Trajectory

by Richard Russo

So this, she thought, was heartbreak. She’d read about it but wasn’t sure she wanted to get any closer and had long suspected that epiphany was overrated.

Except for Opal’s, that first batch of essays was depressingly dismal. Their authors weren’t stupid—the classroom discussions had proved that much—but the writing was breathtakingly incoherent. All their academic lives they’d been cutting and pasting from the Internet—a phrase here, a sentence there—a pastiche of observations linked by little more than general subject matter. Individual sentences, lifted from their original context and plopped down in a foreign one, varied wildly in tone and style. Given a list of transitional phrases—but, rather, on the other hand, while, hence—the essays’ alleged authors would’ve been helpless to choose the one that correctly expressed the relationship between juxtaposed assertions, had any such relationship by chance occurred. Whole paragraphs were maddeningly free of both mistakes and meaning.

In Renaissance Venice, placing the Virgin and infant Jesus anywhere except the exact center of a painting was heresy, akin to suggesting, as Copernicus did, that the earth revolved around the sun and not, as the pope insisted, vice versa. Contemporary Venetians would have regarded such impiety an assault on public virtue, every bit as outrageous and indefensible—not to mention far more dangerous—than hauling a half ton of dirt up four flights of stairs, dumping it on the floor of a decaying warehouse and calling it art. Renaissance painting and architecture were both designed to make the individual feel inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, which to them was, well, grand. Was it the loss of this grandeur, and of the faith that was its foundation, that led to the fragmentation of today’s world, to postmodern silliness, art as a sight gag?