Keyholes & Skydiving

Brad Leithauser once took a road trip, during which his child proceeded to school him on the art of living.

While driving home from a wedding, he and his family listened to a recorded book. At its end, the entire family seems quite content, basking in the satisfaction one feels after having finished a good story. They had come to its edge, its boundary, its end.

Not all of them felt the edge. Leithauser’s fifteen-year-old daughter thought nothing of the boundary, of the end, and in her mind, the story continued.

But what was Rachel really like?

Leithauser’s answer, as one would expect from a teacher of undergraduates, stressed the intentional ambiguity that a masterful author employs. He gave the reasoning behind such ambiguity- and his daughter would have none of it.

O.K., but what do you think Rachel was really like?

Leithauser then realized that he and his daughter were approaching the story from two wildly different viewpoints: that of the box and of the keyhole:

Had I been still more articulate, I might have said that there’s a special readerly pleasure in approaching a book as you would a box. In its self-containment lies its ferocious magic; you can see everything it holds, and yet its meagre, often hackneyed contents have a way of engineering fresh, refined, resourceful patterns. And Emily might have replied that she comes to a book as to a keyhole: you observe some of the characters’ movements, you hear a little of their dialogue, but then they step outside your limited purview. They have a reality that outreaches the borders of the page.

The parallels here were more than I could ignore. I began to think of the ‘keyhole’ approach and to what other realms it might be applied.

I thought of creators- those of us who tend to think of life merely as an opportunity to create things. Writers, designers, craftsmen of all sorts. The one thing, it seems, that we all have in common is the keyhole approach.

Most look at the world as a box: it is what you see, and the established boundaries and rules need not be expanded upon. The average person will see a coffee table as nothing more than a coffee table. A designer will see a coffee table as an opportunity, a limited vision of what a coffee table may be. Then he imagines what might lie beyond his field of vision: he imagines what else a coffee table might be.

Writers take a similar approach to people. Where most see a person as the limited sum of the parts that they see- he is a baker who enjoys movies- the writer imagines what might lie in his depths. Perhaps he dabbles in cryptography, dreamed of being a baseball player as a child, and secretly chastises himself for not being the man his father was.

This keyhole approach little more than a capacity to be amazed. As an adult looks out on the night stars and sees nothing more than stars, a child, whose capacity to be amazed has not been narrowed by the mundanity of the world, will see millions of angels shining flashlights.

When most pick up an iPad and see it as an opportunity to browse Facebook, some will marvel at the fact that they can strike up a conversation with an astronomer in Holland.

It is those with the capacity to be amazed that create the future of our world, because to be amazed is to see what might be, and only when we see what might be can we make what might be.

Not coincidentally, our capacity for happiness, for fulfillment also lies in our capacity for amazement. Stopping to smell the roses is a habit only of those who choose the keyhole approach. I will not wonder at the astounding person my daughter is becoming by looking at life as a box.

Say I were to find myself in a restaurant, alone. Next to me, a man sips his beer, quietly. The box approach tells me that there’s nothing more to see here- this is simply a man drinking a beer. The keyhole approach might cause me to wonder what brought this man here on this night, and I may strike up a conversation. Perhaps we’ll become the best of friends, and he will one day talk me into my first skydiving lesson and take me to a ballgame to take my mind off of the fact that I walked my only daughter down the aisle the day before.

Perhaps not. Perhaps he’s an asshole. If I look at life as a box, I’ll never know.

kat-in-a-grey-hat:

Words.

The Old Man (A Short Story)

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The old man looked expectantly down the street, and, seeing nothing, turned back to his cup of tea.

Five dollars this tea had cost him, but it was worth it, not only for its quality- it was exceptional- but for the visitor that cup of tea would bring.

Again, he turned to look down the street, then, noticing his exposed wrists, pulled the sleeves of his oversized parka to hide them. There was a time when he had been ashamed of those wrists, of their slender proportions, but no longer. He was too old for such self-consciousness. No, now he was simply cold.

He looked around at the other guests. Most were in power suits, and sipped their lattes as if oblivious to the world around them. The old man did not envy them their youth. He knew at what price it came, and would not relinquish his years of experience for their tight-skinned assurance.

