The Bookery: Peter Mendelsund's "What We See When We Read"

Yesterday, as soon as I stepped onto the patio, my glasses steamed up. It finally rained, rendering the yard a jewel-green sauna, the sun’s rays beating down on the glistening garden. Something small, round, and white caught my eye and I took off my glasses.

Oh, the wind from the rain blew my paint pallete into the yard, I told my husband Brian. Brian appeared next to me and looked down at the plastic disc on the ground. Splotched with various colors, it lay in the grass, the narrative of its flight unknown to us both. There is only Point A and Point B; Point A being the patio table and Point B being the jewel-green yard. You don’t have to pick it up, just leave it there, I told him. Silence.

Artist/designer Peter Mendelsund wrote “We know ourselves and those around us by our readings of them, by the epithets we have given them, by their metaphors, synecdoches, metonymies. Even those we love most in the world. We read them in their fragments and substitutions.”

The world as we [you] see it is up for interpretation based off what we [you] already know and/or experienced. Based off your narrative. Every mote of dust. Ever corner of a page of a book. Every inch worm. Every

Robin sang when I rolled to a stop at the stop sign this morning. I needed gas before my commute to work, so I drove in the opposite direction towards the gas station before getting on the highway. Yesterday’s rain brought a cold front and the pre-dawn morning air was refreshing. I opened my car’s window and drove up the road, night-silence and lightning bugs greeting me. At the third stop sign, I recognized Robin without seeing him. I did not need to see the golden belly. I did not need to see the dark wings. I did not need to recognize the silhouette in the boughs. However, Robin was not the Robin from the tree in my yard. And Robin from the tree in my yard was not Robin from the other tree in my yard. Robin is Robin is not Robin.

When Brian appeared next to me, I did not see him. Not even in my peripherals. My gaze, slightly averted away from him, was on my paint palette. My paint palette being blown by the wind is only a surmise. Reason, whatever that may be, had me deducting that my husband did not throw it in the yard and that my dogs did not reach it on the table and place it in the yard. And although the palette’s likelihood of being blown into the yard is high, I will never know the narrative of its flight. Did it do a spin-float into the air and land in the grass? Was it a clumsy, slow drag off the table, along the cement of the patio, and onto the grass? It is not my husband’s character to throw my things into the yard. It is not my husband’s character to be totally unpredictable or guided by what can be nonsensical or destructive free-will.

Mendelsund also wrote “The world for us is a work in progress. And what we understand of it we understand by cobbling these pieces together--synthesizing them over time. It is the synthesis that we know. (It is all we know). And all the while, we are committed to believing in the totality--the fiction of seeing.”

Just leave it there, I told him. My husband didn’t say a word. I did not indicate anything else either through writing this or with my body language then and there on the patio. Silence, an indicator of whatever it is that your narrative creates, is a library whose stacks are full of volumes. Pick a book, any book. Maybe that is where the narrative ends. Maybe this Brian character is deaf and the narrator knowingly speaks to him, knowing he can’t hear. Maybe this is therapeutic for the narrator, to speak to someone who cannot hear. Maybe this Brian character doesn’t know how to respond to his partner. Does his partner have a gender? Just because there is an I doesn’t mean they’re me. Just because there is a “husband” doesn’t always indicate that there is a wife just as much as how jewel-green does not indicate emerald.

Green

Patio

Husband

Yard

Paint Palette

Glasses

Rain

Sun Rays

Garden

Patio Table

W i n d (cannot be seen, but is seen through action)

Given only so many vague nouns, what does the reader even see?

Mendelsund also wrote, "When we apprehend the world (the parts of it that are legible to us), we do so one piece at a time. These single pieces of the world are our conscious perceptions. What these conscious perceptions consist of, we don’t know, though we assume that our experience of the world is an admixture of that which is already present, and that which we ourselves contribute (our selves--our memories, opinions, proclivities, and so on)."

What world are you building, dear reader, as this world falls apart while simultaneously continues on its trail of time? Your sonder is not my sonder. The palette’s narrative in my mind is not the narrative in your mind. Your jewel-green is not mine. The wind is not always a gust as it can be a series of repetitive pushing. It is only through other objects that we are able to see, feel, or hear that it exists.

And finally, Mendelsund concluded that “Among the great mysteries of life is this fact: The world presents itself to us, and we take in the world. We don’t see the seams, the cracks, and the imperfections.”

And as you build the jewel-green yard with its glistening garden and invisible forces, I invite you to add a bird.

Is it a robin?