At midnight she wrote me from the library: “One is done, I didn’t start the Marx essay yet. I think I’ll stay here and try and write it now”.
The two thousand word essay on the evolution of capitalism and the struggles of the working class since the time of Marx was due early the next morning. She had to start from scratch, and she had not yet read any of the literature sources or made an outline.
At 6 am she sent me the finished essay, and there was just enough time for a quick proofreading before waking up the rest of the house. It was a very good essay, seamlessly weaving in an insightful discussion of Marx’s “Das Kapital” with a sociological analysis based on contemporary literature. How someone could produce an eleven page creative and scholarly work operating on little sleep in the dead of night was completely beyond me, and she did it without any preparation!
When I asked how she did it she said she simply opened “Das Kapital” on a random page a couple of times, picked something that could be used as a quote and tried to write a story around it. She received an A+ grade on the work.
So often I just watched in amazement and with pride at the things she did, knowing I would never in a million years be able to do them like she did.
P.
Moments with Jana 