Book Club!!!
It took me six months to read Emma, a fact I am not proud of. I must’ve read seven or eight other books during that time. I tell you that out of pride, not because it’s necessary information. Meaning: I’m not a retard, I swear!
But yeah. For five months, three weeks, and four days, I could not latch on.
The problem began in that oft-quoted first sentence…
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable house and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Hence, who cares? Emma is not hungry! Emma needs nothing!
In this book, there are no poor-but-delightful girls whose fates you are eager to see settled. No sexy rogues like Willoughby. No haughty, handsome, secretly awesome motherfuckers like Mr. Darcy. Only rich, beautiful, irritating Emma. So, yawn. I read slowly.
Then came this Family Vacation. Imagine a world of soulless snack foods, generic cigarettes, and despair. Besides my mother, everyone is fat and grey-faced. These people, when they laugh, make a raspy, disappointed sound that says, There is no sweetness in the world. Everything is rotten.
I got here and I fell into Emma like it was a well. And I realized how phenomenally stupid I have been.
But I’m in good company: in Emma, everyone is wrong about everything! Emma thinks Mr. Elton is attached to Harriet Smith, when really he is attached to Emma. Harriet thinks Mr. Knightley is attached to her, when really he is attached to Emma too. Mr. and Mrs. Weston think Frank Churchill is attached to Emma, when really he is attached to Jane Fairfax. Frank Churchill thinks Emma intuits that he is only pretending to be attached to her because he cannot reveal his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax but needs a justification for staying in Highbury. Etc.
And the way Jane Austen reveals this to us–us, who have spent six months wallowing in the cramped swamp of human ignorance, much like the aforementioned characters!–is so brilliant and perfect, like a dazzling coalescence of poetry and mathematics, it was almost enough to make us weep, right there on a beautiful beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. [Apparently the Family Vacation Cocktail of Maker’s Mark and Xanax has led to the Royal We.–Ed.]
It definitely made us smack our foreheads with the heels of our hands. Just like Emma, all of our theories and ideas were ridicuously, laughably wrong.
That’s just how motherfuckers be.
Nothing is what it seems! Opacity rules! Everyone shuffles the facts in such a way to prove what they already suspect! And,
Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.
Such is the way it works: our rampaging minds have their way with reality. We lie to each other and deceive ourselves. We are silly and myopic, just like Emma! Only God knows the truth, and God is Jane Austen.
Your brains are so stupid, she tells us. But they’re all you’ve got.
The troops are playing Retard Scrabble, in which basically any combination of letters is admitted, and there is much whooping and cackling. “Pistie,” they keep saying, “you look so intense. What are you doing over there?” Luckily Mr. Pistol is gallant, handsome, kind, and amazing at fitting in with anybody. Kinda cute how he just made the word HOOER.
Back to the trenches, y’all.
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