“I kept quiet,
but the knowledge gathered like a storm.
I could see the future…love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras
end.”
~The
Age of Miracles: A Novel, by Karen Thompson Walker
Very recently, I was teaching 10th grade reading
students at a suburban high school. They
were reading “The Secret Life of Bees” and struggling to find connections to
the experiences of an adolescent girl coming of age in the 1960’s. As we read aloud, many students began to
stumble or shake their heads at the main character, Lily, and her startled awareness of the unexpected happiness she discovers
in the middle of so much grief. I recall seeing the disconnection in the students' eyes,
the wandering impatience of their age tugging at their attention. Better judgment abandoned me for a moment and
basic human instinct took over. I put my
book down, sighed quietly, and rubbed at my head. I released the curriculum for a moment and
let the life lesson soak in.
“Guys, close your
books,” I finally said, sitting carefully atop a spare desk. “Listen—let’s
be real for a minute.” It has been
my experience that young people are not often afforded the opportunity of
adults being utterly guileless with them; we so rarely allow our
vulnerabilities to become completely apparent that my change in stature quickly brought
their focus to me, somber and expectant.
“No one ever tells you this—people
hoard this truth for reasons I can’t explain.
Maybe they feel that it wouldn’t have any effect on you unless you
experience this revelation for yourselves.
I don’t really know.”
I paused, my mind and stomach churning. My better judgment returned, furious, hammering
at my brain: Where are you going with
this? This isn’t a part of the plan! I had no idea. But I continued.
“90% of your life will
be spent chasing an experience— pursuing a moment, a dream, an encounter. The mind-blowing kiss with a person you’ve
hungered for. The exultant victory in a
sport you’ve practiced endlessly for.
The dream job you’ve trained and educated yourself for. Only about 10% of your life will be spent
actually enjoying these fruits, these rewards for your chase—and that’s if
you’re lucky.”
The students blinked at me, awaiting the point. My judgment berated me again. Move on, already. They don’t get it.
“The secret to
life—the key to real happiness…” I dropped my volume, plucking my words
carefully, “…is learning to stop, to sit
back on your heels, to look up and around and appreciate the little moments
within that pursuit.”
The floodgates were open.
“Sure, we’ve all
pilfered pithy wisdoms like ‘Life isn’t about the number of breaths you
take but the moments that take your breath away’ and pasted them on our facebook and twitter pages—but when was the last
time you paid attention to those moments? When was the last time anyone appreciated the
twist in their gut, their cheeks aflame, when the person they’ve longed for, dreamed
of, and loved breathlessly in the silence of their dreams actually smiles at
them in passing? When was the last time
you hit your knees, grateful for the ache in your arms or the sweat upon your
brows after a devastating round of physical exertion?”
I caught my breath and the students' brows knitted as they reflected. My better judgment was silent.
“The truly blessed are
those who develop the ability to stop—right here, right now—in the very moment
they live, and give thanks for the little moments that lead to those dream
experiences. Because when you’re my age,
it’s never about ending up with Prince Charming, doing his laundry, shuttling
your kids to school, or paying your taxes—it’s about that one, single,
suspended second in time when your hands first brushed against one another and
you held your breath, your mind racing and your heart quickening, nearly dying
for nothing more than their fingers to weave their way into yours.”
I paused. Some
moments in life have an electricity to them, a static charge that signals that
something is somehow…different. I think
that, as a defense mechanism for our overstimulated existences, we’ve attuned
ourselves to overlook the clues which would signify that a moment of greater
magnitude is before us—occasionally, however, if we shrug off our acquired indifference
and truly focus on the moment before us, it will announce itself with an
invisible thunderbolt. In this room, in
this moment, I swear I could have lit the city’s power grid for a week with
what I was feeling.
I looked into their beautiful, earnest faces and I was absolutely
electrified by the potential their lives held, if only they could be persuaded
to value their moments and to make them count.
I bowed my head for a moment, unsure of how to bring the closure that
this moment needed, but trusting that I’d made it this far, I steadied myself
to move forward. I looked around the
windowless room, at the encouraging posters on the faded yellow walls that
shouted ‘Stand Up for Something or You’ll
Fall for Anything!’ and ‘Read! It’s
what SMART people do!’ I didn’t want
to preach to these kids or lecture them with my counterfeit adult maturity—they
get enough of that every day of their lives.
I just wanted to speak honestly to what mattered most to them, without
condescension or hypocrisy.
“Don’t spend your
lives waiting for the enchantment of those culminating moments in the 10%. Learn to look at the journey toward them—you
know, the other 90% of your days on this earth—as the true magic of your
lives. Learn to pause—whenever, wherever
you can—to find the spectacular in the ordinary, the painful, the debilitating,
the humanizing. Be kind whenever you
can—give of yourselves and watch how it will come back to you in ways you never
expected. How I wish someone had told me
this at some point in my life—or if they did, I wish I had listened.”
My cinematic mentor, Mr. Keating, was chanting softly in the
back of my mind— “Carpe diem. Seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary…” My better judgment was clucking its tongue at
my pseudo-plagiarism, so I quickly brought the text back to the discussion,
chastened by my own boldness. “So I think this is what Lily is experiencing
in this moment with Zach and his family—the exquisite pain of longing has kept
her from seeing the happiness that was always within her reach…”
While I will likely never know the impact this little detour
had on those students, if it had any at all—the short-term effects were
positive. In our remaining weeks
together, the students focused, they contemplated, they produced. I swear they were more considerate. Their friends still came and went, their
parents still coddled and nagged. Their
interests still waxed and waned. Such is
life; such is the imperious nature of youth.
It knows everything and abides nothing.
