Two Worlds, Two Couches

Today I was sitting in the Yale Bookstore in a comfy couch reading my latest book for pleasure (there are so few of these in my life as a student): Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. I was reading about art as politics, and about critiques of postmodernist art as politically ineffectual and preaching to the converted (arguments I only partially disavow). The book, as most of my books, implicitly assumed a liberal political agenda (can postmodernism be conservative?). At this point, I came up for air and turn to my right, where I saw another man, perhaps in his 50s, reading, with as much interest and focus as I had been reading, Day of Reckoning by Patrick J. Buchanan. To add to the surreality, Christmas music was playing in the background.

If I could have been a camera and photographed the two of us reading together, I think I would have had quite the artistic object on my hands. I’m not quite sure what it all means—certainly something about irony, America, and, indeed, postmodernism. What perhaps struck me most was how each of us are living in worlds entirely separate from each other. How could I have even begun to develop a relationship with this man? What could he possibly think about the homosexual reading about feminist performance art in the chair next to him? And yet, neither of us were bothering each other, and I imagine if I had smiled at him he would have smiled back to me, and it would have been genuine for both of us.

Maybe I’ll put it in a play someday.