The City Of Probabilities
Andrew Bertaina After the wedding, we both attended graduate school in distant cities, waiting our turn for a chance to take a swing at life. I waited tables at a small Italian place while she studied environmental science at the University of Michigan, and she worked at a daycare while I studied English literature at a small school in Washington, D.C. We’d moved south then, in hopes of finding a place where we could both use our expertise, and I’d gotten a job teaching high school. Amy was floundering though, depressed at the lack of interest where we’d settled in the consequences of our environmental actions for various species of penguins. After her degree, she had high hopes of getting a job at a regulatory office, helping to keep streams and lakes clean of industrial and farmland run off, which was partially responsible for creating algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. The things you can learn, I’d say excitedly. Most of the things I learn are God-awful, she answered. But still, I said. Learning. Ever the enthusiastic schoolboy. For me, the relationship between facts and reality had been severed by the advanced study of literature. When you spend a whole semester trying to decode what Virginia Woolf was up to with all those lovely fragments in The Waves you lose the sense that anything you think or learn really has import outside of whether your interpretation is the correct one at the pub where everyone is drinking after class.