With tiny, delicate strokes, author Karen Thompson Walker
paints a near-perfect portrait of the complexities of being young, confused,
and hungry for experience and understanding—detailing the cruel ironies of
being filled with unidentifiable passions and unanswerable questions and of
being immobilized by the inability to articulate these feelings—in her debut
novel, “The Age of Miracles”. In fact, her story is so thoughtfully crafted
that, after a time, the illusion that these are your memories, that these are your
experiences, become almost as palpable and pervasive as the looming fate of her
characters themselves.
Because I always want people to experience things for
themselves, I will limit my details of the novel to a three sentence
synopsis:
1) In an era not unlike the one in which we
currently inhabit, the earth is broken; it is inexplicably slowing its
rotations around the sun, stretching days and nights like taffy.
2) The very unit of measurement that we use to
define our history—time—is now
unstable, arguable, irrelevant, and polarizing; it’s wrecking societies,
communities, and relationships.
3) Life (whether it is evolving or devolving
depends upon who you ask) is still carrying on—and through the eyes of the
young narrator, a pensive 6th grade girl named Julia, we learn that
even without the assurance of “life-as-we-knew-it”,
we still hunger and we still thirst—and not just for the endangered
resources of our dying planet; things always fall apart, but to survive, people
crave to be known.
The story is unsettling, troubling, and often intensely beautiful. Much like an independent film, it is unfettered
by the restraints of a ‘happily-ever-after’ narrative, choosing instead to
focus its energy on the precious moments
in between the ever-expanding minutes. Be
warned: just like in real life, if you wait around simply seeking the
answer, tapping your foot impatiently for your Hollywood ending, the pages will
pass like your days—unanswered, unfulfilled.
Instead, the reader would be rewarded if he or she would release his or
her expectations and allow themselves to be led by the author’s voice, which is
as gentle and probing as that of her heroine.
Together, author and narrator, pour careful servings of the horrors of
the inevitable apocalypse, one chapter at a time, allowing the true sorrow of
the situation to settle around the reader in time with Julia’s accelerating
maturity.
Society has always bemoaned the foreseeable fate of its
children and the subtle tragedies of watching them grow up too fast—imagine the
conundrum of having to fit a lifetime of living into whatever minutes you have
left…and the irony of the fact that, in this new world, minutes mean nothing at
all. Every pain or loss in our lives
feels like a signal that the end must be near; every dark despair feels like a
night whose dawn we may never see. Paradoxically,
this quiet little book, “The Age of Miracles”, lays out a story of global
resonance—a tiny snapshot in a time capsule trying to explain the meaning of the human experience as it
wrestles with its own possible extinction.
This novel is so very, very sad—but so very, very sad in all
of the right ways. I’ve postulated
before (usually in defense of my maudlin,
often melancholy, predispositions for picking at old wounds, listening to old
music, and overly romanticizing every single moment of my life prior to the
very one in which I am living) that hurting ourselves [emotionally] a
little bit every now and then is a good thing. I operate best under the theory that a little personal
suffering somehow keeps us connected to the very elements that define us as
human—qualities like pity, compassion, and empathy. Even if we sometimes have to direct them at
ourselves.
As I said before, the Earth in “The Age of Miracles” is a mad, mad world—and
not wholly different from the very one we populate today. Within the pages of this deceptively simple story,
kids still practice incomprehensible cruelty and kindness toward one another, parents still walk a razor-thin
line between their marital responsibilities and their personal desires—chipping
away the illusory bedrock of a stable home, the economy is unclear, the future
is unknown. Orson Welles famously said
that we are all born alone, we live alone, and we die alone—and that it is only through our love and friendship that
we can create the illusion—for a moment—that
we are not alone. I believe he would have been very impressed
by Ms. Walker’s quietly profound elegy to the solitary human being and her single
mother planet.
A bitter soul might simply shrug and spew that we never know
what we have until it’s gone. While the
author’s cautionary jabs are deliberate—she pokes at our rampant consumerism,
our rape of the resources that might have remained abundant had we practiced
more care, our [apparently] innate compulsion to label, categorize, and
subjugate our fellow man—her blows are subtle and measured. Her restraint is a gift, allowing her readers
to swallow each bitter pill that she serves—one by one—without choking on the
revelation of the fate our actions have more than merited. Perhaps what is most spectacular about “The
Age of Miracles” is that, even in the face of the looming and deserved doom
that threatens to blight the extraordinary lives that we have so clearly taken
for granted, eradicating all memories and meaning in our existence, the author’s
magnificent love for her world and
for her fellow man is never lost upon her reader. Despite the devastating losses and the bleakest
realities that precocious Julia must endure, threads of the rarest commodity
left upon Earth—hope—tether her to this new world she occupies.
I have only wept reading three books in my lifetime, and
while this was not one of them, make no mistake that my eyes and heart were hot
and heavy and dark as I read, the penetrating self-awareness burning me from
the inside out. Though never overt, the recognition
of the murkiest elements of our human nature is unavoidably mirrored in this
small, masterful tale—but the deeply redemptive reminder that every
single moment matters is as invisibly pervasive as the pure, white gesso
atop the artist’s canvas. Every breath we have left is a foundation for hope, a
place for a new beginning.
*NOTE* Because when I first began reading, I couldn’t stop humming R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”, (which, after a time, felt far too glib) I made a short playlist of a few songs that more accurately encapsulated the experience of this story. Feel free to steal them, should you ever need a soundtrack for an end of the world as you know it:
Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust”, David Gray’s “The Other Side”, Gary Jules’ “Mad World”, Smashing Pumpkins’ “Blank Page”, Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”, Cinderella's “Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Til It’s Gone)”, Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic"
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