While I am used to being much maligned and generally misunderstood, I have not gotten over the amount of derision and mocking with which a certain assertion I made in book club was met. First of all, yes, book club. Second, no, we were not all Democrats. Some of us were, but not all of us. We did not read from Oprah’s book list. We did not, in fact, have a list. Women schedule their hair cuts 6, sometimes 12 months in advance. Men look in the mirror one morning and realize their hair is way too bushy and go get it cut. Our book club chose its books in a somewhat laissez faire manner, mostly centered around books southern men should read.
Included in this selection was All The King’s Men which begins, you might recall, with a car and a cow. The first chapter is, in fact, all about a cow in a field watching a Cadillac pass by. Heady stuff, right? Actually, yes. That first chapter is all about perception and how perception changes in relationship to an event. You see things one way, and you have always seen things that way, until something — a thing — happens and your perception is forever altered. Altered by one moment in time. Forever. Get it? A paradox. My assertion was that this paradox was the crux of the whole book. I still believe it.
About the book, that is. The first chapter of All The King’s Men encapsulates the entire theme, if not the plot, of the story. I don’t know that I put so much stock in one moment above all others. People do it all the time when they talk about 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or whatever. They talk about how the whole world changed in one moment. I think that there is nothing that stands outside of its context, its period in history. To isolate the 9/11 attacks, as horrible as they are, is to ignore centuries of religious strife piled on top of decades of neo-imperialism. Our perspective may have changed, but the world did not.
And they will change again. As sure as Cadillacs pass cows, there will be shifts big and small in the ways we individually and collectively perceive our world. Which means, among other things, that what we know now with certainty may be proved false tomorrow. Another Cadillac might come rushing by any minute. (I know, you didn’t want to be the cow, but that’s just how life is.) Our best bet is to try to be as honest in this moment as we can, knowing that it’s reality is provisional at best.