Creating Cathedrals

This line never fails to resonate with me: "My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything." But this year, in quarantine, that line devastated me as I read it aloud to my students, in that way we feel when we're laughing and crying at the same time, despair and hope mixed with exhaustion. I longed to identify with its hope, but couldn't shake the ambiguity that follows. Will the narrator wake a changed man or simply hungover? Then I realized that perhaps it doesn't matter.

Near the climax of Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral," a blind man, Robert, and our unnamed narrator get stoned to a TV documentary on cathedrals. Robert gently inquires about his host's spirituality, prompting the narrator's reply that he doesn't believe "in anything."

A man of petty grievances and prejudices, the narrator is a slave to his ego. He attempts to assuage his suffering with scotch, pot, and TV. He is disconnected from the world and himself. But over the course of the evening, the two break bread, get sloshed, draw a cathedral, and the narrator experiences a moment of transcendence.

I relate to the narrator's ennui and predilection for escapism as much as I strive to emulate Robert's empathy and patience. Carver uses the surface polarity of the two men to hint at that universal tension beneath the surface that keeps so many of us up at night; we all suffer, we all fall prey to our egos, and yet there is always the possibility of a moment when we can transcend these seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It's that possibility that keeps me reading, teaching, and breathing.

As they're drawing the cathedral together, hand upon hand, our narrator begins to let his guard down and allow the experience of the moment to consume him. Robert remarks, "Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that."

Carver's sublime understatement captures that fleeting quality that makes life meaningful even in our most despondent times, the ability to connect with another human, with an idea, with something greater than ourselves. As a teacher and student, I appreciate both characters' perspectives here. Akin to the narrator, I've had moments when someone I'd misjudged surprised me in previously unimaginable ways, expanding my perspective on the world in the process. Like Robert, I've realized experiential learning can soften the most resolute of barriers, that the Socratic method opens minds more than didacticism any day.

Robert and the narrator, two disparate creatures, create something beautiful together, and the narrator's moment of epiphany evinces my worldview: the acts of creation and interpretation are everything, and neither are truly solitary experiences. These two strange bedfellows, blind man and bigot, one hand upon the other, like writer and reader, create a new incarnation of something timeless, something meaningful, even if it is but a fleeting moment.