Farewell Virgil, My Guide

The first eleven or twelve decades burst with beauty. I never had enough time or money in my life to see the Museo del Prado, read George Eliot’s collected works, or attend all the Tony-winning musicals of a given year (2016 excepted, but it’s easier when all your statue are belong to Hamilton). To have the House of Earth’s Collected Works, all on the same cloud, was by far the most overwhelming part of the afterlife. I could hardly have begun to navigate it without my Virgil 4.7: the best guide an artistically inclined soul could ask for, at least until the Virgil 5.0 drops in a century or so.

In those decades I saw, listened to, and read everything I ever wanted to experience. After that I read the Twilight series. The well was clearly dry, but I needed fresh water and would turn over any stone, no matter how forbidding. In great pain, I began walking into a theatre screening Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, but my Virgil realized what was happening.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“What else is there?”

“Come with me,” Virgil said. Within moments, I saw a whole other structure: The House of Earth Works that Weren’t.

“What is this?” I asked.

“For all of humanity’s creative output,” he explained, “there should have been more. This is where we hold it. I recommend John Keats’ Hyperion, as a starting point.”

The simulated heart in my chest pounded rapidly. “Hyperion? I can read the Hyperion Keats would have written if he lived?”

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you show me this before, Virgil?”

“You will understand,” he said.

And I did. It was as gorgeous as I had dreamed, but there was a sadness to each line. I felt not only the beauty, but the loss of the Earth that could not read such a masterwork. I could never have borne such sadness when I first arrived in heaven; I really did need every artwork I had experienced to prepare me for this new emotion.

I found out who killed Edwin Drood, and whom Austen would have married off in Sanditon. I heard Mozart’s completed Requiem. I saw the works of Basquiat, ages 28-64. I felt wonder again, always weighted with the bittersweet emotion of what untimely death had denied Earth.

“There’s more,” Virgil said, “now that you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To move past the death works. For the works that humans denied themselves,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “I shall start small. You watched Glee on television, correct?”

“Is this some sort of test to see if I actually deserve to be here?” Virgil looked at me quizzically. “OK, yes, I watched Glee.”

“We have seasons 7-10 here.”

“There were only six!”

“There would have been a revival.”

“Oh,” I said, “but then Cory Monteith died.”

“And Mark Salling and Naya Rivera, but no. It was Kevin McHale.”

“Artie died?”

Virgil sighed again. “No – he even crowned his career with an appearance on Nailed It. But he was not, in fact, a disabled gentleman in need of a wheelchair, and networks believed that reviving the series with McHale would lead to charges of ableism.”

“I mean, there are disabled actors who could have played that role, and I get that. But they also cast Lauren Potter to play Becky instead of having someone fake Down Syndrome. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“These debates grew heated and permitted no such nuance or balancing of scales. Now, knowing that there could have been four more seasons of Glee with older cast members, do you feel the loss of what humans cost themselves?”

I thought hard – mostly to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. “I mean… no?”

“But now you understand the Principle Principles Principle, and being slightly prepared, this will oppress you less mightily,” Virgil said. “Here,” and he handed me An Alabama Tragedy, by DeAndre Morris.

“Who’s DeAndre Morris?” I asked.

Virgil only tapped the cover. I read. The original Virgil would have slowed me down with regular commentary in unrhymed dactylic hexameter, and even Dante’s Virgil 2.0 couldn’t have resisted the odd burst of terza rima, but my trusty 4.7 knew how to shut up, so I finished before long.

Then I read An Alabama Tragedy again. And a third time.

“This book…”

“Yes,” Virgil commiserated. “I know.”

“I think it’s the great American novel.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “Because it never was.”

“What happened? Could it have been a race thing? I mean, I just can’t see it—I know I’m a white guy from the North, but the complexity here, the honesty and compassion… could this really have offended someone?”

“No. The book’s racial politics are impeccable as they are insightful.”

“Then what?”

Virgil sighed, for once with more pathos than pedantry. “DeAndre Morris never wrote it. The inspiration for An Alabama Tragedy would have been Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, had DeAndre read it. He would have loved and criticized it in equal measure as he grew, and he would have vowed to write his own narrative about an unjust trial one day. But his school removed it from the ninth grade curriculum.”

“Atticus and the white savior thing? Racial slurs?”

