Isabel
My daughter Isabel hates stories. Perhaps what she really hates is story structure. I think what I’m trying to say for her is that what she really hates is George Lucas and therefore Joseph Campbell and therefore Aristotle. I’d invite her to elaborate on this herself but she has made it very clear that she has no interest in reading my writing or contributing to my blog.
My daughter Isabel hates stories because they are not like real life.
My daughter Isabel hates stories because “they are lies.”
She believes that stories don’t actually happen. She believes that stories are a kind of mental junk food that make us feel more at peace with our lives passing us by. She believes that as long as we continue to perpetuate the myth of the story structure that we will never truly be present enough to live our own lives. She believes that we will always be looking towards a future that will be our story and at the same time will never actually materialize. She believes that Hollywood and airport romance novels have ruined the modern relationship. She’s also eight years old.
My daughter Isabel doesn’t see herself ever getting married, or being in a committed relationship. If any other eight year old said this I would inaudibly tell them to give it time. But I believe her because I believe that she sees the world in a way that nobody I have ever met has seen it. I think that she might be The Messiah. I also think that she might kill herself before she turns 30.
I want to tell her to not think so dualistically but then I wonder what telling her that might take away from society because I also think that our greatest thinkers have been dualists. Perhaps she needs to be a sacrifice so that cold, hard evidence will continue to have a place at the table in a world that seems more and more dominated by belief and the aim of immediate, temporary peace at the cost of everything else. I want to tell her that love wins but I don’t know that she would believe me.
“Believe me. I’m your father,” I’d say. But I’d see skepticism in her eyes and then there would be no turning back. So instead I say nothing.
She got into an argument with her teacher, Ms. Long, the other day and I got to be the one that stood in the middle. It was an argument about the idea of schooling. Isabel pointed out that she had signed no contract and entered willingly into no deal wherein she agreed to have the next 12 years of her life structured by what other beings thought of her.
“I think we live in American,” she said. “And in America, freedom is key. I was not consulted on the seven hours of school and then four to five hours of post school work I would be required to do. And then also work on the weekends. And I know that my protests and pointless. I know that you sit there and you see me, eight years old, and you think that what I am doing is adorable. ‘Just wait,’ you say. But I’m tired of waiting and also there’s a whole lot more waiting left to be done in my life. And then what? I’ll graduate from college and I’ll have to get a job and then that job will dictate my life. And then I’ll decide that I’m actually undecided about whether or not I want to have children, but my window of opportunity will be rapidly closing, and so I’ll have a few just in case, and then will mostly not regret it. And then I’ll get old and I will start to fall apart and then I will die.
“I guess what I’m asking is what’s the point of any of it?”
I’ve talked to my daughter about suicide. She’s a moderate fan of Hunter S. Thompson. I’ve told her that all of the evidence seems to indicate that most people kill themselves on a whim. That it seems that having something like a firearm present in ones home makes it much more likely that that is how one dies. I told her that that is the reason that I don’t own a gun. I can’t trust that I won’t wake up in the middle of the night and think that the most logical thing to do would be to clinch my teeth around the barrel and pull the trigger. It’s the same reason that I don’t go up to the ledges of high buildings. I’m always this close to throwing myself off.
I also told her that there are probably a small percentage of people out there for who ending their lives was probably the right decision although we’re never going to actually know.
It turns out that the part of stories that my daughter Isabel hates the most are endings because life has only one ending to it. And even then it is only an ending of our ego as we know it. We are burned into ash our we dissolve into soil. We go from being one thing to something else. We don’t know what we are and yet we cling to what we know. A story ends and yet the characters get up the next day because they have to. Because the alternative is so conclusive and finite that none of us want to actually think about it with regards to ourselves or any of our loved ones.
I don’t want to think about Isabel dying so I’ll write a story about a 16 year old boy named Joshua who stood on the roof of Carnegie Mellon University’s drama building one night in the summer of 2009 and wondered what the last thing he would feel might be. I write stories to keep the real world at arms length so that when I finally die I will wonder what life was like among the living.