It was really, really ... good.

This morning on the 2 Dundas, the bus (or some part of it) was emitting a high-pitched wail. Three or four girls, sitting at the back:

Girl #1: Ohmygod. The bus is like ... dying.
(All laugh.)
Girl #2: I know! It's like a ...... kettle.
(All laugh.)

I hate to use more than three dots in my ellipses, but I want to convey the break, the enormous, palpable mental effort it took for that poor girl to come up with a suitable analogue for the wail of the bus. I am not just being mean, folks. You know when you're in a group and something funny happens, and then everyone just sort of waits for somebody to make some witty riposte, so that they can laugh and thus defuse the tension? It was like that. It was clear they were going for wit. What they got was ... well. Maybe Oscar Wilde was on the 13.

This bothers me more than it probably should (sidenote: I feel like this happens a lot with me) because I really don't think it should have been that hard for that girl to come up with something a little wittier. Even if she had said "dying baby," that would have already been a great deal more interesting that what she actually went with. And I wonder: if it takes that much mental strain to come up with "kettle" for a high-pitched, whistling sound, how is this girl doing in her postsecondary education? Is she really freeing herself up, exploring the mind and making associations across her field? In short, is she imaginative?

A moment later, one of the girls at last achieved something subtler, but the implications of the statement are more troubling than reassuring. She said: "Maybe we're all really fat or something!" This is imaginative: it requires you to picture, vividly, a group of fat students weighing down a bus to the point where it causes mechanical strain. Much better than "kettle." Had she said it right away, it would have been quite witty. But notice that her brain is far more capable of following rich, creative pathways on a subject related to body image. Body image, perhaps, is one of the things she might spend time thinking about by choice (as opposed to the "forced" thinking that takes place in school), and so the brain is much more receptive to thoughts in that category.

I am not saying that kids these days are stupider than they used to be. I think that's nonsense. What I am saying is that kids these days are probably investing more and more of their creative faculties on quick, easy, super-digestible kinds of information: Facebook posts, text messages, blogs. Reading a newspaper through is unthinkable now for almost everybody, not because they can't, but because they can't fathom setting aside that much time for one thing. I would also argue that they may no longer have the attention span for it.

Here is Tom Hanks on the topic of Starbucks in You've Got Mail:

"The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!"

That was exactly ten years ago. How much things have changed since then. What was once novel enough for a fairly hip dude in a romantic comedy to say would now never make it into a movie, unless it was to show how backdated the speaker was. The reality is that the world is now more customizable than ever. Facebook is perhaps the most extreme example, because it is nothing less than a customization of the self.

But picture this: what might that girl have done this morning, before getting on that fateful bus? She might have checked her Facebook. She might have tried to come up with something new to put next to her status (thus pushing her to the top of the queue and attracting notice and, God be praised, wall posts). She might have fussed about how to wear her hair or what outfit to go with. And then what shoes. Or she might have done some online shopping, checked out what's on sale, what's worth it and what's not, what she needs and what's just an indulgence. My point is not that she did all (or any) of these things, and I am certainly not judging (I do a lot of those things myself, so I'm including myself on my chopping block). My point is the range of decisions we are required to make, decisions that may seem trivial but which take up more and more of our mental space. When we have to make a thousand such decisions a day (it's probably more than that, actually), do we have space in our minds to consider anything else? If we read a book, in private or for class, do we have any time to process, to allow the language, the metaphor, the richness that does not exist in our daily lives to sink in?

If our thoughts and decisions are all instantaneous, our writing mostly in fifteen-word twenty-second junkets, multiplied by a thousand per day, can you really expect that girl on the bus to come up with a better metaphor?

How to Recognize Beauty

Some of the best teachers in my life have been people I've never met. They've also happened to be teachers in the most classic sense: not people who pass on knowledge, but people who have developed strong stances that (usually) have challenged my own, people who have developed their own rhetoric and towering opinions. You struggle with them and come out a little more clearly defined, a little more sure of yourself in the end.

One of my first teachers was Orson Scott Card who, in addition to being a fiction writer, also has a column wherein he reviews whatever the hell he feels like every two weeks. At first, I was crazy about him - I thought he was deliciously vilifying to things he didn't like, and I agreed with 98% of his judgments. Over time, I came to realize that he approached his subjects with a specific set of criteria in mind - his judgments were based on how well they ticked off his OK boxes, and avoided his peeves - to the degree that he was actually unable to see the thing in front of him. My change in opinion of him was more than just that; I think it showed that I had changed as a critic as well. But he was a teacher in the sense that he was someone I approached first in awe, contended with, and eventually "outgrew."

I don't think I will ever outgrow Daniel Mendelsohn, or if I do, I don't think I will ever lose respect for him. He too writes across the board - movies, plays, classic literature. A bunch of his reviews first published in The New York Review of Books are collected in a book released just this year, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, and I have been devouring them over the last few weeks.

