Teaching undergraduate literature at second-tier universities in the late twentieth century, I used to get lucky with “The Use of Force,” a short story by a modernist poet who earned his living as a pediatrician. He wrote it in 1938, as a kind of casenote.
“You know,” I’d suggest to the class, “this is a story about rape.”
“No!” the class would roar back. “The man is a doctor! He’s trying to help the little girl!” But then we would start actually reading the words that the doctor actually wrote, and faces would light up.
But after the late twentieth century gave way to the early twenty-first, the lights stayed off. “Big deal,” jeered the 19-year-old healthies seventy years after 1938. “Every male-female relationship is a rape.” So I stopped teaching “The Use of Force.”
And after all, by then there remained few physicians who had ever even seen a case of diphtheria.
But oh, Mr. Secretary Jr.: how wonderful the word “again” may be about to become again.
I didn’t say good.
But I do say wonderful.
Two years later, it’s obvious that my Photoshopped optimism was incoherent. I had appropriated an architect’s rendering of the telescope in its rightful elemental night, but during the hours of his waking Martin Heidegger oversaw from the windows of his squat sturdy hut a mountain landscape brimming with illumined fog. Because I had left the night unmodified as a single layer of dark around the telescope, the image I manipulated couldn’t withstand the next two years. Image-fogging light overspread, innuendos of divinity took effect, and as of 2017 the sky has repopulated itself with horoscopic cartoons and there is a real possibility that the telescope never will be built.
