Two people read
the same sentence.
One of them finds comfort in it. The other finds a demand. A third has heard it so many times at so many funerals that it has gone smooth and means nothing at all any more.
None of them misread it.
how I used to handle this
Badly. I used to treat it as a bug.
If a text means different things to different people, I reasoned, then either some of them are wrong, or the text does not really mean anything, and either way somebody should sort this out. I wanted a correct reading. I wanted to know which team had it right, and — this is the embarrassing part — I mostly wanted to know so that I could be on it.
Memory
Twelve years old, Hindu, at monthly Mass in a Catholic school, singing along happily, having been informed by nobody that these were separate teams.
Memory
Twenty years old, fluent in the divisions. Denominations, sects, which practice is objectionable to whom, who may marry whom.
What I thought it meant
My own view, held loosely and offered as mine rather than as a fact about the universe: God did not hand me those divisions. People did — often for reasons that made sense at the time, in circumstances I have not had to live in.
Question
And is that just a convenient position for someone standing between two traditions who would rather not choose?
What I learned later
Maybe. I hold it anyway, and I try to hold it without the smugness that usually comes attached to it.
why a sentence lands differently
Because it does not land in a vacuum. It lands in whatever is already in the room.
Your father is in the room. What happened to you in March is in the room. The language you dream in is in the room. Whether you are, at that moment, the one being comforted or the one being asked for something.
The words are fixed. The room is not. Meaning is what happens when one meets the other, which means meaning is partly made of you — and that is not a flaw in the text, that is the mechanism by which anything written thousands of years ago can still do work today.
same words.
different lives.
different meaning.
I found this threatening for about a year and I now find it to be the single most persuasive argument that the thing is alive.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.