In December 2008, I stared up at one of the great marvels of the world, the gleaming Taj Mahal. And I felt – nothing. Curiosity about its fabled history, yes. But other than that, all I felt was ambivalence about posing for pictures in its imposing foreground and a certain reluctance to leave my shoes unattended as I toured the palace itself.
I should have been awestruck. The Taj Mahal is stunning, a brilliant feat of engineering and craftsmanship, design and artistic grandeur. But the problem was, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen it, or even the second. Over the years, I’d seen the iconic structure in countless photographs, documentaries, and movies. By 2008, I’d encountered the great edifice so many times from the comfort of my couch that now, having traveled halfway around the world to gaze upon it, I was wondering what we would have for lunch.
It’s shameful, I know. But I suspect I’m not the only guilty one.
Recently, a friend told me why she couldn’t stand modern literature. “I hate the descriptions,” she said. “They’re flowery and over-blown and just plain weird.” Although I enjoy contemporary fiction, I knew what she was referring to. While authors of the past could devote full paragraphs to describing fields in bloom or dank urban alleys, they generally used concrete, sensible words. Contemporary writers tend to rely heavily on metaphors, or else they describe things in odd, non-literal ways. In her novel A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore uses the term “a papery caramel of leaves” to describe the wet waste that lined the roads. Whoever thought of soggy, caked leaves as caramel? And yet I think the description gives us something – a sense of color, of texture, and a fresh perspective.
It occurred to me that modern writers are faced with an interesting challenge, namely jaded readers who have seen (if not experienced) it all. Readers like me who can look upon the Taj Mahal without being awestruck. Not only are we more well-traveled than days of yore, but we’re exposed to places all over the world by way of screens large and small. In movies and through television we have seen rainforests and polar expeditions, villages from Scotland to Africa to Guatemala, Texas rodeos, Manhattan sex clubs, Roman amphitheaters, ocean floors, mountain peaks, and even the surface of the moon. No wonder we’re jaded. And no wonder fiction writers today have to sweat and toil to describe the world in a different way if we are to take note of it at all.
I’m torn about the vicarious exposure we get to our world through TV and movies. It’s a strange sort of life without living, experience that is like reality without actually being real. On the one hand, it gives us access to other places, times, and ways of life, showing us things we may never otherwise see. It can educate us, but I think it also steals something from us – the freshness and newness of discovery. I don’t want to be jaded, so I’m going to take this as a challenge. I’m going to push myself to experience each new surrounding fully, to open my eyes and look. More than that, I’m going to challenge myself to touch, taste, and smell the world around me. As yet, technology doesn’t stimulate those senses in our living rooms and movie theaters, which means the real world has got that market cornered.
