When was the last time that you eavesdropped?
I started thinking about this question last week at the Cherry Bowl Drive-In in Northern Michigan as I relished swatting mosquitos and sucking on Lemon Drops as we watched the final installment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Once again we see that Harry Potter gains the lion’s share of his knowledge about his past, his parents, his professors, and his plans for the future through the art of eavesdropping. Owning an invisibility cloak helps in this task tremendously as does being allowed access to Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a bird bath looking receptacle where drops of memories are poured and then actively observed by Harry. Whether allowing us to listen to professors recount tales of treachery involving key players such as Sirius Black or plunging us into the memories of yearning and loss of Tom Riddle or Professor Snape, Rowling uses the well-placed easvesdrop to move the story forward, to pull on our emotions, and to open unforeseen doors for redemption and compassion.
And yet, it’s still eavesdropping.
I went into town Wednesday to check e-mail and hunkered down at a local coffee shop. As I opened my Outlook, I couldn’t help but hear the conversation of two ladies sitting next to me. Both white-haired and tan, one woman was sharing her experiences of widowhood in the last year with her friend. She had just started dating again, and although she really likes this man, she is wrestling with marrying him. On the one hand, she is having some financial difficulties and marrying him would help solve those, but his health is starting to fail and she doesn’t want to have to be a caregiver again as she was to her deceased husband…and then I realized, “Shiza Minelli! I am totally eavesdropping!!!” I had to close my computer and go outside. It was too hard not to keep listening to their conversation, especially since they were talking about topics that I think about all the time. I had to remind myself that I am not Harry Potter and as charming as that wizard is, he still had no permission to listen to the sacred stories and conversations of others, excluding Snape who did willingly give him his tears and ask that he go to the Pensieve.
Personal story has a magical power though, and can effortlessly pull us in, criss-cross applesauce for story-time. I’ve been reading Ruth Konigsburg’s new book that takes a critical look at Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Grief. Early on she speaks to how Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying fit into a popular genre of self-help writing in the early 1970’s, which in part spurned its successful reception. She then goes on to remark that the literary genre that marks our present time is the memoir.  This thought caught my attention and seems to ring true. Most of those who write about death, dying, and grief are often fueled by their own personal experiences as a doctor, a caregiver, or as a grieving person.  It struck me as interesting that a memoir is basically eavesdropping with permission. We cannot resist but read.
During our vacation, I enjoyed diving into Paul Murray’s 2010 novel, Skippy Dies. Set in the fall semester of a private boys school in Dublin, he follows a group of 14-year-old classmates (Ruprecht, Skippy, Dennis, Mario, and Geoff), their young, history professor Howard, an alum of the school, as well as a young girl, Lori, from their sister school, St. Brigid’s, several hoodlums and drug dealers, as well as the school’s interim principal, unaffectionately called The Automator.  Although the narrative is gripping and Skippy does die, the theme of how we cull meaning and purpose from the constructs of story undergirds the plot. As we jump from narrator to narrator, we experience how despite the copious methods we have for communication from cell phones to computers to music to notes to body language to words to symbols to story, our ability to speak and hear clearly are fundamentally flawed. Part of the beauty of the Harry Potter story is that he always seems to get the right piece of the story at the right time and he always understands what was intended to be communicated. That only happens in a magical world.
Instead we hear the boy genius, Ruprecht Von Doren, as he reflects on his research of string theory as applies his scientific studies to the tortured pursuits of his fellow 14-year-old male classmates:
“He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whomever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up on this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channeled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely…
Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derive from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom—a remnant of the universe’s lost state of perfect symmetry—so Ruprecht is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traced right back to the subatomic…If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of our space time’s demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete, U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchanges of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upward to haunt every one of its residents.” (300)
Grief is basically a reaction to reality’s inevitable asymmetry. Those who give us life will die and those who make life worth living will die, leaving spaces of dissonance in the score, narrative gaps in our stories, a reality filled with places of loneliness. And in telling stories and listening to the stories of others, we may not learn a clear cut path of stages that will lead to healing and wholeness, but we hope to survive.
Even Harry Potter, who lives at least 10 lifetimes filled with magical heroics and deeds of courage and who relentlessly builds a reality of hope out of loneliness, is simply known as: “the boy who lived.”
