Small World

I discovered earlier this week that a woman I knew twenty years ago, a graduate of my M.A. program, is now a colleague of a woman I knew from my Ph.D. program. This knowledge arrives after learning that a friend from that same M.A. program is now a department chair at a university where a friend from my Ph.D. program is now a dean--and where yet another friend from that Ph.D. program is a brand new faculty member.

Whew! Don't worry if you can't follow the logistics--I still get confused about who's working where and doing what, exactly.

Ages ago, someone gave me this very good piece of advice: always remember that academia is a very small world, and that burning bridges is therefore a very bad idea, because it might limit options you can't imagine will matter to you at some point. None of us can envision how the various paths we've taken through our lives will cross in some far distant future, so our best bet is to maintain the integrity of each of those paths in case we need to traverse it again. When I was at Ragdale, for instance, I met a writer who'd had a bad experience with an editor I know well and for whom I have enormous respect; nothing I said was going to convince him that perhaps his experience had been an isolated incident. One experience with one person carries forward in ways we may never be aware of.

I've been thinking about this recently as I contemplate a story I just re-read last week, "The Sojourner," by Carson McCullers. I first read that story when I was a sophomore in college, taking my first required class for English majors, but I really couldn't remember much about it, other than the ending. I did remember it as a story that touched me deeply, though. It was one of those stories that made me think "If I can write something like this in my lifetime, I'll be happy." So I went back to read it again, to try to figure out why I still remember this story when, truth be told, I've forgotten so much of what I've read over the years.

It surprised me to discover that this is a very grown-up piece of fiction. The central character, John, lives abroad and has returned to the United States to attend his father's funeral. While he's in New York, the night before he's to return to Europe, he sees his ex-wife and feels compelled to get in touch with her again. She invites him to dinner that night. John knows his wife has remarried, but he's still rather stunned by the physical reality of her new husband and their two children. Coming face to face with them makes him realize that he really hasn't moved forward in his own life at all: he's still pretty much where he was right after their divorce, still single and self-absorbed and travelling through his life without caring too much about anything or anyone in particular.

Initially, I couldn't figure out what would have appealed to me about this story as a nineteen year old; as a middle aged woman, I identify with John's sense that time passes more quickly than we realize--that years fly past us and accumulate and suddenly we're the adults in the room, not the kids. But then I came across this line: "His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room." And suddenly, I remembered what it felt like to be young and single and to not know whether you'd ever be part of a family of your own, to feel like your life as a single person is somehow less meaningful than it will be when you're part of something larger than yourself.

I think that's why I identified with John as a college student, and felt such compassion for him at the end of the story, when he makes a desperate, futile attempt to connect with his girlfriend's son--a child he's had no time for previously, a child who knows John doesn't really care for him at all. At nineteen, I read this as a story about the difficulty of making connections with other people, no matter how badly we want to do that; now, I read this as a story about the profound implications of all the connections we make, given the small amount of time we have to make them.

I thought about this at Ragdale, too. As I read through the journal entries left behind by writers who'd stayed in the Blue Room, some of whom I know, I realized that our lives had intersected in a way I might never have known about. Knowing they'd been in that same room, sleeping in the same bed, provided me with a sense of community that made me feel right at home. Most of our connections are like that, I think: invisible, but no less important in the small world we share.