I’m reading a book, and it’s a good book, but that’s just the problem. In the thick of the text, when plots and characters and language merge, and when scenes connect and stories layer, it all makes just too much sense. The details fit too well. The book crested into its crescendo, and I felt pressed to escape back into reality, back into my own head where questions are more common than manicured realities.
Take this moment now, for example: it’s just me sitting here on a bench. I’m in a small downtown area in front of a coffee shop. I’m scribbling notes on a yellow pad of paper. It’s sunny but I’m cold. Birds are scattered on the ground before me and someone’s beeping their horn just around the corner. Businessmen on lunch breaks are filing into the diner across the street. Moms are jogging with strollers. It’s an everyday, mundane moment.
But writers could boil down life to this single moment, could write the life into it. Maybe my head would crack open as I grasped the edge of the splintery bench and dug my heels into the concrete; the businessmen would file into my head and we’d all sit there eating lunch together. Memories of disappointments would float by instead of skinny joggers. Poetic stanzas would replace the blinking stoplights.
A writer would be able to weave together the gaggle of giggling Tiffany’s-jewelery-bedecked teenagers, the cigar-smoking bald guy manhandling his Hummer and the bird on top of that mailbox. She would grasp the sunlight and remind you of your red popsicle-mouthed childhood summers spent capturing the flag in a neighbor’s backyard.
A writer might marvel at the new entertainment complex in town, the one that houses eight new theaters, a martini bar, a chain Italian restaurant and an out-of-business Tower Records (which closed only months after it forced the smaller music stores in the city out of business). A writer might singe the building’s architecture with irony. It’s a modern version of the Roman coliseum with quotes etched in the top stone ring. One of them reads, “Can one ever wish for too much of a good thing?”
A writer would scan the panorama of life before her and bring forth the precious details, ones that can entertain, enlighten or explain. And this is why I read. I want to see something through the lens of the writer, something I have missed from a moment, or that I didn’t grasp from my own experience. Where Londoners only heard a clock boom, Virginia Woolf saw leaden circles dissolving in the air. Where partygoers only saw a green light blinking across the water, F. Scott Fitzgerald envisioned the illusion of the American dream. Where some only saw the scarred back of a former slave, Toni Morrison sculpted the knots of a chokeberry tree.
Writer’s details can draw the oxygen out of your lungs. But life isn’t lived in details; life plods on day after day and here (a phone call) and there (a smile) a detail breaks up the forward trudge. Writers, of course, can’t write this reality-they’ve tried, of course, and what a bore-so they spin reality, spice it up with a dash of beauty.
But writers’ perception can’t be our reality. Details are not concentrated on a single page, they span out across a lifetime. And sometimes sitting on a bench reading a book is simply sitting on a bench reading a book; meaning, for the most of us, stops there. Our lives diminish without the added perception of the writer. A book diminishes even more so without the ordinary perception of the reader. Together, the writer and the reader move each other along. When I close my book, my dreams of living happily ever after merge into a realistic future. Details rip out of the pages, flurry in the air until, one by one, they land like cymbal crashes to transform my existence into a life.
Rob Anderson is a junior in the College and an associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. He suffers from a crippling case of ennui.
