There’s a book you’ll never persuade me to read. Maybe you know it. A man has a stroke that leaves all his faculties intact but paralyses him except for one eye which he can blink. Using his blinks to indicate letters, he dictates an entire book — his memoir. Understandably, it’s a slim volume. After all, the man has had to measure his words. In fact, that’s the book’s virtue. Because each word is so costly, he only ever dictates what he really means. He takes time beforehand to distill his thoughts to the pure stuff. His words strike to the very heart of the matter. No prolixity. No redundancy. No rhetorical throat-clearing. Only as many words as are necessary to make the point and no more. In other words, something that looks very different than this blog.
I’m afraid of books like this. Apparently, it was a great success. The first print run flew off the shelves in a single day. The author died three days after publication and then the book became an international sensation. Maybe those two facts had something to do with one another. Maybe not. Somebody bought the film rights to it and made a movie. The premise sounds counter-intuitive: a movie about a man who just lies there and blinks. But I hear it was almost as successful as the book.
I’m afraid of movies like this — almost as afraid of the movies as I am of the books they’re based on. I’m afraid of what will happen when my contrarian, curmudgeonly, cantankerous ways collide with an enormously popular cultural happening, a sentimental favourite, a plucker of heart-strings, a weller of throat-lumps. What if, despite its popularity, I reach the ineluctable conclusion that it’s a pile of horseshit?
To be clear, I’ve never read the book. So I don’t actually know if it’s a pile of horseshit. For all I know, it’s the most wonderful book ever written, and it certainly has the sales to support that supposition.
I’m merely asking a what if. What if I read this book and find that the prevailing winds are blowing over a manure lagoon instead of a perfumery?
The problem is: I’m socially defective. I can’t help but tell the truth, even when it’s in my best interest to lie. When I was in elementary school, the tough kids always beat me up. They’d corner me and ask: “So you think we’re stupid?” The problem followed me into marriage: “Does this outfit make me look fat?” A split lip didn’t bother me, and the worst that comes from a night on the couch is a kink in my neck. But it’s quite a different matter when I find myself venting an opinion that flies in the face of the millions.
The book has the potential to be a sentimental piece of goo. But that’s not what bothers me. More than anything, I resent the passive-aggressive hold such a book has on our critical faculty. It’s a true story, we tell ourselves. It cost the man something to write it, we say. And so we engage in a kind of suspension of disbelief. We don’t want to believe that the cosmos could be ordered in such a way as to afflict a man so terribly and then fill his heart with trivial reminiscences and sentimental pap. It must be deep and meaningful. There must be wisdom and life lessons in it. Thoughts that improve us all.
I’d rather not risk the embarrassment of feeling compelled to prick your happy bubble.
The claim that something is a true story just spoils the whole experience. Truth is an object of attachment and, like nipples, we need to wean ourselves of it so we can see more truly.