It’s funny how every thing we do in life becomes so routine that we barely even think about it.
Someone randomly asks you, “What are you thinking about?” and it is a mechanical reflex to respond, “Nothing.”
Because, of course, we make it a daily habit to practice Buddhism and drift into peace with the Earth while we meditate and raise our bodies into a sea of gravity-less thoughtlessness.
Or maybe it’s just natural that since we have such hollow skulls that obtain no deep thoughts or brain cells whatsoever, we just can’t manage to think.
And so when we answer, “Nothing,” we are speaking the truth.
Right?
Wrong.
Neither of those are true. And if the latter is, well… I wish you the best in life.
You’ll need it.
Kate Chopin questions this every day occurrence when Adele asks Mrs. Pontellier what she’s thinking as they stare out into the sea on the beach—yet again—and Mrs. Pontellier says, “Nothing.” Only to be followed by “How stupid! But it seems to me it is the reply we make instinctively to such a question.”
And then she goes on to explain—in quite great detail—just what it is she is thinking of:
“ First of all, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me think—without any connection that I can trace---of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as if as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now!”
Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to the direct heir to the kingdom of Plato and Aristotle.
She starts out by declining in mentioning one little thought and then she bursts into an inspirational description of her ever-profound feelings and their intellectual meanings?
Yeah. Okay.
When I walk down the Bogota streets and I feel the wind and the gray clouds above me I think of a day in New York where I was engulfed in a sea of graffiti that felt like being clasped in between an ocean of landscapes and so I stood still, taking it all in, in the same fashion one takes in a magnificent view of snow-covered mountains.
Psh. Happens all the time.
But I can’t deny the fact that Kate Chopin has a way with words. Just this chapter in itself has brought some paragraphs that merely describe a scene or a feeling, like all other paragraphs in all other types of novels, and yet the way she mends her words and crowns the imagery is just lovely.
Did I just say lovely?
I believe I did.
How tastelessly colonial of me.
Oh well.
But lovely, it is. The way you picture a girl walking through a green abyss of shoulder-high grass, delving her hands in front of her as if swimming breaststroke, carving a path through the field like she would were she swimming in the ocean. Almost as if she’s winding a path to somewhere, her path before her unknown, full of mystery and yet exhilarating at the same time.
Like life.
She then goes on to say, “ I could only see the stretch of green before me, and I felt as I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it. I don’t remember whether I was frightened or pleased. I must have been entertained.”
She describes a goal, an objective, a purpose that one has and yet seems so intangible and almost nonexistent from a certain vantage point. And maybe it seems like such an intricate and unmanageable target, having the road filled with obstacles that make it even less clear and more like an unsolvable puzzle. But while she feels frightened she remembers also a feeling of pleasure. As if the mystery and the ambiguity of it all may come as nerve wrecking but at the same time exhilarating and drenched in fulfillment in knowing you’re doing something to reach a certain goal.
Sometimes that summer she felt as if she were walking “idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided.”
She’s walking through life aimlessly, and even though prior chapters seem to have captured a glimpse into an event where she delves to find more about her self, she has yet to truly understand just who she is, and just where it is she wants to go.
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