I never planned to ask the question.
A friend and I were physically swallowed up, emotionally exhausted and finally relaxed in the giant chairs of Newcomb’s game room last Friday afternoon as we talked about everything from our dogs’ Halloween plans to our first-year dorm nostalgia.
Before long we started bouncing between various issues that we perceived as often being met with apathy by those who consider themselves “unaffected.” We already knew that the two of us stood on the exact same plane. We thought we also knew precisely how the conversation would just flow from one example to the next in a never-ending list of reasons why we still need to rant about social justice in the first place. Race and gender and class, oh my, and then all of a sudden … the humanities?
The second she muttered an offhand comment about how the staggering rush of everyday life makes it so easy even for truly good people to shuffle from one place to the next as one more face in the crowd, out of nowhere I just had to know:
“Did you ever read “The Phantom Tollbooth”?”
Her face lit up immediately. At the same moment, I felt a rush of baffled delight that my nerdy inner English major had apparently not been judged — yet.
The two of us shared that moment because, as we soon figured out, we also shared the common yet immensely personal experience of recognizing this childhood favorite as one that truly led both of us to question the very nature of existence, selfhood and meaning for the first time. Strangely enough, literally half a lifetime has now passed since I first flipped through those pages. At that stage, it certainly seemed to be the deepest thing I had ever encountered (aside from the terrifying end of a swimming pool, because everybody knows that the sharks live there). One section in particular just never left my mind.
There was a place named Reality, the twin city of Illusion, and its inhabitants were in retrospect not all that different from U.Va. students at their most stressed and chronically overcommitted. Day in and day out, all these people just trying to get through Reality were so relentlessly preoccupied with traveling straight from point A to point B that they never even looked up long enough to notice something astounding: their entire city had become invisible.
Our conversation grew to include the memories and morals of many other books we greatly valued from our earliest experiences of reading. Even on the way home, I was still thinking about just how profoundly my most basic modes of speaking and perceiving are still informed by everything from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” to oh, how many giant books I carry around nowadays for the sake of classes spanning the academic humanities.
Of course, all these simple yet extremely meaningful human moments transcend far beyond just those classes formally constructed as “the humanities” in higher education. This particular friend is majoring in urban planning, and the fact that my roommate studies Biomedical Engineering had very little to do with a similarly fascinating conversation that we recently shared about the implications of “1984.” In extending the echoes of these deeply resonant experiences to others, regardless of the nuances tied to personal backgrounds, we find a beauty and a mystery that mean much more when shared.
In light of the depth and breadth of so many of these inspired dialogues, we as students, friends, and, of course, human beings would all do well not to undervalue the talents we label “soft skills,” as if their effects on our lives are somehow uncertain or less legitimate when stacked up against the ability to succeed on a math test. What makes us human applies to an “us” far beyond just those who are able to name at least five Dostoyevsky novels or to have an impromptu debate about the state of nature in this or that philosopher’s works. The concept of an overarching humanity is fundamentally incapable of not including every childhood book, every important friendship, every thought-provoking Friday afternoon conversation and so much more.
No matter how many things may have changed at every level of my being in the past ten years, as one small person sitting in a giant chair and feeling every bit as excited about the same text just this past week, I honestly couldn’t help but feel that certain aspects of the best books in our lives really are timeless. Even in the midst of inevitable change and immeasurable chaos, all it takes to become more conscientious parts of the Reality surrounding us is the will to share pieces of ourselves with others. More often than not, ultimately we learn that those “others” are in fact surprisingly familiar.
Katy Hutto is a third-year College student majoring in English and political and social thought.
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