Old Gold and Black

A few links to articles I have written for Wake Forest University's student newspaper, The Old Gold and Black:

Old Gold and Black



Opinion > April 5, 2007
Risk of falling worth potential gain

By Emily White

Guest columnist
Wake Forest University

Poor Icarus with his melted wax wings. Poor Icarus falling into the ocean. Today is seamlessly beautiful. Clouds are perfectly paced and the sun is shining at a generous 83 degrees. I am sitting on the Magnolia Patio, working on a presentation of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus for my Shakespeare class.

Little Icarus has started me to thinking about the highness of things (in his case, the sun) and wondering if I have ever let myself know the top or bottom of anything. Watching the people moving in variations of Easter Bunny-colored polos below me, I am trying to guess who has jumped into the thick of anything?

I think I never have. My father died when I was 16. My mother nudged my shoulder out of sleep one starched Sunday morning, and told me ?daddy is dead?. I looked at her and said we needed milk. I peeled from under my blankets, dressed and drove to the grocery store. I bought three boxes of Corn Chex and a gallon of milk. In response to the warm faces of my neighbors, happy behind their shopping carts, who asked, unknowingly, how my parents were, I smiled. Looking at them square in the face, dry eyed, I let them know that ?they are doing really well.?

Turning back into my driveway, I walked past the hearse and the ambulance, the men carrying the sheeted stretcher through the front door, and carried the groceries into the kitchen, settling them into the cabinets. Too scared to loose grip of the mundane. Too scared to know the darkness waiting for me at the foot of my grief.

At his funeral I sat straight and tearless, pretending the church was filled for a wedding or a baptism.

Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back I cringe thinking about how I cheated the completeness of my heartbreak.

As time went on, the emotions caught up with me ? in a variety of unexpected ways. But I never let myself fly close enough to the emptiness of his death to hold my melted heart and say ?this is the bottom, this is the black, this is the worst, of sadness.?

I think it is safe to say we all cheapen our experiences from fear. Maybe we are scared of knowing too much, feeling too much, loosing our wings.

But I think that Icarus should be thrown from the canon of mythology.

We all seem to be taking it a little too serious. Or maybe we should turn it on its head.

Because we never realize that it is Icarus who, even for just a second, saw the closeness of the sun?s light.

It is Icarus who died knowing both the sneezing top of the sky and the strangled deep of the ocean.

What I am saying is fly high. The worst that can happen? We fall from the sky. People pay hundreds of dollars to skydive for that very feeling. Cats, in their curiosity, have nine lives. Who is to say we don?t?

We are large. We contain multitudes.

Emily White is a junior English major from Knoxville, Tenn.