Thing is, he's actually a pretty so-so writer, technically. Maybe because of the deadlines that are part of the magazine game, where most of these reviews were first published, his writing is sometimes inelegant and clumsy, as if he didn't have time to really clean something up. ("And so the classical Greek angelos, grimly transmitting his urgent report of the horrors he has seen, horrors that always result when men find themselves trapped in irresolvable dilemmas, may be thought of as the Angel of Tragedy, and hence very different from the adorable, glittering sylphs who have, lately, alighted in stationery stores and aromatherapy counters and on our television screens, bringing the comfy tidings that everything will be OK: the Angels of Sentimentality.")

But what he lacks in elegance he makes up for in seriousness of purpose, generosity toward his subject, and the deep penetration of his insights. The first half of a Daniel Mendelsohn review is typically description. For example, in his review of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, he spends several pages not only describing the real Marie Antoinette's life, but also Sofia Coppola's earlier movie Lost in Translation; he gives, in other words, both the artist history and the subject history. The result is that when he does get to his argument about the work in question, he has already shown you the stakes and made you care about the story and context in a way that you want this work to get it right - and if it doesn't (Mendelsohn tends to choose things that are popular and set himself against the public tide), he's already made you care so much that you feel as strongly as he does.

One of his favourite techniques - and I think it's brilliant - is to describe the reception of a work by critics, usually positive, as if he is going along with it. He is observing, and apparently endorsing the high praise that surrounds the work. But then, as if suddenly noticing something, he drops a single line that, in its simplicity, suddenly reverses the viewpoint by introducing his own view. Let me offer an example. He begins a review of the uber-popular novel The Lovely Bones (which I found insulting somehow, but for reasons that I didn't fully understand until I read Mendelsohn's review) by describing how fantastically popular it has been with both public and critics, who were all blown away by its unflinching portrayals of the worst horrors that can afflict little girls and families. He does this for a good two or three pages. And then this: "And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak are what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal."

Bam! Can you get away with saying something like that without first offering any evidence? Usually, no. How Mendelsohn gets around it is by always following these brash thesis statements with a page break, and then beginning a new "section." On the page, this is really visually effective. The page break stops the reader from exploding with "But wait!", and the long passages of text seem to promise: "We contain all the evidence you need to be convinced. Just read along and you'll eventually see things the way I do." And you usually do, because he has taken so much time to give you context and information about the work in question that a) you feel like he's given you everything you need to know to make a judgment, b) he's shown you what is at stake and the deeper issues his arguments are rooted in, and c) you feel like he really cares about the subject and is really interested in finding out the truth, rather than simply going on a bash-fest.

That last point is probably the most important quality for a critic to have: generosity. You approach every work with the fervent hope that it can do well, that it can succeed and offer whatever it is that good works offer. This way, you don't punish any good works, and because of your initial optimism people tend to believe you when your opinion of something turns sour.

It is perhaps unsurprising that one of his most perceptive reviews is of another book of reviews, Hatchet Jobs, which just about accommodates the opposite theory of how critics should behave. But Mendelsohn doesn't jump down his throat, enraged that another critic could be so mean and self-serving. He is honest; he is fair in spite of what he may feel. Roger Ebert, another superlative critic of a different field, likes to quote: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, if a literary critic sheds a tear while reading The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, he might write:

"The book is juvenile, saccharine, and finally does not probe or stimulate the human spirit on any meaningful level."

Which would be a lie, because something about the work, despite whatever flaws it may genuinely have, nonetheless found a way to move him - and as a human being who comes in contact with a work, he has to recognize this. But equally bad would be this:

"This book moved me to tears. It is therefore a great book that I would recommend to everybody. I read James Joyce's Ulysses last week and I did not cry at all."

Why is this bad? Doesn't it manage to recognize beauty? Yes - but it confuses personal emotion with the value of the work. You may have been moved by it, but - why? What does it say about the work, and not about you? Look deeper.

"The book has some touching moments, and indeed one moved me to tears. Yet the sometime genuine scenes of recognition and reconciliation are founded upon a suspension of disbelief that the author demands of the reader, a suspension that, in the end, contradicts the very 'realness' of the girls' interactions with one another."

That's criticism. Honesty in recognizing your reactions and honesty of purpose and observation. Where was I? Oh yes, Hatchet Jobs. Mendelsohn admits that the author is intelligent, and that he laughed a lot while reading the book. But his eventual point is that the author's writing can't be called criticism because it accomplishes nothing of value - just breaks things down. To get there, his analyses of the text are beautiful in their matter-of-factness and vision. Of a long and verbose metaphor in Hatchet Jobs, Mendelsohn writes:

"This is a wonderful bit of writing, but two things strike you: first, that by the middle of the passage you (and, you suspect, Peck) have temporarily forgotten just where this metaphorical road trip is headed, and second, that what's really going on here isn't so much criticism as a kind of performance - it's as if Peck wants to show you not what's wrong with Barnes, but how good a writer he, Peck, is."

Not only is this right on the money, but did you notice how he assumes he knows what you are thinking? He does it often, and never was he wrong about what I was thinking. His observations are universal, and rooted in the text, rather than reflections of himself and his own biases.

