Best Part

Best Part

It hadn’t just been that morning, but what felt like endless weeks of strategizing, rushing, calculating. Navigating as though hopping from stone to stone in a stream, from one responsibility to the next.

The audiobook had been a part of that dance, of eking out every bit of optimization from my morning commute. I had been listening to Lord of the Rings, and I was near the end of The Twin Towers.

“Don’t trust your head Samwise, it’s not the best part of you.”

There it was, the perfect line after a books worth of buildup that brings that watery feeling to your throat, that fullness in your heart, this reminder of what is most important. The sunrise became more stirring and my bitter coffee tasted sweeter.

This is what I love about literature.

The revelation of heart experience.

I was immediately reminded of an overheard conversation in an Italian restaurant. A young group of friends were on their way to a camping trip, and one voice seemed to be dominating the conversation. My husband and I would exchange glances and chuckles at the young man’s self-importance, “yadda yadda, do you really think that people are inclined to altruism? I studied this a ton in college, and I can tell that governments really needs to incentivize good deeds in society…”

It wasn’t that his points were bad, or that they weren’t having an interesting discourse. It was the way he cut off his friends, and the way his voice was clearly the loudest. I could tell without seeing his face that he had a cocky eyebrow raised.

It got worse.

“You know, you really need to read philosophy. You are saying ideas that have already been more clearly formed by philosophers in the past. You would be a better speaker if you did…”

“Okay man, I think we can have conversation even if I haven’t read the same books as you.”

“Yeah, but you would be more articulate if you did. Trust me, I took tons of philosophy in government classes in college, I know what I’m talking about.

The man kept going, telling his friend in so many words that he was a bumbling fool incapable of joining in adult discourse. His friend eventually had enough, slamming his fist on the table, the women around them, infuriatingly even to me, telling them both they needed to calm down.

My husband, who quite enjoys philosophy, had been miming along with the self-important man, making me both terrified he would be caught, and grateful I was with someone who didn’t tolerate that kind of arrogant behavior.

I wanted to jump in. According to this man, the many societies that are not Western, the illiterate, the isolated cultures, children, other-abled, and the less educated, were not capable of important thought and meaningful dialogue.

And I mean I get it. This man took one class on philosophy in government, and it widened his perspective, and that is a beautiful thing. However, to wear it as a badge of superiority, or to see Western philosophy as the only vehicle to deeper understanding was intolerable.

I couldn’t imagine how his friends were going to survive a weekend camping with him, and I did my best to write it off as his age.

The man bothered me the whole drive back to our cabin, my husband speculating that people like him don’t do well in life, and me disagreeing. He was a tall, self-assured, conventionally attractive man. He was going to do just fine.

I just hated that in his mind, at the core of his argument, was this idea that western intellectual makes superior, and that only original thought has value.

Samwise Gamgee knew better; it was that knowing that struck a chord so deeply in me.

Which brings me to this: I am often so afraid to call myself a writer.

Writers are supposed to be brilliant, transcendent beings.

I am none of those things. I am not the smartest or the most insightful. I don’t have a poet’s depth of emotions. I am more closed off emotionally than many of the people I admire the most.

What I do have is a deep love for the human experience, the absurdity and the deep heart strumming beauty of it.

I don’t write because I’m the best read or because I have some new intellectual insight. I honestly have nothing revelatory to share at all.

I do it for the same reason intellectualizing and postulating plays no part in true story telling.

So, with fear, shame, vulnerability, I share my clumsy writing, because even if isn’t the most brilliant thing, it comes from the best part of me.