Letter #105: Mona Lisa Smile

Reading as a life skill.

Pitmaster Klavan,

Yesterday before I got your letter I was out walking, when one of those Tennessee rainstorms opened up from nowhere and in seconds flat I was drenched. There was absolutely nothing for it; I was just that distance from home where it would have taken as long to wait for an Uber as to go back on foot. So I thought well, guess I’m getting soaked. And I walked back through a torrent.

It was incomparably beautiful. The potholes streamed with glass-black water and the magnolia trees bowed their heads. So far as I could tell, no one saw that street in that moment, curtained with that gray rain, but me. And I thought what a strange waste of beauty is made everywhere in the world, what an enormous outlay of irreplaceable landscapes is spread out almost carelessly for anyone that happens to pass by. Galaxy on galaxy unseen by any eyes we know of.

So then your letter came, and of course it brought with it that immortal line from Narnia: “no one is told any story but their own.” It’s true enough that the downpour I saw was entangled in the whole limitless system of pressure fronts and storm clouds beyond the edges of my sight. It would have broken whether I had been there or not, I guess. 

But it’s equally true that if I hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have been quite what it was, which is not simply an event but a work of art. What was the “meaning” of it? You might as well ask the meaning of the Mona Lisa, to which Da Vinci could only answer helplessly: “it’s her smile.” Sometimes the theological questions we ask have the feel of the worst SAT assignment ever, the kind that invites you to find the “message” of Catcher in the Rye. If there were a message there wouldn’t need to be a book. I presume if God had something to say to me in words, he wouldn’t have sent the rain.

When I was in town for your birthday we were laughing about people who need a data set to back everything up. No one really needs to have it proven that men are different from women or that being on a phone all day will suck your brain out through your retinas. But lots of people won’t feel they have permission to believe the plain facts of their experience unless they come prefaced with the incantation “studies show.”

We’re almost finished with a month discussing how to talk about God in real modern life. But I notice it’s been just as much a conversation about how to hear as how to talk. That probably tells you something. To read experience as a story—to read life as an allegory—takes patient training, but not the kind you’ll get in stats class. Some of us got it in English class. We just didn’t realize we were being taught a life skill. 

Love,
Spencer