He grasped the tea cup with both hands to warm them. It was, indeed, a cold January day, and the wind was balmy. The luxurious red velvet curtains of the cafe rippled slightly, and the old man briefly smiled, thinking that even luxury must still bow to the whims of nature.

He grasped the cup again, thawing his frozen hands, then set it gently down and ran his now warm fingers down the length of his face. Like his wrists, his abnormally large nose had once caused him grief. His fingers traced the deep wrinkles that now dominated his face.

It was unusual for her to be late, but he was not a man to worry. Besides, it had been a long time since he’d seen her. Perhaps she’s lost the capacity for punctuality since then.

He thought of her often, and he thought of her now. He briefly touched the white kopiah on his head, thinking of how ridiculous she’d considered it, never passing an opportunity to ridicule him, although good-naturedly, for it.

She was just a girl when he’d started wearing kopiahs, after a business meeting with a Malaysian man had presented one as a gift. He wasn’t Muslim, but it gave him a certain comfort, and had worn them since.

He realized now that people were staring. He was not one of them, and they were beginning to notice the outsider. Let them stare, he thought. I am here for a purpose. You will not make me leave, no matter how penetrating your stares.

He pulled a newspaper from his pocket, laying it out on the table before smoothing it, then finally folding it carefully to reveal the crossword section, already half-filled in.

This, too, made him think of her- the Sunday mornings by the fire, a father using the New York Times crossword as a conduit to teach his daughter the ways of the world, or perhaps just as an excuse to spend some time with her. She was young then, and uncomplicated. How much easier that had been.

Twenty-one across: “Benjamin’s love in ‘The Graduate.”

These had gotten a bit easier over the years, he thought.

He thought of that film, of the amazing performance of Dustin Hoffman. Then he thought of The Wizard of Oz, the first movie they’d ever watched together- at least, after she’d become old enough to sit through an entire movie without getting distracted. They had reenacted the story in the backyard, pitching tents for landmarks and laying down bags and bags of sand as the Yellow Brick Road. She had done the most awful Wicked Witch impression, which, of course, had been the most adorable thing he’d ever seen.

The reenactments always ended the same way: he as the tornado, whisking her back home to Kansas (or, in this case, the kitchen) to make peanut butter cookies.

The old man sighed.

He took another sip of tea, which was getting cold.

Two down: “neighborhood.”

Carefully, he wrote: C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y. He glanced again at the pen. He remembered Bobbie Kopecki, who’d stabbed her with a Bic pen on the schoolbus in third grade. She had shrieked in pain, the bus driver later told him, but then forced her lips shut and insisted that nothing had happened. She was okay.

She stifled the tears until she came home, and they came out in a flood as soon as she crossed the threshold. She had stood there, waiting for him to come to her. He had picked her up, setting her on his lap, and let her sob for two or three minutes without asking a single question. When her eyes dried, she told him what had happened, raising her skirt to show him the ink-stained bruise forming on the inside of her left thigh. He tended to the wound and took her out for ice cream, where he explained, for the first time, why good people do bad things.

The old man checked his watch.

It was a good watch, and for the longest time he’d avoided wearing it, out of defiance. It had been a gift from him on the old man’s sixtieth birthday.

He closed his eyes and imagined the wedding. A beautiful church on a warm Sunday morning, the sun’s rays bathing the church’s occupants in a sea of color as they burst through the stained glass depictions of so many ancient saints. She in her snow white gown, smoothing down the fabric that hugged her hips every time the nervousness seemed to be too much. The smile that had not left her lips since she’d awoken that day, betraying the happiness that would not be contained. The rose petals being strewn along the path that she was destined to walk by a rose-cheeked girl of about five, the daughter of her lucky groom.

He imagined every moment, as he must, for he had not been there to see it in person. For that, at least, his heart ached.

He remembered, too, the fight. She met him in the park for a Sunday picnic, and he had been excited to tell her of his recent promotion when she interrupted, telling him of her plans to marry.

