The Garden & The Window

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench in the garden. Who is it for? When was it built? Or you can shift the angle of your gaze and focus on the window itself. Is the glass smudged? How wide are its panes? Can you see your own reflection in it?

Most people when they read look at the garden: the flowers are the characters whose lives we admire and watch grow. It is lovely to look at a garden; we may feel many things. Students and scholars of literature when they read must learn to look at the window: how does the depth and texture of the language through which we read shape our view of the world on the other side?

Learning to see the window takes time -- even learning to care about the window takes time. After all, the garden is so beautiful. And sometimes looking at the window seems silly. Isn't transparency in a window's very nature -- its sole defining feature? Do we do a window a disservice by refusing to look past it?

But over time, the glass' grain emerges. It becomes possible to see within it a bank, a thread where a core of liquid cooled, and the scarce scratches scored by beads of sand colliding. The garden may be pretty but the window is epic, ancient, the site of revolutionary encounters between irrepressible forces.

It is only after the window has occupied you for so long and with such intensity that you have ceased entirely even to wonder about the garden that you make a most surprising discovery: there is no garden there at all -- whether it has disappeared or whether it never existed in the first place is a question for experts beyond your level.

What L didn't tell his students is that if you look at the window long enough, one day it will be the only thing you can see.