the mirror of the spectator

I have only just picked up a copy of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray". I read the preface twice, closed the book, and will likely carry it around everywhere I go in the next few days before I start to read it again. I do this with books from time to time, but it is a habit that marks my contempt at adulthood more than anything else. I'll explain.

When I was in high school we read "Cry, the Beloved Country" one year. I remember loving it. It was honestly ten years before I picked it up again, but I was reading it on a flight from Seattle to London when I realized everything about it for me was suddenly different. The book itself has this pulse of its own, and it beats out in repetitive language as it slowly pulls you apart. I sat there in my tiny little seat, elbows prodding me from either side, reading about despair and fear. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child, who is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply..." "Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end." And the engines came to life on the plane, and I felt stretched thin between the idea of pushing up through the air at however many hundred miles an hour and the pulse of the despair on the pages in front of me. I had never been an anxious person before, and I realized at that point what it must actually mean to be an adult in this world. I felt my own mortality ringing in my ears. I took the idea that we could plunge back to earth and set it lose in my mind, let it mingle with the language still bouncing around in there. "Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley."

I had to close the book, close my eyes, quickly down two glasses of crappy airline red wine, and try my best to figure out what the hell had come over me. I was feeling the loss of things that weren't lost. A part of me was mourning children I didn't have, wishing for places I'd never seen, and clinging to some sort of connection to everything around me that I didn't know was there. And I suppose that's when it started. My humanity became full and unforgiving, and from now on I'll have to fight not to cling to it, even when it isn't threatened.

So I still pick up books with reckless abandon, but I no longer read with it. Literature is sticky now, like walking through cobwebs and compulsively brushing them off for ages afterward, even when you know they've gone. "The Picture of Dorian Grey" threatened to stick to me with its heavy implications, and I sat with it tonight, reading the preface over and over and thinking about art and spectators. I ran my mind through all the things the preface was suppose to draw up in me, possibly missing some of the more important ideas but adding unimportant ones of my own, and soon I felt the sentences become leaden and once again felt that fear of loss that I've only felt in adulthood.

Wilde writes:

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

I plugged my brain back into the circle of all this. While on that flight from Seattle to London I went beneath the surface, let the language of the book prod at my senses, and was left in peril. I couldn’t do that at sixteen, and I haven’t decided yet if this new talent means that I love my life too much, or not enough.