I found a box on my desk when I got home late Saturday night. I knew what it was and decided to save it for the next day. I have gone online to buy this book (and cyber stalk my favorite UCLA professor) several times. Finally, the week before taking off on vacation, I took the leap. I've read most of this journal, several of the articles (those written by Maniquis) multiple times over. This was in fact the primary source for my senior thesis. Robert Maniquis was the only scholar/ professor I could find applying the imagery of terror and violence to the cultural crisis of the French Revolution. My thesis dealt with the imagery of childbirth and it's power in times of cultural crisis. In France and England, the Romantics, affected by the Revolution, created birth imagery of terror with hinted abortions, horror, and sons murdered by their fathers. In the Apartheid in South Africa, Serote paralleled birth imagery with the war in the skies, heavens, blood, and graves. And in the end, it meant hope. Maybe none of this makes any sense, I'm doing my best to describe a 20 page essay in a few sentences. I bought the book because I know that regardless of grad school or marriage or the state I end up in, I'll be writing something more on this. It was that moment where I finally realized in school "This is why I'm here." Don't get me wrong, I've always known why I was at college, why I was in the Literature program, why I was training. And that was the first moment when the answer to those questions was actually touching the tip of my toes and my fingers tapping the keys made a bigger sound in my heart than in anyone's ears. I went to school because of a book I'm going to write, though I don't know exactly what it will say - but it surrounds the power of birth and birth imagery in literature during times of cultural crisis - such as now. When the Revolutionaries lost hope, they felt aborted by their fathers and they created pictures where they lost their children too. It was tied to terror, childbirth and generations was wrapped up in its very cultural core of disappointment and political suffering. When the South-African's began to fight back for their rights, their poets penned hope into the hearts of the people, hope through birth as a sort of war, as victory.

I didn't mean to pour all that out at you, I only meant to tell you all I'm excited to finally own this book, the only one I've read that touches on a specific passion in my heart. One I don't know how or where it will work itself out, so somehow owning this book feels like holding onto that spot where my toes touch calling.