To Kiss and Eat and Sleep

I miss essays and blog posts. The—or perhaps more accurately, a—problem with essays and blog posts is that I’m not in school or on most social media outlets anymore, and vocalizing opinions on just about anything these days seems akin to vanity. I’m tired of all the opinions. They used to be fun. Disagreements and even arguments used to be fun. I recall how my cousins, our friends such as my childhood best friend, Sam, and his older brother, Daniel, and I used to debate any and every thing just for the hell of it. One of us was always taking up the role of the devil’s advocate, defending the silliest of presuppositions just for the challenge of seeing it through to the end. For most of my life, to disagree with a person was a method of learning about them and about myself. Arguments were always in good faith and were of intellectual benefit. Or at least it seemed that way then and seems that way now looking back. These days, however, everybody argues in monologues without caring to listen, and every topic under the sun is treated as being so important that to be wrong about a thing is to be Wrong in an irrevocable sense. Everyone seems so angry with everyone else about everything—on the news and online, that is. It’s funny how difficult it is to be hateful towards a person when you look him in the eyes. That’s one of the many reasons why I abandoned Facebook and Twitter. The anger was too much, and I need to look into more eyes.

Anyway, I haven’t written much of anything in a long time, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking. I finished reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for the first time in June of last year. It is the first classic work of literature that has ever really spoken to me. I teared up quite a few times when reading it. There’s a part where a former preacher says the following:

“I ain’t gonna baptize. I’m gonna work in the fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna be near to folks. I ain’t gonna try to teach ‘em nothin’. I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear ‘em talk, gonna hear ‘em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin’ mush. Gonna hear husban’ an’ wife a-poundin’ the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with ‘em an’ learn. . . . Gonna lay in the grass, open an’ honest with anybody that’ll have me. Gonna cuss an’ swear an’ hear the poetry of folks talkin’. All that’s holy, all that’s what I didn’ understan’. All them things is the good things.”

That little paragraph is a fairly decent summary of the journey that my heart and mind have been on for the past few years, and to see it written out like that (and coming from the mouth of a preacher, no less) just worked something inside of me. I love the humanity that Steinbeck put into this book, and I’m excited to read more from him! But I took a temporary break from Steinbeck and am now ninety percent of the way through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And it’s like every little thing I found beautiful in The Grapes of Wrath has been cranked “up to eleven.” I mean, just wow. What an incredible work of art.

Reading these two books in particular has left me considering my history with classic works of literature. Of course, we were assigned several to read in high school, but my dogmatic and protective Christian school environment did not allow for anything of too much substance. At least, that’s how I see it in this moment. There’s no way Faith Christian School of Lafayette, Indiana, would have let us read The Grapes of Wrath or The Brothers Karamazov. They include cuss words, mention things related to sex and the human body, so clearly display the depravity of man, and, worst of all, feature religious beliefs that differ from the traditional reformed protestant evangelical ones. But the irony is that these books also display the beauty of love, faith, and hope more than any other I’ve encountered. A part of me feels cheated by having had my literary education so censored. Then again, I don’t think these books and their themes would have meant much of anything to me before I had had a chance to truly live life for a bit. Perhaps the classics just can’t be fully appreciated without first experiencing the pain of the outside adult world. With that in mind, perhaps I wasn’t so much cheated by the censoring of “truly meaningful” works as I was misled by being naively handed works that wouldn’t reveal their meaning to me yet at the age I was when they were assigned to me. Perhaps there is a danger in forcing children to read the classics if it mostly serves as a turn-off to them in the future. It certainly did to me, but I’m glad I’ve started giving them a chance. They truly are classics for a reason. When I was younger, I almost thought that books were given that moniker arbitrarily. How unintentionally post-modern of me!

I was planning on writing more, but my wife just walked in after a hard day’s work. I should probably put this down, give her a kiss, eat dinner, and enjoy the next hour we have before it’s time to go to bed. What a gift it is to be able to kiss and eat and sleep. Life is such a wondrous thing. I think I’ll end this article with one of my favorite quotes from the late comedian, Norm Macdonald:

“It’s the greatest gig in the world, being alive. You get to eat at Denny’s, wear a hat, whatever you wanna do.”