Groundskeeping

by Lee Cole

I was going to write a quotation, he said. The gist of which is that literature is not a way of escaping life but of seeing it clearly. I want that to be the foundation of our class. Good literature is supposed to give us a shock of recognition. We read a passage and we think, “I’ve felt that!” It reconnects us to the world and other people and the felt presence of immediate experience.

I felt the competing desires, as I often did when meeting someone new, to know everything at once and to save it all for later. It was like the feeling one has reading a good book, the sensation of being propelled toward the end and at the same time wishing to linger.

It was the fate of every elephant to be obvious.

we came up with compulsions and delusions and elaborate, tortuous strategies, all to avoid little discomforts.

Naturally, from here, our conversation turned to Donald Trump. Eldin and Ajla went through the expected liberal talking points and platitudes. I agreed, of course, with all of them, the thrust of which was that Trump was a bigot and a con man, but it left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless, knowing that if MSNBC were unmuted in the den, I’d be hearing more or less the same talking points and platitudes, delivered in nearly the same rote fashion. It was aesthetically displeasing, like a canned phrase or a stale image.

I’d come to believe that so much of life was fiction and artifice that you never really got past representation. It was all material, and so, to do something “for the material” was merely to do something because it was valuable, and worthy of attention. That’s what made it art. But another part of me wondered if this was only sophistry. I’d gotten so used to looking for narratives in the world—for signs and wonders—that maybe I’d deluded myself into believing they were really there. Noticing every little thing, writing them down and believing them significant, was only a step away from the schizophrenic who memorizes license plate numbers, believing they contain coded messages from the CIA.

I’d wanted us to have a story, to be like those lovers in novels, who meet in a time of conflict, who fight to be together and are carried away by the sweep of history. But there was nothing grand about us. We were just two little people who’d tried to love each other in the middle of a mess. Now that was ending. No fanfare. No big to-do.