Toward Whatever

By PERDITA BUCHAN - New York Times: "We have "closure," not "conclusion." Baseball is played into October, A.T.M.'s mean money is always available, and surfing with the remote has replaced choosing a particular program to watch. In students' expository writing, precision and definition don't seem to matter in a world that values neither;

Time: Office hours. Place: Rutgers University, the top floor of the Victorian Gothic building that houses the Writing Program, sponsor of the dreaded "Expos" - English 101: Expository Writing.

THIS sentence is ambiguous," I said to the student sitting across the desk from me. He looked puzzled.

"You have to make what you mean clear," I explained. "This could be read in several different ways."

His face cleared.

"But that's good," he said amiably. "It's better if it has more meanings."

This was my second year of teaching the course. I was used to the Internet as library replacement, omnipresent cellphones and navel-grazing tank tops worn with confidence in December, but the embracing of ambiguity touched something much deeper.

Here I had been teaching expository writing as if precision and definition mattered in a world that valued neither. Although the introduction to the textbook I used in English 101 remarked "a high level of uncertainty" as a "constant feature" of contemporary life, I had taken it, as I am sure it was meant, in a metaphysical sense. We live in an uncertain world. Frankly, I don't remember anything else. People talk about the certainties of the 1950's, but my 1950's were spent in anxious expectation of nuclear cataclysm.

What I see now is something different: more like the movement from solid to liquid. And the language we use reflects it. These days, we have "closure," not "conclusion." Closure is sibilant, soft; conclusion snaps shut, leaving no way out. It doesn't suit a fluid world in which few things have clear boundaries or appointed times. Football is played into February and baseball into October. Supermarkets are open 24 hours. A.T.M.'s mean that money is always available. Television never goes off the air and surfing with the remote has largely replaced choosing a particular program to watch.

Thanks to the cellphone, conversations no longer take place at a specific time for a specific purpose. They are continuous - on the street, in the car and, yes, in the toilet stall. The speed of cars and jets cancels the exacting sense of distance: a round trip of 160 miles from my house in New Jersey to visit family in Philadelphia would have taken at least eight days by covered wagon.

Not even the seasons are absolute, given heating and air-conditioning. The Internet rambles around somewhere in cyberspace, leading into a maze of connections, never finite, always offering another choice. Most conversation stutters with tentative tics ("like" and "you know"), prompts for affirmation, as though no one wants to risk offending with a definite statement.

As a teacher, I first felt this shift on the little verbal bridge of the preposition. I couldn't say at what point "toward" first began to subsume all other prepositions. When I was teaching high school, it leaked into the papers my students wrote about literature. Writers now had attitudes toward their characters. Those characters had feelings toward other characters or places or ideas. They strove toward riches or social position. Jane Eyre even showed her love toward Mr. Rochester, her hesitation understandable, perhaps, given his equivocal position. I suppose Mr. Rochester did have conflicting feelings toward his mad wife; at least he went toward the attic many more times than he actually went up there. When I began teaching college writing, I found that "toward" also haunted the opinion essay. Discussing the genetic engineering of crops, a student wrote that "one of the only disadvantages toward farmers" was that the Colorado potato beetle might "gain resistance toward bt."

"Vague," I penciled in the margin. "Use a more precise preposition." Perplexed, she asked me what I meant.

Was precision simply too stuffy, I wondered, carrying with it the rigid attitudes and expectations of an old-fashioned world, a world where everything and everyone stood in clear relation to everything and everyone else? Or was it simply irrelevant? If you think about it, this is a "toward" world. We move toward war, toward peace, toward a new definition of religion, of the literary canon, of race, of gender.

I can't help feeling, though, that "toward" often provides the appearance of effort without the demand of actually getting to or by or around something. "Toward" never declares itself, whether the question is geographic or emotional. I'm driving toward New York; I am friendly toward others. I may never get to New York, and my friendliness may remain a sort of radiance spilling into the crowd. How I feel about my sister can be pretty specific at any given time; how I feel toward her is soft-edged, glancing.

Where is this going? Will we take a vacation toward California? That would mean we would never have to get there. We could stop in St. Louis or Salt Lake City or Las Vegas. It will be a world of near misses and serendipitous encounters. Or no encounters at all. I walk toward you, you walk toward me - we may never meet.

In grade school, we learned about prepositions through the mnemonic of the plane and the cloud (above, below, through) or the squirrel and the tree (up, down, around). In this world, I imagine the plane will voyage endlessly toward the distant cloud as the squirrel will run forever toward an unreachable tree. When you go toward something, you can always veer off in another direction - toward a bigger cloud or a more appealing tree. The problem is that to reach a destination you have to head straight for it, making your way around, through or over those obstacles that get in your way, whether they be clouds, trees or teachers of "Expos."

Perdita Buchan taught writing at Rutgers from 2001 to 2004. The author of two novels, she is working on a book about utopian communities in New Jersey."