Objectivity Is What We Blokes Do Around Here

I am reading a book. If books were as readily copied as the short stories I have been teaching in my classes, I would take this book and send it to Connie in the copy room with a note to make 100 double-sided replicas of it. I would then walk the mile to the post office with two fifty dollar bills in my pocket, purchase the necessary envelopes, and send them off with an admonishment to put down your magazines and formally innovative novels at once. I would make the claim that I send you sustenance that you sorely need, without adding the very real qualification that I am not sure I have any idea what you need. If nothing else, perhaps you could light a fire with the pages I send, or use the margins to write “To Do” lists to yourself. In other words, this book could possibly lower your opinion of my opinion, but here’s to a shot in the dark.
In the past, this little self-absorbed community has declared a love for the written word by arguing, evaluating, and pushing likes and dislikes in high-minded, sometimes vituperative rhetoric meant to display that we know a bit about reading a sequential collection of words and can create our own sequence to elaborate what we learned from the reading process. I for one have deployed concepts and English lit-speak in ways that were too clever by half, and not clever enough by the same margin. Lately I have even spoken to my collection of fifteen- and sixteen-year old Indians as if I really know what “close reading” is and have the ability to teach them how it is done. Being a teacher has made me realize that I do not have any idea what I am talking about. Take that as the proverbial grain of salt.
I put these opinions out there having recognized that I am a bit of a dork and an overly confident one at that, especially when it comes to pontificating about what is “interesting,” what is “good,” and what is “better” than the rest, even though in my heart of hearts I know that I have idiosyncratic tastes that may not translate into appreciative commonality. Add to that my recent penchant for all things small and rustic, excepting large mountains and hundreds of thousands of acres of trees. There is a cloying, even self-satisfied tone to which I sometimes succumb in my thoughts, and seeing as I even annoy myself with that kind of talk, the wear and tear I’ve projected onto others may be beyond calculation. (Unless of course this attempt to be humble and objective about my limitations is itself a calculated attempt to be endearing, in which case I am more clever and more needy than either you or I initially realized.)
The book in question is Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, and the alterity it offers is an old, scarcely recognizable variety that deals in vegetables, soil, animals, and old school rural community fabrics threaded out of constancy, threadbare but independent livelihoods, and shared experience, all housed inside of a succession of fictional days, months, and years out of which comes a sense of the narrative arc that time carves out for us. That is, admittedly, a mouthful – I use “alterity” to poke fun at my mouthfulness. More personally: I guess I mean that the book is genial and substantive in a way that reminds me of older people I know and admire, whose example in turn reminds me of the strange machinations to which the 20th century gave birth and against which our present ordeals gain perspective. Lately it seems that above all else I’d like to be decent: I don’t need to be intelligent, I don’t need to be attractive, I don’t need to have a killer crossover. More and more, I feel I need to intentionally invoke sentiments that I used to find hokey or generically vapid, in part because what I used to do was mainly a ruse, and in part because it is possible to overcome the generic with detail.
I am old enough now to realize that my inheritance of these older people’s memories is largely the sum of stories and memories they have bequeathed to me, and I am also old enough to appreciate the value of being an audience of one. I will not pretend to relate the details and small appreciative nuance that comes with my thoughts on this topic. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, especially when the past that is yearned for is overly romanticized. I suspect that romanticism is one reason why I left cities and their life forms (the beautiful girls, the frenetic five o’clock energy, the palette of lifestyles and skin tones and music emanating from cars driving past – of course I miss it, I want to drink it all again in fervent gulps of compacted time that makes of a weekend a few years of experience and the textured sediments of knowledge that those years bear – Anyway. Back to digressions that will eventually lead to broaching the topic of the book in question.
A few years ago, I read a book straight through that was called Kissing in Manhattan. I borrowed it from Manwaring, whose praise for it consisted, in part, of his inability to put it down. The book was a set of interrelated shorts set in that great enigma (to me) that is New York City, and Manhattan in particular. I can still recall sitting in my apartment in Chicago, brewing two or three pots of coffee to attain the wakefulness that I believed finishing the book the day I started it would require of me. The compliment I would attach to the book, and the ultimate source of my attraction, why I was enamored with it, was the purity of story it offered. I am not sure what I mean by purity of story, so if you are concerned don’t feel left out. We encounter books in moods, and as our moods change so does our response to what we read. For whatever reason, I was in a state of mind that was receptive to the particular charms of Kissing in Manhattan, just like I was in a state of mind or being that made me immensely susceptible to loving Blackstar’s first album when I was sixteen, to loving Stan Getz when I was twenty, to loving God when I was seven.
It is both surpassingly strange and easily understandable that art carves out a lucid and permanent space in memory. Strange in that we appreciate art as solitary atoms devoid of common vocabularies, understandable in that art often gives us vocabularies we would otherwise lack. I remember, in vivid detail, where and when I first heard a Fugazi song. It was in Chris Eixenberger’s bedroom in eighth grade, an hour or two after we had learned and perfected the bass line to Nirvana’s “Come as You Are.” The album was Red Medicine, and after hearing the first two songs I knew I had discovered a comrade that would stay with me so long as I remained attentive to what I felt as an active listener/participant of the music.
The night before I started Jayber Crow, I read the first two paragraphs of an appreciation of Emerson written by William James. The last sentence of the second paragraph reads,

