Sometimes I stare, sometimes it's me

I had someone at the wedding I attended tonight compare me to the eponymous protagonist of Good Will Hunting (1997). She's like that scene, "I read your book last night." Nine hundred pages, she read it last night. Boom-boom-boom. It's incredible. I feel totally inadequate, talking to you. I'm serious. I feel about this big . . . This was the brother-in-law of the bride, a registered nurse whom I had met last year at his own wedding, introducing me to another friend of his. I didn't remember that he'd seen me reading. But I show up most places with a book—to this wedding, it was David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo; to dinner last night, Patricia McKillip's The Changeling Sea; Jaco Van Dormael's The Eighth Day & Toto the Hero to a doctor's appointment the day before—so it was nothing remarkable, particularly since my eventual reaction to two hundred wedding guests attempting to hold each their own conversation at escalating volume in a crowded ballroom is to stuff Kleenex in my ears and read whatever I happen to have brought with me. I do not recharge from the company of other people. I have always read in blocks and paragraphs and pages, not line-by-line. He wasn't making fun of me.

I never feel like Will Hunting. I feel like the professor, who has won the Fields Medal and this means only that he is good enough to recognize the greatness he does not possess. And when it comes to that, it's only—it's just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I'm one of them. Or envious Salieri, if you believe Pushkin and Peter Shaffer; though God is nowhere in it for me. Grazie, Signore! It is to the credit of intelligent people, my father repeats, that they are aware of the limits of their own intelligence and constantly frustrated by them. Only idiots think they know it all. This statement is usually accompanied with a story about television. And I take comfort, if that is the right word, in the fact that the universe is a far stranger place than I will probably ever wrap my head around: to learn that it was after all as neat and orderly as Dante's circles of hell and wheeling paradise, a creationist's magnificent clockwork with not a cog or a counterweight out of place, would depress me beyond words. So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe. But off the cosmic scale, I pull the strings of a smile and tell the nurse, yeah, so what? I'd be useless in an emergency room. That which I can do, I dismiss. I revere what is outside my scope. It is very unhelpful.

It is not always true, either. But it is tonight. I'm on my knees staring at a half-burned paper and I don't wish I didn't know that the instrument of God is somewhere out there, playing: I wish I believed that occasionally it was me.