Two Deliverances
On some personal anniversaries
There are some pieces of art that you just can’t be normal about.1 Certain things come into your life at such personally perfect times that your love for them is totally immeasurate to any person who took it in anywhere close to neutrally, or it’s something you shared with a particular person that made it that much better, or it’s something that mirrors your own life in such a specific way that you think almost no one could relate in the same way. Sometimes you cling onto a book or album or painting like a life preserver, and it bears you through a time of crisis; these are perhaps the most dangerous. In polite company, it is best to avoid talking about these life preservers, because you will almost surely go too far, your fervor unnerving whatever person innocently brought it up. I can say this because I’ve learned it the hard way, and haven’t even learned it all that well; I was at a wedding a couple weeks ago, talking to my friend’s brother about books, and, well, he somehow hadn’t read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov yet, and suddenly I’m raving about how that book saved my life, a ridiculous thing to say, but also the handiest shorthand to relate how much something means to you. (Sorry, Kris; I think I managed to get back to regular dinner table conversation after that.) It’s been ten years since I read it for the first time, and somehow the light hasn’t gone out, and that feels like reason enough to celebrate. The other life preservers I clung to at that time were applying to grad school (that’s everyone’s last resort, though) and an album by the Hotelier, Goodness, that turned ten this year, another piece of art I just can’t be normal about, another work that hasn’t lost its power over me over time. Some things fade away, some things stick with you far longer than you’d think, and it’s clarifying to look back and see exactly how you got from there to here toting that along all the while. Though Karamazov and Goodness really have nothing to do with each other, they’re twinned works for me, any port in a storm, I suppose. In both of them there is a kind of mysterious, gnostic spiritual underpinning that promised me some way out of trouble.
