Page 32 of Close Reading

Like most arguments that matter, it starts about something else.

Priya reads a passage I wrote and says, “This is too dense.”

“It’s rigorous,” I say.

“It’s rigorous and dense. These are not mutually exclusive, and in this case they are both true.”

“The argument requires precision.”

“The argument requires an audience. You’ve buried the insight under three layers of academic scaffolding that the reader has to excavate before they can find the point. Most readers won’t excavate. Most readers will read the first paragraph, decide it’s impenetrable, and move on. And they will be wrong to move on, but they will do it, and the argument will die in a journal that seventeen people read.”

“Seventeen specialists whose assessment of the work determines its scholarly impact.”

“Seventeen specialists who already agree with you. That isn’t persuasion, Margot. That’s an echo chamber with a peer-review process.”

I set my pen down. “The solution is not to simplify the argument,” I say. “The solution is to trust the reader to meet the work where it is.”

“The solution is to trust the argument enough to let it speak in a register that doesn’t require a graduate degree to parse. The strongest ideas don’t need fortification. They need⁠—”

“A door. I remember. You said that in our first meeting. Everything needs a door.”

“Everything needs a door if you want someone to walk through it.”

“And if the room is not intended for casual visitors? If the room is built for people who have done the work to enter it? Not every space needs to be accessible to everyone. Some spaces are built for specific audiences, and the specificity is the point.”

She leans back in her chair. Her arms are crossed. She has not crossed her arms with me before. The crossing changes the geometry of her upper body. The forearms pressed against her chest, the shoulders rounded slightly inward, gathering herself rather than opening, and the change from open to gathered is— I notice it. I notice the arms and the crossing and the way the crossing compresses the fabric of her blouse against her skin and I am going to focus on the argument.

“You’re not describing rigor,” she says. Her voice is even, but the evenness is effortful. “You’re describing a moat. You are building a moat around your ideas and calling it scholarship, and the moat keeps people out, and you are more comfortable with the keeping-out than you are willing to examine.”

The sentence hits.

“You’re pushing me to write something I don’t write,” I say. “I don’t write accessible summaries of complex ideas for people who haven’t done the reading.”

“I’m not asking you to summarize. I’m asking you to translate.”

“Translation always loses something.”

“Isolation always loses more.”

The air goes out of the room. She meant it about the writing and she meant it about me.

Something detonates in my chest. The anger is the surface, manageable. Underneath the anger is the thing the anger is protecting: the recognition that she has seen me. She has identified the place where my work and my self-protection are indistinguishable, and she has pressed on it. The pressing is not cruel. It is exact.

She is agitated. She pushes back from her desk and stands, and the standing brings her closer to me, not intentionally, not strategically, just the physics of a small room and a person who needs to move.

She reaches up and pulls off her sweater.

The gesture is practical. The room is warm, the argument has been going for twenty minutes and the Chemex is on and the lamp is generating heat and the air between us has its own temperature. She is warm and she is removing a layer, just like anyone removes a layer, a completely ordinary thing that happens in rooms where the temperature has risen.

The sweater comes off over her head and her blouse untucks on one side, a small displacement, the fabric riding up for a moment, exposing a strip of skin at her hip, soft skin over solid bone. One second. She pulls the blouse down. The skin disappears.

My mind produces the next frames: the blouse untucking further, the fabric riding up, the skin extending from the hip to the curve of her waist to the ribs. The shape of her body inside the blouse becoming the body without the blouse. The image is specific, not a fantasy but an extrapolation, my mind completing a sequence it was not asked to complete with the same involuntary precision I bring to completing a sentence or a syllogism or any other pattern my mind has been trained to follow to its conclusion.

The conclusion involves Priya’s bare skin from the hip to the shoulder, and the image is vivid and unwelcome, and I am in the middle of an argument.

I shut it down.

It is a physical act. I feel it happen like a door closing, the latch engaging, the mechanism doing its work. The image retreats. The heat does not retreat. The heat stays because the heat has two sources, and I can close the door on one of them but the other—the anger, the argument, the woman standing in front of me with her blouse tucked back in and her sweater draped over her chair—the other is still here, still speaking, still looking at me with her precise and unrelenting gaze.