Rocks from the basement of time

For the past month I have been doing research for a short class I'm teaching in August. In the opening of my Norton Anthology to Short Fiction, there is a "Talking about Fiction" section that describes why knowing how pick apart certain aspects of a story is useful and it gives examples. Under the sub-heading of "Indirection" is an example of its meaning, just like the examples they give for all the other sub-sections, but this one has the most beautiful, complete little story that you should look up if you have the desire. It's called "Important Things" by Barbara L. Greenberg. The definition of the technique Indirection is complicated, but the editor explained it so beautifully that I felt the need to post it here:

"Most stories - much larger than this one in bulk - stir up questions of right and wrong, of what is worth living for and dying for. Truly these are "important things," and authors work with all their skill to guide us to a point where the inexpressible can be sensed. It is the best tactic of fiction to move circuitously to the point of revelation. Then those readers who have followed the path of indirections complete the reading transaction by going somewhat farther than they have been led, by drawing from themselves the impassioned judgment that will make the story whole" Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Sixth Edition, p. xxx.

I agree, Norton. Indirection, then, must be my favorite part of a good story - the feeling or the sense that there is something more behind the words, something that is tugging at you from the roots of emotion, from the cellars of the collective human experience. And this something is inexpressible! Words are inadequate. Even the word to describe the technique that produces this sense - Indirection - is inadequate.

But how, then, if no words can describe, do I convince my Japanese students that when Norman Maclean says at the end of A River Runs Through It, "I am haunted by waters" that he means to fill you with the same deep regret and ache that is felt not from "waters" but from the loss of something that was fleeting and beautiful? Will they sense the indirection? Will they understand that although the ending's tone is filled with regret, the beauty of the words, the carefully enshrined description of Paul's last fish, have endowed Paul, the brother who is incapable of being understood, with an immortality as a man who thought like a fish, who became a river, who left his brother with a sense of what is beautiful, with a sense of what is worth living for?

I don't know if they will sense it. Or even if they care to. But I have to teach it. With books piled everywhere around my room, this one by Norman Maclean lays open on my window sill to the last pages of the story, its words facing the evening sky, feeling the after-storm coolness of the air from the open window. The cracking wooden sill scratches its spine. Its pages don't bother a flutter. And its words have left me with that sense of something more beneath the words.

Something inexpressible.