Smoothness

On the road there are peaks and valleys of landscapes and emotions, sharp points of pain and joy surrounding long stretches of road and time. Being home means, I think, that those peaks and points are rounded off as you settle into a routine. Surprises are fewer because you know the road, and you know what to expect because you are seeing the same people and landscapes most of the time. My walks now are familiar, and I can name almost all the streets as I pass and cross them. I find my way around my town now by instinct instead of using Penelope, and I can anticipate what is coming up by virtue of the landmarks that I have come to know. The same is true in my work as I have come to learn the rhythms of Cool University and the people and structures that set those rhythms. I know the shortcut to the office of student life, I know where my friend smokes his cigarettes outside, and I know how to get into my building without being seen by everyone. It’s all very good, and it means once again that this is looking like home. I still resist calling it Home because it would be too soon for that, and only time and the universe will decide that for me. But the rough edges are gone, and everything is now seems to be about smoothness.

Our desire for smoothness is ancient and can be found in our efforts to figure out the world and make it work for us. In other words smoothness is the root desire of culture, the sanding down of the rough textures of existence to make our lives glide more easily in a universe that appears hostile at times. That hostility takes the form of roughness, both literal and metaphorical. Smoothness, then, is a result of culture’s effect on nature, and time’s effect on us. River rocks hold a special aesthetic for me and for other people too from what I can tell. When we pick one up, we admire its smoothness. It fits so nicely into our hand, and we caress the surface looking for resistance and finding pleasure in its absence. Smoothness means contentment, a freedom from disruption and sharp turns.

While smoothness is ancient, it is also contemporary, and in thinking about smoothness today, I was reminded of an excellent essay on the topic by Mark Kingwell in Harper’s Magazine several years ago titled “Against Smoothness.” Penelope herself is smooth, a sleek, blue bullet slicing through the California air. My water bottle is smooth, as are my lamps, my iPod, and, of course, my iPhone. My Roomba looks smooth like a spaceship, and if you have an Airport Base Station, you know that it looks exactly like a UFO and feels like a river rock. It is as if technology itself has encoded the meaning of smoothness into its form. Technology is both the medium and the message of smoothness because it smoothes the rough and mundane textures of our existence, taking away from us tedious and disruptive tasks such as vacuuming and communicating and representing its own achievement in its very design. And it wasn’t always so. Automobiles have been, throughout their history, more rough than smooth, and it is only in the last decade that rounded corners and sleekness have become de rigueur. Smoothness is the very essence of cool because it means that we have rounded off the rough edges of our lives.

But smoothness beguiles. It is a trick, a momentary achievement of culture over nature, an artifice that will not hold. Our deepest meaning isn’t smooth; it is rough. Rounding corners is not much different from cutting corners, and sailing through life without resistance is not what makes us human. In fact, after a certain point, smoothness represents a loss of humanity, a glossing over of the texture of life that is itself the sacred. The sacred isn’t smooth; it is rough. The sacred isn’t sleek; it has points and edges. The sacred is a disruption in the everyday; smoothness is the everyday. Two literary examples come to mind when I think of smoothness, and neither is positive. In James Dickey’s Deliverance, there is a scene where Ed and Lewis are discussing life, and Ed, the supposedly satisfied city-dweller, is arguing that sliding through life is just fine with him. He says, “Sliding is living anti-friction. Or, no, sliding is living by anti-friction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.” Readers of the novel will recall that Ed doesn’t really believe himself here, or he wouldn’t have been on that river at all with Lewis, a man who distrusts smoothness. One of my favorite lines in the book is when Lewis is talking about Bobby, the insurance salesman, and Lewis tells Ed “I don’t believe in insurance. There’s no risk.” Of course Walt Whitman knew about the dangers of smoothness as well, and wrote: “Listen! I will be honest with you; I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.” You don’t take the “long, brown path” before you because it is smooth, and at several points in “Song of the Open Road,” Walt notes that the open road is not for the faint of heart:

Allons! yet take warning!
He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance;
None may come to the trial, till he or she bring courage and health.

Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself;
Only those may come, who come in sweet and determin’d bodies

As I said, smoothness is good. It is a groove. It is comfort. But a groove is another word for a rut, and comfort is the opposite of the sacred. Smoothness should be the outcome of a journey, not the substitute for one. It should be appreciated for what it is and when it occurs, like a rock in a river that water washes over. But that rock doesn’t move; the river does. So while I am enjoying my smoothness, I know not to make too much of it. Maybe that’s why I like to go to the mountains so much: it reminds me that there are rough, new prizes to be won, even when I think things are going smoothly. It’s extremely seductive to believe that having completed a journey, one is due a reward. Not so. There are no rewards; there is only the open road, and sometimes that road is smooth. After the Great Plains, however, come the Rocky Mountains, and smoothness will always be put into relief by roughness to remind us that life is both and that we have to keep moving to experience the sacred.