I forgot everything I learned in college because . . .

I broke the golden rule which is to condense your knowledge of something into one sentence (maybe two). Here are some examples of me doing that based on stuff I looked at this summer:

Kafka's Metamorphosis = Life is absurd.
Flaubert's A Simple Heart = The world will mercilessly hack down those who do not fight back.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind = Go with the flow: accept (even embrace) the good and the bad about life and who you are.

It is surprisingly difficult to sum things up so briefly. The process of doing it really makes you think through the work of art and, best of all, if the work of art is worth remembering, you generally will be able to remember one sentence about it.

That one sentence answers the question I was discussing before, "Why was this work of art made?"

And then answers to the second question, "How does the artist get their point across," sort of come to you if you can remember the answer to the first.

In college, my professors thought they would sharpen all of us up by stuffing our brains with bucketloads of information. It was so painful regurgitating all of it. It's so much better, when you read/see/hear anything, just to take away from it the one thing that really matters . . . the main idea.