Story: Salutations!

“Salutations are greetings. When I say salutations, it's just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning. Actually, it's a silly expression, and I am surprised that I used it at all.”

– Charlotte, Charlotte’s Web.

A friendly and aristocratic spider, a shy and grateful pig, and their strange, tender attempt to understand each other – this was how, as a nine-year old, and for the very first time, a book got me within its pages and refused to let go.

In the thirteen years since then, there have been many other moments: The bowing of the Aes Sedai to Rand al’Thor in Lord Of Chaos, Lucy’s forgiving caress of Maggie in The Mill On The Floss, Dumbledore’s speech to the Hogwarts students at the end of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, Jane’s frantic fleeing from Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, and the long instant during which Jonathan and Bobby realize that they are in love in A Home At The End Of The World, among others. What is striking about these moments is not only that they are entire worlds within a few lines, but also that they try to capture somethings that cannot ever be caught, feelings so pure and complicated, so personal and universal, all at the same time, that they defy names, and can only be hinted at obliquely. It is not only about power, forgiveness, a world endangered, betrayal, and love. All of these moments contain all of these things, and many others also: loss, nobility, loyalty, and more. But all of these moments share in addition one of the most essential and painful truths about living: the terrifying and poignant realization that things are not what they were, and can never be again. All of these moments are about the same thing: A spider saying “Salutations!”, and then, a few seconds later, after a tiny and yet momentous shift, “Actually, it’s a silly expression, and I am surprised that I used it at all.”

I would like to say that in the course of this semester I have experienced such a moment again, but I have not. This is probably because I have read the books only as assigned, and not on my own terms yet. It is also possibly because, to paraphrase Thomas Hardy, the book to love has not yet coincided with the hour of loving; it was not until two years after being taught The Mill On The Floss that I felt, and not just appreciated, what it meant. But in the process of re-examining which of this semester’s texts have left the deepest impression on me, and which the shallowest, I was surprised at the conclusions that I came to.

I expected Hamlet, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, any of the Sophocles or Euripides tragedies, or Prometheus Bound to move me the most upon rereading. It is not only that there is a lost lyrical poetry in the language of the past, an inherent richness, texture, structure, and rigor that I’ve always liked ever since my high school teacher prefaced his introduction of Shakespeare with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”. It is also that the capricious and intractable nature of love, the delirium inextricable from passion, the unshakeable bonds of independence, and the simple feeling, as Fyodor Dostoevsky said, that “it’s sometimes… very pleasant to break something”, are things that I struggle with.

But it was not these texts that touched a sensitive nerve. It was Endgame, a play that I initially abhorred for its obtuseness. The feminist theme of Fefu And Her Friends I did not care for, and the artificiality and relative ‘insanity’ of life espoused by both Fefu and The Day Room I had already made some measure of peace with. But after rereading Endgame as mankind’s losing battle with loss, I feel that it encompasses all the other troubles within its portrayal of the impossibility in trying to escape not only death, but also life itself.

What can you do? Things change. Everyone has to pass through the golden gates of childhood, and see them close forever. It isn’t just the final death that scares me; all the small deaths along the way frighten me too. When I reread all the essays that I have written, save Rosmersholm, they read like a litany of eulogies, one for innocence lost, another for possibilities of potential destroyed, another for the submission to the tyranny of insufficient words, and another for the innermost fear, the most unbearable and therefore comical, that some crucial part of me may already be dead. The ability to find pleasure in the buying of a ten-cent sweet, for example.

I don’t think all change is bad, although that is possibly because I cannot afford to. But I do wonder whether change is at its core an effort to return to a state of wonder, where everything is what it is for the first time. I appreciate Endgame not only because it addresses the inevitability of all these deaths leading up to the big final one, but also because it emphasizes the possibility of triumphing over those deaths through storytelling. I don’t think storytelling is only a means of distraction. I think its most essential purpose is to bring what might be dead or deadened back to fullest life again. A story is to life what “salutations!” is to “hello” – a fancy roundabout way to strike at a truth that cannot be struck at any other way, and needs to be struck at, in order to remind us and make us feel that it exists in its purest form., even if we can’t quite name it. Even though Endgame did not contain a moment of wonder for me, it reminded me that all those previous moments wrenched something within me not only because they showed things as they were and could never be again, but also because I got to re-experience things exactly as they were, even if only for a few seconds, before the feeling of loss encroached. I may not be able to feel those moments in the exact same way again, but each of them brought me back to when I was nine, blissfully wondrous, attuned to the complicated sharpness of every feeling, and fully alive. I can only think that the immortality of storytelling must in part be this, which is why we continue to tell them, silly expressions though they might be sometimes, and surprised though we might be at our telling them.