The old man had objected. No one was worthy of his daughter, it was true, but he was especially unworthy. He defended criminals for a living, and when the criminals didn’t pay well enough, he chased ambulances. He seemed entirely too sure of himself- a sure sign of a man that’s completely unsure of himself- and never looked anyone in the eye while speaking. He had a weak handshake, and once, the old man had caught him treating his dog unkindly. A man who cannot treat a dog well cannot treat a woman well.

So, he had objected. He had mocked their love, telling her that it couldn’t possibly be real. She didn’t love him, could not possibly love that sort of man, and that was that.

She had cried. She had counted on her father’s blessing, and was shocked to see him withhold it. In the end, she had walked out.

Fourteen years later, he’d received the watch. He had stood in his doorway, staring at the package on the front porch for a long time, unable to move. Fourteen years of absence, and now the unmistakable handwriting on the package shook him. Finally, he picked it up, took it inside, and opened it carefully on the kitchen counter.

When he saw the watch, his face sagged, grew older. It was not a gift from her- it was a gift from him. She was of extravagant tastes, and this was an elegantly understated watch. She had always forced her elaborate sense of fashion on him, saying he should “spruce it up every now and then.” He resisted, but she never gave up. She would never give him a simple watch with a flat leather band. It was not her style.

He put the watch in the drawer of his nightstand, and didn’t see it again until one day when the pain began to dull, when it was no longer a pain, but an ache.

That day, he’d opened the drawer, and, for the first time, looped the watch around his thin wrist. He was truly an old man now, and needed to be reminded of the ache, needed to live with the pain that he’d caused.

Every morning since, he had donned the watch. Now the pain and the man were one: inseparable, indistinguishable. That unity had cost him everything: his position, his stature, his life. He’d let it all evaporate the day he became aware of how meaningless those things were.

The old man turned to look down the street. So many people were going about their lives. Soccer moms from Iowa drug their kids along behind them, trying desperately to fit all the sight-seeing into one day. Power brokers talked on their mobile phones, finalizing the deal that would finally get the attention of the boss. Teenage girls stared into window shops, desperately wishing that their bodies could more closely resemble the perfection of the mannequins.

The old man turned back to his tea to find the waitress standing above him.

“Sir, are you waiting for your daughter?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “I am.”

“I’m afraid she’s not going to be able to make it. She just left the message with a member of our staff.”

She pretended not to notice the heartbreak in his face, and instead offered to refill his cup.

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll be going now.”

And with that, the old man slowly stood, zipped his parka, and started down the sidewalk on the long journey home.

This story was inspired by this photo.

The Children and the Analog

Over on the New Yorker, a thought-provoking piece entitled Spotify and its Discontents recently captured my attention. In it, Mike Spies recounts the story of a potential album purchase at a flea market. The seller refuses the author’s purchase offer, so Spies goes another route: he goes home to download the album digitally. There, an interesting thing happens:

This was supposed to be a victory of sorts, but I was quickly overcome by the blunt banality of the moment. In front of me was not only the album I desired, but also every other Butterfield recording ever made. And once I sampled and sated my hunger for Paul Butterfield’s blues, I could locate just about any recording ever made. But what, I wondered, were the consequences?

That’s a fascinating question. Spies goes on to contrast the experience of buying a CD with the experience of Spotify’s instant, all-access pass, concluding there is something to be said for doing things the hard, old-fashioned, “analog” way.

I remember my first treasured CD- Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’. It must’ve been destroyed three or four times (ten-year-old boys tend to destroy things with much more effectiveness than they preserve them). And every time it was destroyed, I found a way to buy it again. It was a fantastic album, yes, but my attachment to it would no doubt have waned had I not put so much effort into owning it.

We digital savants often extol the virtues of the internet age. It will make things easier, more enjoyable. It will do so by eliminating the time and effort required to perform the menial tasks life has hitherto required, leaving more time and energy for the meaningful. That, of course, is an admirable goal. We must be careful, though, not to overemphasize. There is something to be said for the work that goes into the analog that we grew up with.