“Yes,” Virgil answered. “The complaining parents also took issue with elevating a white woman’s novel so that it became the alpha and omega of American racial literature.”

“Look, the book gives an incomplete picture and has its issues, but it’s still a great work of art,” I protested. “Wasn’t there another solution beside cutting it entirely?”

“Of course,” Virgil said. “The parents and principal met with the teacher, who gave assurances that other material would be taught alongside Mockingbird – Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a Randall Kennedy essay on language, an article considering how Go Set a Watchman darkens Atticus’s character. One parent was satisfied. One remained angry—her daughter would have been provided an alternate text, and the parent sought another school for the following year. But the remainder of the class, including DeAndre Morris, would have read To Kill a Mockingbird alongside the other texts."

“Why didn’t they?”

“Word of the contextual lessons spread on social media, and at the next school board meeting, a few other parents demanded to know why the school had cancelled Atticus Finch.”

“Which is their right,” I pointed out, “just like those other parents had the right to raise their objections.”

“They held a ‘Rally for Atticus’ across the street from the school. The predominately-white group read the whole novel aloud,” Virgil said. “Every word of it: slurs included. They used a bullhorn.”

“Oh.”

“At that point, everyone took a side. Fights moved from social media to the hallways. With the political conflict over the novel obliterating its intended theme, the school sidelined it. Lee’s novel never enthralled and troubled DeAndre Morris, and the world lost An Alabama Tragedy. Morris became an investment banker.”

I felt it fully now: the ache of what might have been. I was nearly afraid to ask. “Is this the worst of it, Virgil? The worst loss?”

He shook his venerable head. “Follow me.”

We passed through a hall of paintings and assemblages I had never seen, with music I had never heard softly playing, and I felt a trickle descend from my eye. I hadn’t known eyes in heaven could still do that.

We halted outside a security door with a keypad. “This is the greatest loss,” Virgil said. “The most lamentable artistic victim of what was termed ‘cancel culture’ is held behind that door. You must enter the security code of your own free will; I am forbidden.”

“Why?”

Virgil said nothing.

“What is the code?” But I found I knew it after all, somehow, strange though the symbols on the keypad were. I stepped into the darkness, Virgil followed while a light snapped on, and I saw an enormous poster. Virgil knelt in reverence while I froze with surprise.

“Umm… Virgil?”

He knelt dumbly.

“There seems to have been some mistake. This existed. I saw this movie while I was still alive.”

“You did not,” he said, still genuflecting. “Look closer and see what was taken from you.”

I had not noticed at first, but the Space Jam 2 poster did have a difference. “Do you mean…” I scratched my head. “Are you talking about the D cups on Lola Bunny?”

Virgil had this weird look in his eyes when he finally turned them on Lola Bunny. I didn’t think I’d ever seen it before, until I remembered him taking me to the Secret Museum of art from Pompeii where he examined that statue of Pan with the goat. “If only the naysayers had not demanded her shapely form be flattened…” he said. “She would have been this perfection.”

“My dude, she’s a curvy rabbit.”

“She’s an apotheosis!” he countered, gesturing emphatically with his robed arm. “In Love and Death in the American Novel, your critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women. Lola Bunny is the most complete encapsulation of sexuality your American culture could ever have produced. She is a vision!”

“That sounded insulting. Virgil, should I be insulted?”

“She would have been a new archetype. She could have inspired so much… behold!”

A vast series of screens flicked on around us, all depicting Lola Bunny. At least half seemed to be tuned to PornHub.

Who was I to judge? I stood for a moment while Virgil gazed raptly at sundry unprintable acts performed by and upon an anthropomorphized rabbit. I reflected, and then I left Virgil 4.7 in the eternal bliss of his bunny porn.

My guide had left me with many experiences and more questions, like all great teachers. What common ground can be found among people whose most foundational perceptions clash? How do we draw the shifting lines of propriety, and what do those demarcations cost us? Who watches the watchmen? And in the end, who among us can truly claim qualification to weigh healthy body images for children against the sexual gratification of a facsimile Roman poet?

I could say with certainty only that I would reread An Alabama Tragedy often, and that I would mourn literature’s loss of it each time. And whenever I receive my Virgil 5.0, I’m keeping him the hell away from Space Jam 2.