I have a numbers job, which is the epitome of irony.
I spend the better part of my days surrounded by people who don’t care a whit about literature. People who say things like, “Oh, I never read. It puts me to sleep.” People who if they can manage to read, they read self-help books.
I don’t mean to sound elitist. That’s just the way it is. I’m sure they wish I could do math.
But it still amazes me how the simple fact that English was always my best subject, instead of my worst, sets me apart as an “other.” A couple of years ago, when a co-worker found out that I “like to read”, she said, “Oh. You’re one of THOSE people.”
Those people?
I didn’t realize we had a club. Did I miss the day they gave out membership cards?
Maybe there is a support group.
This is why I love my fellow bloggers who are smart and literary and interesting. You know who you are. It makes me feel so much better to know you are out there sharing witty Jane Eyre references (Thanks E - that made my day!) and appreciating the beauty of a well-placed analogy.
What’s worse than this feeling of not fitting in, though, is the realization that I’m surrounded by . . . well . . . idiots. On several occasions recently, my co-workers have proven to me that they are, to use my friend JP’s phrase, “as dumb as a bag of hair.” For example, when an older gentleman was told to enter his user Id (seven characters consisting of letters and numerical digits) with all the letters uppercase, he asked, very seriously, “What about the numbers?” Ahem. Yes. Capitalize the numbers, too, why don’t you? Why not?
Things like this make me shake my head in awe - especially when I think of the children I know. I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with my little niece and nephew over the past weeks (an entire day with my nephew, in fact), and I got to see my buddies Michael and Nicholas several weeks ago. I was struck, once again, with how smart these children are. Their memories are sharp, they are clever and resourceful, and they have completely unrestrained imaginations. What struck me, too, was the fact that these four children are all smarter and more creative, and much more enjoyable to be around, than most of the adults I encounter from day to day. This makes me wonder, “What happens?” Is it just that I encounter adults that were never like these children at all? (It is hard to imagine that some of the adults around me were ever as smart as the kids I know.) Or do we all get dumber when we grow up? Children have their own understanding of the world, and it seems that we adults have lost that. Some more than others! Or is it that they have their own entire world, and once we leave, we can’t go back?
Something else that makes me feel better when burdened by others’ stupidity is daydreaming . . . hearkening back to my roots . . . those good old days of grad school when I was surrounded with people who don’t think I’m strange because I can actually put a sentence together. The days when homework was a thick novel, and conversations were lofty and intellectual. Wondering about the dichotomy I see between the world of children, filled with both logic and wonder, and the world of adults, where morons stumble around barely able to function, I remembered the essay I wrote about Shel Silverstein in an American Poetry class in grad school. We had studied Emerson’s essay The Poet, in which he describes his vision of the ideal poet, an interpreter of nature, beauty, and ideas for the rest of us:
I know not how it is that we need an interpreter: but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. . . . Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. . . . Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. . . . The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
Emerson says, however, that he looks “in vain” for the poet he describes.
I feel his pain.
My argument, however, was that Silverstein, born 48 years after Emerson’s essay was published, was Emerson’s Poet. He was a poet for the children, an interpreter of the world of children for the rest of us.
How many of us can remember memorizing Shel’s poems as children? I would sit for hours reading his poetry to myself and anyone who would listen. I could recite my favorites, and still haven’t forgotten some of them. Shel never candy-coated anything, and represented a child’s entire world, good and bad. (Remember the little engine who thought he could, thought he could, and thought he could - but then realized he couldn’t?) Shel, as Emerson wished, “traverse[d] the whole scale [our] experience” He was the translator for us, putting our world into words to make it clearer to us and to help the adults around us both remember and understand.
But then we left. We got drivers’ licenses and registered to vote and went to college. And we got jobs and had relationships and took on responsibilities. And somewhere along the line, we lost some of the magic. Now as an adult, I have to wonder how I can get back to that childhood world. Shel, who could hear and faithfully communicate the “primal warblings” of the child’s world, invites adults in - invites us to go to the place where the sidewalk ends . . .
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
Here, most certainly, “the air is music.” With Shel’s measured and slow verse, we are invited to leave our adult world and enter, or perhaps return to, a child’s wondrous world. Sounds like a wonderful place, doesn’t it?
I want back in.
