Perspective. Probably one of the most important words in the English vocabulary. Right up there with love, compassion, understanding, kindness, and baseball.
Without perspective, we’d be a society of robots, all clinging to the same ideas and notions. We’d probably all wear the same, drab clothing. Eat the same, unimaginative foods. Watch the same, uninteresting television shows. Read the same books written in the same style and voice they’ve always been written in. But perspective brings with it a different outlook, a chance to see life through a pair of eyes much different from our own.
In my infinite fatherhood wisdom, I try challenging the kids to see life differently, to dream impossible. But I also hope to impress upon them the notion that sometimes things are just as they seem, that there is no hidden meaning or grand revelation hidden throughout the pages of a book or within the scenes of a movie. Maybe that’s because as an English major, I’m tired of having to explore what it is we’re supposed to think the writer was trying to say, what he wanted us to take away from his piece, what she wanted to tell us but for whatever reason couldn’t just come right out and say. Or as one graduate from the Pac-12 football champion University of Oregon’s English program told me earlier this week: “…but without lit majors, who would dissect the meaning of fog in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Priorities, Brad.”
A non-fiction essay of mine was critiqued in class last night. I’d written a narrative about the nine months leading up to Kacie’s birth, surrounded by scenes in the delivery room telling of moments from our arrival to hers. The critiques noted the piece to be funny. Endearing. A nice array of emotions from the eyes of a father-to-be. A couple of people couldn’t grasp my non-linear approach to storytelling, how I could shift in an out of time, between being in the delivery room at one moment to remembering key moments from the previous nine months the next, or going from pre-conception to morning sickness to the realization and fear that I was not only going to have a daughter but be in charge of protecting her from every penis in the world. Some felt the funniness of that last part took away from the tenderness of the scene’s self-realization. But I hadn’t written it to be funny. I was serious, and unsure of my abilities as her protector. I mean, name one dad in the history of fatherdom that hasn’t worried about his daughter’s virtue at one point in time. Deadbeat dads don’t count.
Most of the critiques were encouraging. Insightful. As a writer I definitely want to know what works for my audience and what doesn’t. But I also get that not everyone is my intended audience.
Then the critiques got interesting.
One person challenged how I’d crafted my dialogue, saying that she felt it was unrealistic, that she doubts I really speak to my wife in a jocular, slang tone. I knew immediately that she’s not a reader of Her Living Room Hero or else she’d have noticed a common theme, that I’m willing to put all of myself out there to be judged harshly by a world I’ll never meet while simultaneously allowing myself to live up to the cliché of what you see is what you get. In so many words, her critique noted that because of my writing style, my voice (which has always been received well), I’d never be one of the greats because I “don’t use language that is timeless” in my work. I guess that depends on what one’s idea of greatness is. If you ask me, the world can keep Ernest Hemmingway and Joan Didion. I’ll stick with Bill Cosby and Paul Reiser. While we’re at it, give me John Hughes as well. I aspire to suck as badly as these three did as writers.
All of this takes me back to perspective. Can’t something just be what it is because that’s what it is? The obsessive need to pick something apart promotes the notion that without a deeper or hidden meaning to something it holds no value. It’s like having a roundtable to discuss why a green apple is green and concluding after three hours of debate that it’s green, well… because it’s jealous of the red ones. Wasn’t it created to be green? Weren’t we too created to be different? To be unique? To be who we are? That’s my idea of timeless. Of greatness.
Doesn’t obsessing over what we feel someone is trying to say versus what they’ve actually said remove us from their perspective, thus making it our own? Doesn’t seeing something from someone else’s perspective afford us the ability to experience life the way it was meant to be experienced?
I don’t want my kids seeing the world through such a narrow-minded scope, because if they do, they’re going to miss out on so much of it. And life, well…life already goes by too fast. Nine months. Thirteen years. I can’t attest to where the time’s gone, but at least I have my memories, my perspective.
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