Never Trust an Absolute
I don’t think anyone ever forgets the first time they read “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson. For me, it was in the fifth grade, when I took out a collection of her short stories from the school library. At that age, I had already decimated entire series of novels for kids and was just beginning to venture out into more grown-up literary territory, which was exciting because, not only was my under-the-blanket reading past bedtime “forbidden” by my parents (who, I realize now, may have just been very clever), but it was also the one area of outside influence that my parents, being Southern Baptist, didn’t strictly monitor. I guess they figured books were books, and books were good. That was not the case with TV shows or movies or music or a whole list of words.
The library, on the other hand, was my turf. I often read things I knew my parents would probably not be cool with. It was my first little taste of rebellion and, in a way, it set the tone for all of the rebellion that was to come — never rebellion for its own sake, to make my parents miserable, but because there was something I wanted to experience and I knew somehow that I was right in thinking whatever it was wouldn’t hurt me, or ruin my future or my virtue or my reputation with anyone who really mattered.
It was important, I think, because it filled in a gap. I started to understand darker sides of life and even the darker sides of my own life through the sometimes dark realities presented in stories and novels. It prepared me, in a lot of ways, for what was just up the road for me. Most churches have good intentions, but there is a reason people leave churches in times of personal crisis. Your average Christian congregation and their white-bread, sunny views on God and the universe are not designed to hold up under the weight of individual tragedy. I was hungry for depictions of the world that more closely matched my increasingly complicated views, rather than the stripped-down, Bobby McFerrin version the church community, which could answer none of my sincere questions, depicted.
A professor of mine, in a meeting reviewing the introduction to my thesis (a collection of poetry), said that he could see plainly that I had a severe distrust of absolutes. It was uncanny, because up until those words came out of his mouth, that thought had never occurred to me, but he couldn’t have been more right. What was more strange was that somehow he had gleaned this from my writing. Granted, he’d been my professor since freshman year, but it was a statement that cut so deeply to the heart of so much of who I was that I was taken aback by it.
Literature — especially poetry — has been my retreat from a world that seems to otherwise thrive on absolutes. I don’t want a clear answer to anything, because I feel like a clear answer is often a lie.
“The Lottery” is my first memory of getting that little thrill in my chest that told me that, somehow, by moving away from the extreme of the light and a little closer to the darkness, I could also come closer to the truth. It’s also a nice analogy for what happens when individual tragedy comes into conflict with the desperate fear of the small, closed community, and a perfect example of why absolutes should never be trusted.
The New Yorker is doing a series on Shirley Jackson, and it’s quite excellent. You should check it out. Here’s a bit about how her story was received when it was first published, also worth a read.
On a similar note, here’s Joshua Beckman, one of my favorite poets, who I had the honor of working for back in New York, on the unknowable.
