The Beauty of the Mundane

Jem, Henry, Scout, Atticus, Calpurnia, Alexandra, Dill, Atticus, Hank, Henry, Henry, Delilah, Atticus, Jean Louise, Cal, Dr Finch, Atticus, Aunty, Atticus.

Atticus.

I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. Last year, when seeing the harsh orange cover of Go Set a Watchman in the window of a book store, I immediately imagined Harper Lee as some white-haired, sixty-year-old male, who’d finally decided to write a sequel to his successful book.

I had heard good things, of course. In the sixth grade, a former classmate of mine presented their thoughts on the novel in a book report-esque seminar we held once a month. I distinctly remember her making the sounds a mockingbird would make, which she had heard in the movie adaptation. We all laughed.

The year before, in tenth grade, the other English group of my class was reading it. Then, however, cries of desperation against their unending assignments prevailed.

I was never really in a decent situation to read it, either. The famous American classic isn’t one of those three euro “classics” books in any book store and its significance in international culture is barely existent at all. After reading it, however, I can begin to understand the novel’s small part as important, global literature. Not only is it largely isolated in its historical 1930s setting of the United States during the Great Depression, which barely has any role in European educational systems, it is also a very simple story.

What’s here isn’t a clear, three-act progression. It is a story in the specific definition of the very term, it looks at the lives of people — regular, largely insignificant people.

A classmate (from that other English group), when asked whether they liked the novel or not, said that he found it “boring — nothing really happens in it.” And, in hindsight, I couldn’t necessarily disagree. Apart from the oddly suspenseful conclusion or the stellar courthouse section — a favorite of my classmates’, I should add — , it is a book about nothing. About something as globally trivial as a couple of kids growing up, about their struggles of identity, about their beautiful naïveté.

And yet its simple and direct nature are what have made it a phenomenon equally as global.

Before having finished the novel, a similar story recently came up— Firewatch, a game in which you take the role of a fire lookout for the National Forest Service. A game of walking, a game of hiking, and a game of speaking only through a yellow walkie-talkie.

The struggles of its main characters, Henry and Delilah, are not different from the young Jem and Scout. An adventure of nought, a world full of red herrings, the search for something larger and more significant, it shapes these peoples’ lives for the duration of a summer. It’s a spectacle, no doubt. A visually realized world enthralls the simplicity of the plot so reliant on one relationship, and the feeling of isolation and smallness that defines Maycomb County reverberates here.

However, that confinement is also the biggest downfall of it all.

As we saw with Go Set a Watchman, Maycomb can be a terrible place. It is morally shallow, completely stuck in the past. Jean Louise loses her faith because she knows what else is out there, she knows New York — she knows the outside world. In Firewatch, Henry and Delilah never meet, they are mere voices, shadows in that same stark and orange world that so quickly set the tone for Go Set a Watchman, when I first laid eyes on the book.

Yet, we want more. We know that a destination exists, we are accustomed to closure, though we never get any of it ourselves. Lives don’t just end, relationships don’t come to a satisfying conclusion, but we’ve fundamentally ignored that in our culture of consumption.

Sure, it’s easier that way, it’s more pleasant. Of course it feels better to have a good meal, rather than eat snack after snack, because not only is it much healthier, it’s more convenient. And so is living with settlement.

What Harper Lee wanted more than half a century ago was to break the sentiment. She showed us that beauty can lie in the ordinary. Her ideas were down to Earth, where hers is Maycomb, just as where the Earth of Firewatch is the Wyoming forest. She showed us that a conclusion can come from the journey, not just that we had to enjoy it.

She showed us that looking into a world didn’t mean we were its gods.