Frozen Toothpaste

Rparle

Everywhere I see people who don’t understand how the world works. This includes, but is hardly limited to, when I’m standing in front of the mirror.

To my limited understanding, the world is wonderfully complex place full of wonderfully interesting people doing their absolute best to live the most useful lives they can. And I don’t understand even half of what happens out there.

And I don’t much see how fiction helps me or anyone else to better understand anything.

In that paragraph is the fundamental hangup I seem to have with fiction. It’s fictional. There’s a tautology if ever one existed.

I’m certainly no lover of literature, so perhaps that’s the simple nature of this beast. After all, I’ve also never been much a fan of any form of art.

Paintings. Drawings. Oils. Giant pieces of abstraction. It all seems rather dead to me.

If we were to accept the fairly reasonable, if not necessarily true, premise that art is fundamentally a window into the artist’s mind, then I suppose my fundamental dissatisfaction with fiction is that the people who write it don’t seem terribly interesting to me. They’re mostly — at least of the authors I frequently hear of — white, middle-aged, and male. These men are like me, or like what I’m going to be. I’d much rather have insight into the mind of a Russian housewife or a Congolese general than into the mind of a middle-aged white American.

But I like to read journalism. I usually struggle to read fiction. In some way, I would argue that even when the two are written by the same person, the first explores others, while the second explores nothing more than the self.

I’m certainly devaluing fiction. It’s an exceptionally useful tool to elaborate your personal understanding of the world. And when you understand something about the world differently than most others, that’s a tremendously valuable gift you give. Your fiction is then a way for people to learn about the world.

So too is it tremendously useful if you lived quite long ago. Roman fiction is often seen as more useful for understanding the world of the empire than are the histories made by friends of the emperors.

But most fiction I see, and most fiction I see people read, is dull. It’s John Grisham. It’s Tom Clancy. It’s Danielle Steele. And I can’t seem to understand the value in that. And I wonder: Am I the only one?

To be fair, I don’t mind watching a good fictional movie. And part of my dissatisfaction with fiction in print is probably that I read slowly. Or not at all. But those aren’t the only reasons.

I feel like most fiction is situated so close to the world I know that I won’t shun it as unknowable. It’s a drama about twenty-something Americans that I’m expected read because I’m a twenty-something American. And something about that just rubs me wrong.

One month ago today, I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The ceremony was rather large and anonymous. This was not unexpected: commencement ceremonies are rarely the intimate gatherings that perhaps they should be, especially not at a large state school.

Though I could go on, I prefer to discuss the event’s significance.

There has always been, it seems to me, some quasi-religious rite-of-passage aspects to graduation or commencement ceremonies. Whatever age, they are spoken of as dividing lines. Mundane events painted as crucial turning points. There is only before and after. You are a fundamentally different person, you are constantly told, and after this you’ll be treated according to this new system. The life you knew is dead, the life to come will challenge you, shape you, change you in ways you simply cannot understand.

I graduated from the sixth grade in 1998. For a second, I believed them. I believed that Junior High School was massively and importantly different from elementary school. But I soon realized: though we no longer had line-leaders, we were still doing the same thing. And maybe the building was bigger, but the people were about the same size as they had been three months before.

I guess part of this rhetoric of change is a fundamental outgrowth of the fact that the first graduation ceremonies were important. They were likely adaptations of medieval rituals brought inside the hallowed halls of some long forgotten French of English building. To distinguish men from boys.

Today there can be differences with graduation. Having decided that I need no more book learning (I’m sure my use of that phrase would convince some otherwise), this is an important dividing line in my life.

But it is not for all. Many go one, whether by choice or inertia, to study still-longer at universities. Keeping themselves from the new reality that graduation introduces them to.

But if the commencement ceremony really signifies a change, if it is really the path into independent adulthood, it cannot be the end. That change, that path, if there is one, is a slow and arduous path. The change may have been introduced, but its reality has hardly arrived.