I have been having many a conversation with friends and well-wishers lately about aesthetics - and specifically criticism. Mostly, I was really surprised to see that many people see criticism as mostly a negative thing - a way to say that your opinion is better than someone else's, which somehow makes you smarter or perceptive. This is not it at all. Daniel Mendelsohn is a perfect example of the idea that criticism is the ability to see clearly - maybe to be guided by instincts and opinions and feelings, but in the end to look at something in an uncompromising way. That is the value of criticism. The alternative situation can be described as one in which "everyone is entitled to their opinion" - which, I think, is an insult to just about everybody. It says that the works don't matter, because anyone could like them or not like them and they'd always be right, and it says that people can't be trusted to see beyond their own likes and dislikes. In the end, we want to be able to see others, and, finally, see ourselves - clearly. And this is what criticism teaches.

The Fall

I am losing my ability to spell.

It's always come naturally to me, and I have a couple of spelling bee wins under my belt from my ability to accurately spell words I've never heard before. I've known many people for whom spelling is not an innate ability, and have to think hard every time they come across something with ambiguous sounds, such as "separate." How do you know the second vowel is an "a," and not an "e"? A huge percentage of words in the English language feature such seemingly arbitrary choices. Do you memorize them all?

In a way you do, since the words themselves don't offer hints one way or the other. (Unless you are very very into etymology, and know that "separate" comes from the Latin "separare," to pull apart.) But most of us don't actually choose between "a" and "e" every time we spell "separate" - it's wired into our brains. Same goes for most words that we've learned. It becomes instict.

But instinct is by definition an insubstantive, ungraspable thing - there is never a guarantee that you will still have it tomorrow. And I've been losing it. For instance, the other day I wrote "irreverant" ... and only noticed a good few sentences later, when I glanced back at the page. Even with words that I spell correctly (hopefully, most of them), I find myself slowing down to ask myself questions I've never asked before: double r? double l? double the first s or the second? It's likely that lack of confidence is playing a part as well, as I doubt my spelling powers more and more with every mistake.

This all reminds me of The Golden Compass, where Lyra has an innate ability to read the alethiometer, but loses it at the end of Amber Spyglass and must learn to read the symbols from scratch - a process, she is told, that will be painstaking and lengthy, but at the end of it she will have the symbols for good. In the books, this change is a symbol for the loss of the innocence of childhood when we become adults. The curtain is pulled back, so to speak, and we see that nothing is magical, or easy, in life - all good things are contingent and fragile, and nothing that you value is safe or exempt.

I read somewhere that the progression of humankind has been marked by its gradual removal from the centre of things. We begin with the notion of ourselves as central in some way, and time after time we are shot down and revealed to be anything but. We first thought the sun and moon revolved around us, but Copernicus removed us from the centre of the solar system and placed us on an orbiting ring. Then, 20th century astronomers displaced us from the centre of the galaxy, and our galaxy from the centre of the universe. Ouch. Some have asserted that the discovery of altruism and selflessness in animal societies has constituted the next step in this abasement; we once thought of ourselves as superior to animals because of our ability to transcend animal insticts, but it looks like being a nice guy is really part of our genes and, moreover, nature!

I am slowly getting to my point. Let us combine the above with Ralph Waldo Emerson's assertion (and, since we're talking about RWE, replace 'assertion' with 'truth') that the entire history of civilization is encapsulated in every individual life. So every human life enacts the progression from blubbering cave-brute to sophisticated, articulate twentieth-centuryalite, and the simple reason for that is that history cannot be inherited. There is some reason for why the caveman ended up here, where we are, some six thousand years later, and each individual has to "catch up" with her time, to live through six thousand years of progress and arrive where everyone else has arrived.

Anyway, I wonder if the same applies for our constant shifting away from the centre of things? When you're born, you are at the centre of everything - not just because everyone fawns over you, but because you have no real sense of other, no inkling of the possibility of multiple perspectives. As you get older, this becomes more apparent (I just typed "apparent" and then "apparrent" and then "apparent," see what I mean?), but it is clear after talking to any teenager for five minutes that their bubble hasn't yet burst, so to speak - their problems are the worst, their their their. I find it compelling that in one interpretation of the ideological start of the universe - the story of Adam and Eve - we begin in a state of ignorant innocence that is complicated by a fall. The first significant event for humankind is a fall from the awesomeness of Eden, which really had nothing to do with Eve's disobedience of God and was in fact due to the acquisition of knowledge in itself. (I have no idea if this is true, by the way - it just makes sense in my mind.) So what, really, made Eden so great? Symbolically, it was this great garden filled with naked people (and pigs you could munch on) - but what is Eden a symbol for? Isn't it just ignorance? A simple life uncomplicated by what goes on behind the curtain?

I would argue, then, that each of our lives is marked by a series of falls, falls that are caused by knowledge and resultingly push us farther and farther from our centrality. What is our centrality? Maybe our belief that we have it all figured out, that we know how to deal with life, that we are somehow immune because we are smart or clever or lucky. That we have a hand in our fate and are not the victims of casual, devastating chance. This process of displacement, which is a result of our acquisition of knowledge, is the exact same thing as the progress of humanity over the entire span of its existence, as humanity acquires knowledge and is displaced again and again.