Introducing Readers to Life Itself

Essay Recommendation: “My Stint as the Adulterous Flavor-of-the-Month”

Read it here, from the New York Times.

I don’t think of myself as prone to righteous indignation, but this essay by Paz Pardo made me feel enough of it that I almost stopped reading a few paragraphs in. I’m glad I didn’t, because it shifted my perspective more than any other short piece I’ve read recently.

Pardo wastes no time making herself unsympathetic: she admits, forthrightly, to being a bored American tourist who wants to contribute to the end of an Argentinian couple’s marriage because it will make a spicy story for her friends back home. (“It would end when I boarded the plane home, just one more story. My friends would giggle, scandalized. It would be like one of those French novels, or like Eat Pray Love.”)

From here, the story develops into something far more vibrant and human than it starts out. Pardo’s telling leans into this contrast, laying a kind of ambush with the structure of the story (including, in retrospect, the tawdry title). By emphasizing her vapid attitude at the beginning of the relationship, Pardo heightens the contrast as guilty-pleasure-romance-plot metamorphoses into real life: tender, ambiguous, and oddly full of grace.

For Pardo to shape her story this way involves a type of courage that leaves me, above all, puzzled. I cannot imagine heightening, in a nonfiction piece, a depiction of my own banality and even immorality―whatever literary effect I thought I might achieve―but for me the result here is undeniably effective.

My larger takeaway is to remember one possible benefit of a well-told story: to remind us that, no, we haven’t seen it all before. This essay hasn’t changed my views on infidelity (still bad on average!); that’s not the point. The point is that it successfully ambushed me with life itself, with the awkward beauty of sentient beings doing whatever they feel is best at that exact moment—which is really there in all situations, bad-on-average or not, and which an impulsive eye roll will miss.

Negative Capability

I had always thought that Keats’s “negative capability” means The ability to work on a piece while knowing it’s bad without getting discouraged. I distinctly remember being told that this is what it means. I don’t remember by whom, though, so I don’t know where to direct my righteous indignation, a theme for this newsletter.

Recently, I Googled “negative capability,” wanting to cite my sources for “It’s okay that your writing is presently bad.” It turns out that this isn’t what negative capability means―not even close.

Here’s Keats’s first use of the term, in a letter from 1817 (with updated gender pronouns):

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Person of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

So, as Wikipedia beautifully summarizes: “Negative capability” is the capacity of artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty.

I appreciate the resonance between this prose passage from Keats, which basically says, “Accomplished literarians don’t let grasping for logical truth impede their relationship with beauty,” and perhaps Keats’s most famous lines of poetry, from Ode on a Grecian Urn:

I also think Keats’s description of Shakespeare is very perceptive. For me, that’s exactly what Shakespeare is like: not a dutiful inspector of or advocate for one slant on life, but an enormous and brilliant kaleidoscopic display of life itself. In Shakespeare, I find no particular meaning that endures across texts and characters; there are too many meanings, too many worldviews. I don’t even get much of a sense of Shakespeare himself, other than, again, the sense of a joyful and ever-shifting kaleidoscope of life who spoke Early Modern English. Whitman claimed to “contain multitudes”—to be a large mind with lots inside it—but for me Shakespeare barely feels like a mind: he feels like a portal, wide open, somehow endlessly channeling multitudes not from inside but from everywhere, and much too large to fathom, let alone to contain.

And that’s the feeling I get from Pardo’s essay: Life is bigger than our take on it. Shakespeare may overwhelm with the sheer bigness and color of it all, whereas Pardo’s tightly crafted (and, by Shakespearean standards, tame!) infidelity-romp-turned-life-story works more by a sort of structural whiplash, but the effect on me as a reader is similar. Opening ourselves and our readers to the vast unknowable shifting face of life itself—beyond sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice—sounds like a tall order, but it happened in Shakespeare’s time, and it’s happening today. We can do it, too. We have the capability.