In February, Alexis Madrigal wrote a brilliant piece called We, the Web Kids, which opens thusly:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not 'surf' and the internet to us is not a 'place' or 'virtual space'. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

When I read that piece, I thought merely of the benefits: the magical effect of the internet is so pervasive in the lives of the young. Imagine what that familiarity, that understanding of the technology will allow them to do with it. They won’t be stuck in old modes of thought, bringing along assumptions and prejudices to their contributions to the world; they will see with fresh eyes.

What I missed in that piece, Spies’s New Yorker piece brought to mind.

My daughter will never know the pleasure of doing yard work for two months to earn the money to be taken to the bookstore. She will never know what it’s like to dream of the scent of the pages, the feel of the pages being flipped beneath her fingers. She will never know what it’s like to walk up and down a book aisle, overwhelmed at the thought of all the stories, all the magic, all the humanity that surrounds her in that moment.

She will never know the satisfaction of taking it home, that one special book that she decided was worthy of ownership. The similarities between picking a dog up from the pound and taking a new book home (either way, you’ve rescued what will become a great friend) will be unknown to her.

She will never know what it’s like to take a walk in the woods, alone, with nothing but a pen and paper to talk to. She’ll never know the escape that it can provide, the flow of the pen as the ink spills onto the page while fall leaves come to rest at your feet.

She will never know the power that a simple phone call can infuse when you haven’t spoken to someone in days, simply because instant messaging, and mobile phones, and email, and texting didn’t exist. No, you had to wait for what seemed like hours for your parents to get off the phone so that you can call that someone that you so dearly missed. And, oh, how much sweeter was the sound of their voice after that wait.

This new generation knows the internet, is the internet, and that is a wonderful thing, because they will do things with it that we wouldn’t, couldn’t dream of.

But we are the last generation that knows the value of analog. Whether that is a knowledge, or a feeling, or a intuition, it is something that our children will not experience.

That is, unless we teach them. To value the things that we know, the experiences that an unplugged world can provide. They must know this, if only to contrast it with the world they live in.

More than that, though, we owe it to them to let them feel what we felt when we bought our first CD, when we took that walk in the woods, when we had that riveting conversation about nothing. It’s a joy too wide to keep to ourselves, and maybe... just maybe... if we can make them understand, they will pass that experience onto their kids, and the joy of the analog will survive us and our quirky nostalgia.

On Pain

The child huddles in the corner of her room, her hands covering her ears. She crawls along the floor, careful not to let go of the wall, careful not to lose the strange comfort it provides.

She reaches the closet, grasping for the knob with her elbows, before she realizes that she must let at least one hand drop from her ears to open the door, to hide in the precious anonymity of her own closet. She must drop her hand, and she prepares herself, knowing that her ear will be left defenseless against the screaming.

The hand falls, slowly, and the demons enter her room, her ear, her head. She listens to her mother shriek in pain. She hears her beg, please, no, stop, and she marvels at the fact that a fist can turn her once proud mother into the defenseless creature now pleading for her life.

The child closes the closet door carefully so as not to remind the monster of her presence. If she sobs too loudly, he will come for her, too, and surely, she will die.

---

The story above is, quite obviously, one of tremendous pain. Pain itself is a word so often thrown about in this English language of ours, and yet so few of us understand the depth of the word; far fewer know its power.

Those who know me or read me know that I am no stranger to pain. I have that experience to cling to, to remind me, and now I have the benefit of hindsight to help me understand pain.

The story of the child is one of unimaginable pain. Few of us can ever truly know the feeling of listening to your mother being beaten to death in the next room, of knowing that if you utter a word, you’re next. Yet we read this story, and countless others like it. We watch on the television as character after character walks through the pits of hell, some to emerge, and some not. Those that crawl their way back from the inferno are scarred, sometimes beyond recognition.

Those people know more of life than we ever will.

To live is to feel, and to feel is, inevitably, to feel pain. When it comes, we hide, like a child huddled in a closet. We tell the pain to go away: we just want to feel joy again.

But when that pain comes for you, opening yourself to it can be a great gift. When it comes for me, I embrace it as one would embrace an old friend. I take it in my hands, I roll it over the tips of my fingers, and I notice how deep my breaths are, how alive my mind, how tender my heart. It never stays long, this pain- that is important to remember- but when it leaves, something is lost. The farewell is bittersweet, and I always thank the pain for visiting.

