The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 11: October 18

Today I sat on the steps to the library and wrote e-mail replies on my computer. I was replying to replies to replies. Where is the question that began all of these replies? Was there ever a question?

A tourist approached me. She was Japanese. She wore a white business suit; she held an iPhone. A lot of tourists visit this campus. What are they here to see? Often they ask my permission to take pictures of my children playing on the wheelchair ramp, which suggests even they may not know why they’re here. A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it’s just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin.

The Japanese woman, I assumed, wanted me to take her picture in front of a statue. I checked the direction of the sun. I considered telling her to pose in front of a smaller library, because I had taken a lot of successful pictures of tourists there.

Instead the woman asked me, “Do you imagine God as a woman?”

I took her question seriously. I didn’t want to be dismissive or rude and thus reflect badly on my city or my country. I always feel a keen responsibility to be a good host. Her question better explained, too, why she was on campus. Maybe she thought she’d strike up a more interesting conversation with a stranger she found at a university rather than one she found in, say, Carnegie Deli. What is the place of man in the universe? What determines the fate of the individual? Where, spiritually speaking, is the nearest subway?

I also considered the possibility that she was part of a conceptual art piece, maybe an “interpreter” hired by the artist Tino Sehgal. Sehgal did a piece recently at the Guggenheim called This Progress in which interpreters — one of them was my friend’s teen son — asked museum visitors questions like “What is progress?” and followed them up the museum’s spiral ramp until another interpreter took over. Maybe Sehgal’s new work was being secretly unfurled over campuses of higher learning. Maybe, in fact, this woman was not an interpreter herself but part of the conceptual art advance team. Maybe I was being interviewed for an interpreter position.

Now a job was on the line. I love to get jobs. Getting jobs is like winning domestic arguments on a grand scale, and then getting paid for it.

So. Did I imagine God as a woman? I didn’t. When urged to envision God, or the aura God exudes, I understood that aura as male, maybe because the only people who use the word “God” in a question such as the one I was asked by the Japanese woman tend to be Christian. But I didn’t want to give the Japanese woman this hackneyed answer. I would never be hired.

Instead I said, “I’m not sure.”

“According to Scripture,” the Japanese woman said, “God is referred to as both Our Father and Our Mother.”

“Oh,” I said. Now I was wondering: maybe she was a feminist activist?

The Japanese woman could see I was confused. I was clearly a novice. I was not the erudite liberal arts student/professor she’d hoped to encounter.

She regarded me with sympathy.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked.

I heard this question as “Do you even know who God is?”

I was in too deep. I didn’t have answers to her questions. I had too much e-mail to answer to answer her questions. I was no interpreter. I already had a job.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to answer your questions today.”