Rediscovery & or bear with Me-I am going somewhere with this

In my last post I mentioned my kinship to some of Ernest Hemingway's works, it wasn't always like that.
High School English was my first taste of "Papa", that and many other "classics". I use the term loosely because near as I can recollect I hated them and had no taste for anything I was forced into reading and over analyzing in Mr. Grant's stuffy sophomore English class.
I'm talking Ethan Frome = I loathed this. My synopsis, cheating on your wife in New England then attempting suicide by sled, failing and being cared for by said wife = suck.
I laugh aloud in a favorite movie of mine-GROSS POINT BLANK, when the main character bumps into his former high school English teacher and asks if she is still inflicting all the Ethan Frome damage? No, its been dropped from the curriculum. = hilarious.
The Good Earth as above, this one did nothing for me, reprehensible characters struggling do not make me care.
Great Expectations I had them-but was sorely disappointed.
and finally
The Old Man and the Sea
What I especially recall was Mr. Grant beating into our brains the symbolism of the Old Man, the Fish, the Sharks and the Sea. I have since purged myself of anything he told me in that class, but I do recall the miserable feeling and general distaste for "Classics" it gave me.
As a writer NOW, I look back and wonder at the disservice Mr. Grant did me and everyone else he taught. His dogmatic bombardment of Montana public-school English status quo rather than appreciation for literature, damned me from reading Literature for enjoyment for about ten years.
Yes, I still read but it was mostly non-fiction or comic books.
Yes, you can argue I made that choice, but I'm not here to discuss existentialism and free will, I am talking about the outside stimuli that turned me away from enjoying fiction.
This will probably boil over into being another post, but fiction matters.
It feeds the soul.
We can be exposed to brilliant insights from fictitious character's that will never mean as much coming from the scruffy guy living in the basement with a lawn that desperately needs mowing (i.e. Me)

I turned back to fiction when I decided that if I had to choose anything I really wanted to do it was writing. I always wanted to write but dreamt I would save it for when I was old and grey.
But you can't put dreams in a cage and expect them to soar.
I came back to the classics's on my own to rediscover Literature and KNOW for myself what came before and why it mattered.
And I found I truly enjoyed a lot of classics, that I would have shunned only a few years before-case in point Hemingway.

In a letter to Bernard Berenson, Hemingway writes- "There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Damn, I wish I had that quote back in Mr. Grant's stuffy sophomore English class.

Thanks to commenter Vicki Rocho for inspiring this rant. Like Jackson Browne said and I'm paraphrasin' "I had to write a blog post to see how I felt about a thing."