The day is good, [Emerson] said, in which we have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of the crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his fields become symbols to the intellect of truth equal to those which the most majestic phenomenon can open.

James and I convened on Wednesday. I began reading Mr. Berry’s book early Thursday evening. On Friday, I walked to school with the above two sentences resonating in my head, and they gave the early morning light took on sensuality more visceral than I am used to. I taught my morning classes, drank my morning cup of coffee, took a piss, and ate lunch in the afterglow of his appreciation of “deep” experience, with which I identified, and which stayed with me until the final class of the week ended. I was happy – it was Friday, a payday Friday at that. I went to the bank to take out an allowance for the upcoming week, checked my PO box, and got back in my car with the intention of returning to my apartment. Then I saw the colorful dress of Amish in a parking lot, pulled over, and spent the first $20 of my paycheck on farmer’s market goods. For $20, I obtained carrots, onions, two loaves of fresh bread, a pie, two cans of salsa, banana bread, corn, green and red peppers, cinnamon rolls, squash, cucumber as large as my foot, potatoes, and a half-dozen ripe red tomatoes. It was satisfying to hand over money to the people who raised and cared for the food I purchased, and to know that when I went on a drive Sunday to go to the swimming hole I could see where my food originated. I returned home to begin the fourth chapter of Jayber Crow, having completed the first fifth of the book the night before.

It’s Saturday night, now – nine o’clock. I have a six pack of Budweisser, half of which is in my belly. I’m on page 276, eighty four pages from finishing. Why should you read this book? I guess I can only say that I came upon it at the right time, and hope you occupy a mood that allows for a similar experience. I have a friend – he is one of you, if that makes sense – with whom I have not spoken in some time. He once told me that books saved his life, and I knew him well enough that I was not surprised that books played that role even as I was surprised that he spoke to me in confidence. One of these days, he will be a published author in his own right, and hopefully I will be able to direct you to this man’s work with unqualified endorsement. Unqualified endorsement is what I give to this book, Jayber Crow, even as I acknowledge that many of you will not be able to countenance reading it from start to finish. Oh well. I stated my opinion. Do with it what you may.

Books, at this point, are my one sustainable source of solace, though admittedly of late I find less and less need for solace. I live in an apartment surrounded by approximately fifty houses. When I walk alone, late at night, I see the reflection of television screens in these houses, and it makes me wonder. Here are the trite clichés: television is boring, television dulls the mind, television is and only will be a distraction from living life. I don’t adhere to the idea that television is useless or an instrument of the intentionally self-stupefied, but I do think that it allows us to be more alone than we otherwise would be. Following the romantic impulse to get away from the present and find a piece of the past at times done enough to make me lonely and detached, so I do not need television to pound that nail any deeper into the wood upon which my current constructions depend. That sounds maudlin, but the idea is that habit begets habit, and I’ve taken steps to create something here, the enjoyment of which would be compromised by the surging blue box. At this point I want to convince you I am not a Luddite, not one of those people who have only had sex in the missionary position because it never occurred to them that other positions are available: that is not me. My life is not overflowing with fullness, but the glass is not empty either. Or perhaps it is true – I am boring. There are worse things to be.
ASIDE: It may not surprise you at this point to learn that loneliness is central to Jayber Crow. The narrator is twice orphaned by age 8, is sent to an orphanage, finds a false calling in the ministry, abandons the calling to do some early twenties-style wandering in his early twenties, then sets up shop in his hometown as a barber. The story goes from there. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, the book opens with a note that is as openly contemptuous as any book I have yet opened of the kind of training for reading books that I received, and ardently admired, in college.

In the spirit of being against loneliness, read the book I have praised in this post, and let me know what you think. Or, if nothing else, inform me of a book that you have found to be excellent, and I will do my best to follow your example.