academics runs through it

I read A River Runs Through It, watched the movie twice, and read the book again. I may still have missed it. Why? If Maclean is haunted by water, I am haunted by academics. The task of reading this text reminded me of walking to Kerry park with my friend Chris. “Where are you going?” he confoundedly asked. “K e r r y park?” I spoke the word so slowly it became at least four words. Why was Chris asking me where I was going when we just decided to walk to Kerry park. “Umm,” he still seemed confused, “is Kerry park going somewhere anytime soon? You’re walking like your chasing someone or something. What are you looking for.” Feeling chastised for my gate, I slowed, stood silent, and tapped my finger to my nose, as I always do when I am in deep thought. “Nothing I guess. Nothing. Maybe that’s the problem. What do I do when I’m looking for nothing? Am I present when I’m looking for something? Is it possible to be present here when I’m looking for something that must be ‘there’ because it isn’t ‘here.’ Or maybe it’s between us and I’m looking for encounter – but my rushing is a hinderance……….[on and on into nauseating infinity]” I’m sure Chris wondered if my existential response, floating once again to a cerebral place of philosophical inquiry, was a passive aggressive way to punish him for questioning me. At any rate, I’m sure he wished he had not interrupted my rush.

We walked in silence for a while as I thought. I am so used of rushing through academics and the many tasks academics push into a two-hour corner, that when I am not looking for the answer to a question, I don’t know how to be. “You’re doing it again. Dude, for a short chic, you walk really fast. Can you walk slowly and just take things in?” I stopped, breathed, and tried. Each step, I tried to match Chris’ gate. When I managed to match his gate, I began to multi-task by looking at the moonlit sky, the ivy growing on old brick walls, children and parents walking, elderly couples huddling for warmth, dogs dodging in and out of the brush, curious about every element and smell of their trek. All these things had been there always, but until I stopped and forced myself to look, I knew them not and robbed my journey of their beauty.

I am haunted by academics, and those few moments I allow a ghost to be nothing more and the haunting not to imprison me, I am raptured in a beauty that utterly destroys and reconstructs me. Nowhere is the difficulty of meeting such moments, nor the transformative beauty of these moments so stark as in reading.

Josipovici closes his chapter “reading” with a reading benediction:
Our task is to wrestle with this book as Jacob wrestled with the ‘man’ in pitch blackness, and not for the mere sake of the contest in order to wrest the book’s secret from it, but in order that we may hear it utter its blessing upon us: but that, we must not forget, is what we would expect of our encounter with any great book.

Though I’ve been thinking of that quote for four days, it still stings as powerfully as the first time it invaded my rushing mind just like Chris’ voice. I remember back to seminary when a TA suggested we read the Greek New Testament for devotions because the foreign language would “slow us down.” Expletives! I want to should endless expletives if this is what it has come down to. In order to encounter a text, I must have difficulty reading? In order to walk slowly, taking in the scenery from the Queen Anne Caffee Ladro to Kerry Park, maybe I need to forget how to walk or gain a physical impairment. So, after reading the text only to realize I failed miserably at encountering so much as a word, I watched the movie. After watching the movie a second time, I felt prepared to return to the text. I imagined the boys’ father with a metrenome, holding me to a gentle, artful pace as I sought God’s grace for the hurried mess that has become my reading. Could I enter the story the way Paul entered the water? Could I come even within three years of thinking like the characters? Could I sit on the shore and watch the way Norman did as the world melts into one thing and a river runs through it? Not quite, but I came closer, and that was enough for this week.