Another Family’s Photos in the Middle of the Night, or the Value in Mystery
The other night, our 15-year-old daughter came down to our bedroom in deep distress. She had been taking a shower, and while she was in there, heard her desk chair topple. When she came out, she found a set of family photos on the floor near her bed — with no obvious source from which they had come. Also, they were not our family photos — nor did they come from any family we know. Instant terror — warranting waking her aging and early-to-bed parents and insisting that someone had broken into the house and deposited said photos, and knocked down her chair.
Our daughter quite likes dark humor and horror films, and also has a touch more anxiety than is ideal. She had also been in the process of re-reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a book with a hefty relationship to found photographs, albeit slightly more creepy ones. To her, this could only be: 1) a home invasion by 2) someone with malevolent intent who 3) was leaving the photos as some kind of coded message to convey 4) the deep danger we were all facing, which perhaps 5) was faced by this family and 6) hinted at by the photos.
So, this event represents a kind of Rorschach test of personality — because as I turned the photos over in my hands, groggy, mildly amused, and also mildly irritated — I looked at the dates on the photos (they are all about a decade old or more), tried to identify the locations (one I’m fairly certain is a nearby park called “Canyon Rim”; another is an area in Yellowstone National Park), wondered about the young girl who appears only in some photos and bears zero resemblance to any other family members. Was she a foster child? A friend of the daughter’s? I also thought about the sheer number of children in the photo and felt some empathy for the mother of those children, who I must admit looked remarkably sunny and not exhausted. Perhaps, I think, because at least some of the photos were taken on vacation.
The source of the photographs, as well as their subjects, is going to remain a mystery forever — we don’t have any way to figure out where the photographs came from within our house. It’s even possible that they fell out of the Peculiar Children book itself — layers and layers of coincidence if that were the case! And, this has me thinking about mystery in our lives, a little bit more — and the way that mystery can be something that leaves us with a sense of possibility and magic, rather than anxiety.
In Walker Percy’s essay “Loss of the Creature” (published in his book the Message in the Bottle), he writes about the way that those who value the kind of textbook knowledge or technical know-how and understanding too much (“the technician and the sophomore who loves his textbook”) actually don’t see things in an authentic way — and the tourists who seek an “authentic” experience are likewise blinded by their expectations and ideas about authenticity, and their desire to have their experience validated by an expert. It’s an essay that struck a deep chord with me in my early adulthood, and continues to do so today, although now I read with a bit more wincing at some of the more elitist sentiments in the text. But I think that the idea of a relationship between comfort and openness to not knowing, and the capacity to see more, or learn more, is not wrong.
I’m not suggesting we all return to some pristine, Edenic state of ignorance, and avoid seeking out the knowledge that apparently brought about all the sorrows and troubles of the modern world. I’m also hoping that we can avoid letting a steady diet of horrific scenarios, strife, and historic, systemic wrongs render all mysteries into existential threats.
I think, instead, about a few attitudes that may serve us well in the coming years of uncertainty and change. A humility about whether what we think we know applies to the current moment, or requires us to look with more openness, and adapt what we think is happening. A capacity to see the edges and boundaries of what we know as an invitation, rather than a threat or a warning. And a respect for the fact that our world contains other stories, just as complex, rich, and variably experienced as our own, even if all we can see of those stories are fragments and old photos.