Life can be precisely measured by how deeply we are cut. The little girl in the story has felt life to a degree that the comfortable among us will never know.

Suffering is optional; pain is not, the Buddha once said. He was right. Everyone that lives will feel pain. To some, it will be foreign, something to be rid of as quickly as possible. To some, it will be so intertwined with life itself that they can scarcely distinguish between the two. To those, the embracers, life is fuller and richer than can be imagined by those who think it a nuisance.

To go through life avoiding pain is as pointless as pretending that you have only one arm. Despite your delusions, the other arm remains, and by denying its existence, you deny its usefulness.

Get to know your pain. Hold it up to the light and see how parts of it reflect the sun’s rays, while some parts absorb it. Get to know its feel, its texture. Listen closely that you might hear its voice. It may one day whisper to you the secret of life.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book

Henry David Thoreau (via taylorbooks)

Poe on Life/ Death.

On Contrast

When it comes to pixels, I’m a bit OCD. Case in point: when I switch wallpapers on my desktop PC (which I often do), I switch the wallpaper on my laptop and phone to the same image. It’s an exercise in consistency. There’s something comforting in seeing the same image across all devices, something comfortable in weaving all three platforms together by a common thread.

The other day, for no apparent reason, I changed that. I selected a wallpaper for each device, giving each its own personality. I realized at once how much easier it was to select an image for each platform. Whereas before I needed to select a wallpaper that would display the proper contrast with each of the three menu bars, widgets, etc., I was now free to select an image based on the visuals of each individual device, making the process that much simpler, the results that much more striking. Each device assumed its very own identity.

I reflected on that for a bit.

I began to think of my relationships. Friends, parents, colleagues, children. How often had I applied the same approach to the people in my life? The more I thought about it, the more I realized it to be true: I was attaching a uniform image to each person in my life, depriving them of their own personality.

On deeper reflection, it became clear that the image that I was transposing onto my loved ones was me.

I have a dear friend who’s overly analytical, mostly on a micro level. She likes to analyze people, situations. I can also be overly analytical, but usually on a macro level- ideas, cultures. So many discussions arise between us in which I silently wished that she would see things from my perspective.

Look at the bigger picture here!

When I think about it, though, it’s precisely this contrast in thinking that makes our discussions so fruitful, so engaging.

My daughter is many, many parts me. Because of that, it’s easy to relate to a large part of her nature, the things that she encounters, and the way she approaches life.

She’s also, in large part, her mother. These portions of her are largely alien to me. I’ve no idea what she’s thinking, how to get through to her, or what advice to give when I see her mother coming through. It’s unnerving.

And yet it’s precisely this dichotomy that makes her who she is. It creates a wondrous being, full of surprises and unexpected gifts.

If only everyone could be more like me.

I’d never thought about whether or not I thrust my own personality onto others. Once I did think about it, I was a bit alarmed at the frequency with which I do so.

I will never know what it’s like to write like David Foster Wallace, with such paranoia and an almost unthinkable attention to seemingly trivial detail. Reading Wallace is that most exquisite of gifts- to travel into the mind of another human being and observe the inner workings, the quirks, the brilliance, the life inside. Imagine, then, what I would miss if I simply lamented the fact that he doesn’t write more like I think.

The contrast is precisely the thing that the value derived depends on.

We are unique creatures. For all our childhoods, this simple fact is reiterated over and over to us: you are special. Somewhere at the intersection of adolescence and adulthood, we forget that fact, or, even if we are lucky enough to consciously recall it, we forget to apply it to the world around us. We look at others and hope, wish, and pray that they could be more like us. See things my way. Do the things I would do. Each of us, though, need our own background, our own contrast. It is the contrast that gives us our shape.

The world is nothing if not a puzzle, and we are simply pieces. A puzzle requires pieces of many different shapes to form a coherent whole. That is precisely why your circle of friends feels so complete when you are all together, why your family feels less total when someone is missing, why you, yourself, feel incomplete without your significant other, your adjacent piece.

Embrace the contrast. The world would not be whole without it.