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// March 15 [poetry exam] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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March 15

Today started out like a normal Tuesday. I slept a bit late, 'cause of the stupid Daylight Saving Time change, but not too late. Got a good flight in—enough to relax me and unstress me the rest of the way. Although the beer and pizza last night had really helped a lot, too.

I was thinking about Kant as I flew. Turning over his thoughts in my head.

I think the part I liked the most was his idea that if you couldn't prove that something existed, you ought to try and prove that it did not. If you could prove neither, then you had to decide whether it was in your best interest to believe in it or not.

There was just something poetic about that. Maybe that was why I liked it.

I couldn't prove that I liked it because it was poetic, and I couldn't prove that it wasn't poetic, so I guess that means that I had to decide for myself whether it was in my best interest to believe it was poetic or not.

But how he built upon that to understand how the mind made sense of the world around it, and that the world existed regardless and behaved the same regardless of if anypony was watching it or writing down observations about it, well, that was pretty obvious. This world had existed before I even knew about it, and unless all my professors and friends were lying, there were things like clouds and rain and snow before the first pegasus set hoof on Earth. And they behaved sorta the same here as they did in Equestria.

I landed on the field in front of Trowbridge, setting my hooves into the snow which was very much like Equestrian snow. Then I stuck my muzzle in it and blew a cloud of flakes away from me, watching as they danced in the little wind I'd just made.

When I got out of the shower, I sat down at my desk and went back to work on my essay. When I read over what I'd written, I had second thoughts. I wasn't sure I was completely clear on what a priori and a posteriori were, although I was pretty certain that they were before and after. Miss Chestnut ought to have told us that we'd need a Latin dictionary too, as much as the humans loved using Latin.

His ideas on morals were the most important, and that's what I was focusing on. I think that was something that some of the newer philosophers had forgotten. They were too busy trying to figure out if the world existed at all, or why it was such a horrible place for them, but Kant was more positive.

I finished writing what I thought his formulations meant and then just sat staring at the paper while I tried to figure out a way to wrap it all up.

That's the hardest part of writing stuff. I get these ideas in my head and then I write them down and read back and they sound dumb, or I get to a point where I can't figure out what to say next.

I finally came up with a kind of rambly conclusion that I could probably form into shape when I got a second look at it, and started the tedious process of writing the whole thing again for the computer. The professor said that she wasn't going to accept any handwritten essays, and she probably also meant mouthwritten, too. But once it was on the computer, I could show it to some students in the English Department who were helping people with essays. I had an appointment for tomorrow morning, which was cutting it really close but would hopefully keep me from making any really dumb English mistakes.

I had most of it done when it was lunchtime. I could finish that up after the poetry final exam, and then make some changes on the computer (which was a lot neater than crossing stuff out in my notebook) and have it ready before I went to bed.

When I sat down in Conrad's class, I wasn't sure what to expect. The final for climate science and philosophy were both pretty obvious; I didn't know what he was going to do.

He came into the room and opened his desk and placed two jars on the table, one of them containing yellow slips of paper and one of them with white. Then he took a stack of papers out of his desk and set them beside the jar.

He had each one of us take a piece of white paper out of the jar, which had a number on it. Mine was 19. Then when we all had our numbers and were back in our seats, he told us that he liked to do things a little bit differently than the other professors did. He reached into the jar with the yellow slips and pulled out the number five.

That was Melissa's number, and she went forward and he handed her a poem with the number five written on the back.

He had her read it aloud, and then asked her what she thought about it. He asked if she could guess who had written it, and a few other questions like that, and then he had her draw the next number.

It took a while for my number to come, and I listened intently to all the poems which we hadn't read in class and I tried to guess who'd written them. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong.

Then Trevor picked the number nineteen and I almost flew out of my seat and got my page.

I knew as soon as I saw it that it was e e cummings. Nobody else wrote poems like that.

It was called O Sweet Spontaneous, and I smiled when I got to the end—it was all I could do to keep from laughing. Conrad asked me what I thought about it, and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

I told him that the world was an amazing place, and no matter how many scientists tried to explain it or how many philosophers tried to understand it, it would keep on being what it was. I told him that even Earth ponies who know all about plants have a happy joyous song for when the first spring flower bloom, and we sometimes sit on our outposts and watch the clouds playing over the ocean.

Then I drew the number twelve out of the jar and Miro who I didn't know very well got his poem and began reading it.

I felt a lot better about everything after class, because I asked Conrad if I could keep the poem, and he said I could, and then he said that I would be welcome in his next poetry class.

When I got back to our dorm room, I hung the poem on the wall next to my computer.  I thought about how much I’d been struggling sometimes in philosophy class and a little bit in climate science, and e e cummings had said in so few words what I should have known all along: that the world was gonna keep being the same no matter how many scientists poked and prodded at it trying to get its secrets out.

I ran into Meghan and her friends at dinner and decided to sit with them. Meghan asked if I was still going to be able to go to the salon tomorrow—there hadn't been any free blocks on Monday after all—and I said that I would. It was going to be refreshing after my exam was over. Then Thursday I was going to meet Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn for lunch and then we'd drive to Michigan State University where I could spend time with Aquamarine before we went on Spring Break. They were going to get a hotel room nearby, until it was time to go on our trip.

I wasn't sure of all the details; they were going to tell me on Thursday. But I was looking forward to it.

I finished up my essay, and Peggy was kind enough to help me edit some of it. She said that she wasn't all that good at editing, so I ought to still let the English student at it, but she still picked out some pretty obvious mistakes, and had me explain a couple of things better that she didn't really understand from reading my essay.