very interesting even though limited to the various literary forms used in the Bible. One was “Folklore” and, it being near the Bicentennial, was quite popular. We had to make our own folklore collections, meaning we had to “field work” and interview lots of people — elderly people were best — and I amassed a whole book of stories, sayings, expressions, recipes, superstitions, etc., all properly classified and categorized and sonforth like a proper cultural anthropology study. I even learned how to make split white oak shingles from a kindly elderly gentleman who lived in what at the time was still a rather isolated mountain farming community. That class was fascinating to us, and we loved it and learned a lot.
But I rebelled, too, and started college early, so I missed the whole senior year thing — if it was going to include Nausea and The Plague, I really dodged a bullet there! But, as you read, I got my due punishment in that Existentialism class (German class, too!). Looks like we have that in common — torment by way of Existentialism :( You have my full sympathy.
I don’t know why they made us read A Separate Peace in junior high (hated it) or made you read The Plague and Nausea in high school. There is so much fine and wonderful literature in our Western canon. Why that stuff?
That folklore work you were doing sounds a lot like the Foxfire books of that era. Do you know about them?
“I don’t know why they made us read A Separate Peace in junior high (hated it) or made you read The Plague and Nausea in high school.”
We were assigned all three. They really hated us. I think the book that got me booted out of honors English was some Henry James abomination called The Bostonians. It was dreary and boring beyond belief and I’d have chosen bamboo under the fingernails over being forced to read it.
I assume that high school was trying to make students, especially male students, suicidally depressed by forcing that garbage on us. The class was also subjected to watching ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf’ which was another 2 hours of my life that I bitterly resented them taking from me.
I always marvel at how people look back fondly on their high school years. It would be like reminiscing over jail.