Unwrap and Let Loose


Dear Eugene,

A friend said he has no heart for literature, seeing an old book of novel in my hand, that he doesn't care for stories.

I said, "But you do watch, what, Korean soap opera, right?"

"Yeah," he replied, "but that's different."

"I've tried literature before, and everything is so sad.  I would rather look at porn," and there he walked away from our short conversation.

That final line has the clarity of fine poetry.

What he meant was he wants a story to work for him, to be useful to him, with a narratival trajectory that lands not too far from where he's standing/sitting/lying, an outburst of happy ending guaranteed with no heavy lifting on his part, an easy and gratifying giving of oneself that is just as easy and inconsequential to throw away.

"Literature, good literature, speaks for us, when we find no word to speak for ourselves," a few minutes later I continued, seeing how my friend exposed his eyes to mine again, with a suggestion of mild eagerness to go further.  "Literature is usually about sad people in sad situations, yes, because 'happy' people do not need to be spoken for."

"Happy" people speak for themselves.  They think they have their money, their lifestyle, their moral, their religion and politic and family all figured out, and all these work for their purpose and pleasure.  They don't pray.  And if they do, they would post their prayers on Facebook to make sure the world knows their prayers are making a winner out of their circumstances, that God is on their side, speaking on their sole behalf to set the rest of the world right according to the "happy" person's strategy for a "happy" life.  "Happy" people crave for "Likes."

"So to read good literature is to listen to the voices of the deaf-mute, the speechless, the powerless, the dispossessed and disenfranchised.  And who knows, if we are honest and broken enough, one day we might find ourselves being spoken for between the lines?"  My friend nodded, first reluctantly then slowly.

As to "happy" people...I don't know.  If one day we feel our own happy ways not too happy at all, we will need to jazz up our triumphalist rhetoric and further hijack any good news to the narrower space we now find ourselves.  Scriptures once used out of context are now going for space-traveling, to the outer-limits of our pride and sanity.

How do we see ourselves as Lazarus when we would rather jerk off to our many screens and store shelves than to spare a sentence of attention to the little "cadaver" that is Lazarus?  Jesus recognizes the wrapped face of Lazarus, but we've made our own a stranger to his longing.

Yours, Alex

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