A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Read Online Free PDF

something.
    My favorite book growing up was something called the
Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations
. It was given to me at a formative age and I read it cover to cover. It was an anthology of humorous quotations taken completely out of context, a sculpture composed entirely of elbows.
    Do you want to know what Oscar Wilde said about smoking? I can tell you without even turning on my phone. (“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and leaves oneunsatisfied.”) Do know want to know what George Bernard Shaw said about self-plagiarism? “I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.” You want P. J. O’Rourke’s advice about when to send funny cards? “Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.” I’ve got all of this at the tip of my tongue.
    Now it makes a kind of sense.
    But back then it didn’t.
    I read it cover to cover, over and over. I read all the naughty sections, where I learned everything that I knew about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. “Sex is bad for one, but it’s good for two,” I quipped. “For three, it’s fantastic.” I didn’t realize why some of it was naughty or why much of it was funny. But I knew that, on the occasions listed, those would be the words called for.
    I had the words all ready to go. All I needed were the opportunities to use them. If I discovered love, I was supposed to agree with P. G. Wodehouse, that it “seems to pump you full of vitamins. I feel as if my shoes were right and my hat was right and someone had left me ten thousand a year.”
    The quips were like bread crumbs strewn through literature for me to find. As I read along, there, in the middle of the page, would be a quotation that I recognized, beckoning me forward. There was that thing Oscar Wilde had said about marriage. There, on page 89, that Evelyn Waugh quip about sex and dentists. (“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”) All of it made a little more sense when I saw where it fit.
    The picture filled in, slowly. The words weren’t always right. They didn’t always defuse the situation with a laugh, the way I’d hoped.
    There is a certain awkwardness inherent in coming at life book-first.
    Life was a word whose definition I knew but I had never seen used in context.
    That tends to lead to mispronunciations. And then someone has to take you aside and say, “No, it’s not Penile-ope, it’s Penelope.” “It’s Rafe Fines, not Ralph Fee-yennis.” (I’m pretty sure that one is on him, though.)
    •   •   •
    I had all the dictionary knowledge I could have wanted. What I needed was context. I had to go out there and live. I had to use all these words in sentences.
    Reality comes on with a jolt. The way you imagine that things will be and the way they actually are go gliding toward each other like the
Titanic
into the general vicinity of an iceberg. Growing up is the process of watching them collide.
    And that’s plenty awkward.
    The only way I could handle it was to turn back around and feed it back onto the page again. On the page, marshaled in words, it made a kind of sense. On the page, I could almost see a logic to it. It had themes. It was awkward but it was also all the other things that life is—beautiful in unexpected ways, full of those strange gifts that the universe sends you on mornings that are otherwise rotten, when you walk past a statue that is supposed to be a majestic lion and notice it looks constipated instead, when you spot an unexpected purple house, when you hear a favorite character’s name being called out over the PA system at an airport and it feels like a private joke. The trick was to notice these parts and save them from the wreckage.
    So. I swam out to the lifeboats, and began dragging the words onto the beach, shuddering, with towels around their shoulders, and waited to see what they’d look like when they