Date a girl who doesn't read. Find her in the
weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her
in the smoke, drunken sweat, and
varicolored light of an upscale nightclub.
Wherever you find her, find her smiling.
Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look
away. Engage
her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-
up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her
outside when the night overstays its
welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of
fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp
because you've seen it
in film. Remark at its lack of significance.
Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with
making love. Fuck her. Let the anxious contract you've unwittingly
written evolve slowly and uncomfortably
into a relationship. Find shared interests and
common ground like sushi, and folk music.
Build an impenetrable bastion upon that
ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale,
or the evenings get
long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do
little thinking. Let the months pass
unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her
decorate. Get into fights about
inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be
closed so that it
doesn't fucking collect mold. Let a year pass
unnoticed. Begin to notice. Figure that you should probably get married
because you will have wasted a lot of time
otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-
fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your
means. Make sure there is a beautiful view
of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne
with a modest
ring in it. When she notices, propose to her
with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you
can muster. Do not be overly concerned if
you feel your heart leap through a pane of
sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot
feel it at all. If there
is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile
as if you've never been happier. If she
doesn't, smile all the same. Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career,
not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking
children. Try to raise them well. Fail,
frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference.
Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a
mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel
sometimes contented,
but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during
walks, as if you might never return, or as if
you might blow away on the wind. Contract
a terminal illness. Die, but only after you
observe that the girl who didn't read never made your heart oscillate with any
significant passion, that no one will write the
story of your lives, and that she will die, too,
with only a mild and tempered regret that
nothing ever came of her capacity to love. Do those things, god damnit, because
nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads.
Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is
better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl
who reads possesses a vocabulary that can
describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary
that parses the
innate beauty of the world and makes it an
accessible necessity instead of an alien
wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a
vocabulary that distinguishes between the
specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the
inarticulate
desperation of someone who loves her too
much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that
makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who
reads understands
syntax. Literature has taught her that
moments of tenderness come in sporadic
but knowable intervals. A girl who reads
knows that life is not planar; she knows,
and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A
girl who has read up on her syntax senses
the irregular pauses—the hesitation of
breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads
perceives the difference between a
parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter
cynicism will run on, run on well past any
point of reason, or purpose, run on far after
she has packed a suitcase and said a
reluctant goodbye and she has decided that
I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that
knows the rhythm
and cadence of a life well lived. Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl
who reads knows the importance of plot.
She can trace out the demarcations of a
prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax.
She feels them in her skin. The girl who
reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all
things, the girl who reads knows most the
ineluctable significance of an end. She is
comfortable with them. She has bid farewell
to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of
sadness. Don't date a girl who reads because girls
who read are the storytellers. You with the
Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the
Woolf. You there in the library, on the
platform of the metro, you in the corner of
the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned
difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the
account of her life and it is bursting with
meaning. She insists that her narratives are
rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her
typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything
that I am not. But
I am weak and I will fail you, because you
have dreamed, properly, of someone who is
better than I am. You will not accept the life
that I told of at the beginning of this piece.
You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life
worthy of being
storied. So out with you, girl who reads.
Take the next southbound train and take
your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I
really, really, really hate you.
--Charles Warnke
