Trenchant Words · Sunday June 7, 2009 by Julie
Bob (this is yet another Bob, not any of the Bobs I’ve mentioned before) and I were talking about what it’s like to live on an isolated island.
“In some ways, it’s just like living anywhere else,” he observed. “Except that other people have such strong ideas about what it’s like.”
“When we used to go to the Farmers’ Market,” I recalled, not without some sentiment, “people would come up to us and, without preamble (I didn’t actually use the word preamble, but it fits better than what I actually did say), tell us what it was like to live where we do.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Bob, shaking his head slowly. “My visitors yesterday told me that they’d love to live here forever, because it brings them closer to the earth.”
“But it does!” put in The Spink, who had been embroidering a triceratops and a moth on a piece of violet fabric.
“True,” I said. “That’s one sort, the people who think of it as a place where you can get in touch with the noble savage within. But then there’s the other sort, the people who think of it as a cesspit of primitivity, and think we are all either criminals or hippies or both, using our food stamps to buy alcohol and pot, and voting liberal.”
Bob shuddered.
I nodded. We sat in silent contemplation for a few moments, watching the triceratops take form.
“The thing is,” he ventured, “is that they’re both right.” So saying, he put a skillet of lemon-feta-olive chicken with cinnamon-cornbread on the table. A reverent silence ensued, punctuated only by the schnauzerlike noises that gourmands emit while head down and fingers greasy to the elbows in the presence of good food.
“What we need is a transcendent paradigm,” I said, licking my fingers disgustingly. “We need a way of looking at lives lived in closer awareness of trees and salmon and bats that doesn’t marginalize it, doesn’t turn it into rather shallow archetypes of pre-civilized living.”
“Because we’re anything but shallow,” said Bob, trenchantly and even tendentiously. “There’s something going on here at the intersection of irony, culture, and nature that’s worth pursuing.”
