Best of Week: Epiphany

This week, I was very fond of the themes brought up during the discussion of the short story, "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. My mind was particularly stimulated by the question about the nature of epiphany. In the story, the narrator experiences somewhat of an epiphany while drawing a cathedral to show the blind man, Robert, what the majestic building looks like. In the end, he doesn't have to open his eyes to know that he created mastery and expressed himself, and he keeps his eyes shut when he tells Robert that the drawing is "really something". This anticlimactic ending to the story would disappoint most, but it says a lot about the way people experience abrupt changes of mind.

I keep thinking about how epiphany doesn't happen like it does on the TV show House. People don't stop mid-sentence with a look of mind-blowing comprehension on their face, then drop what they're doing to go implement their epiphany, like Dr. House is known to do. What more often happens is that someone has a minor "aha!" moment in their head and keeps it there, continuing to do whatever they were doing in the way they were doing it. But that little "aha!" causes bigger changes in their life when faced with similar situations in the future. After all, an epiphany is a change of mind or worldview, and in the narrator's case, it was in the way he views the blind and the way he expresses himself.

Therefore, I believe that it is a fallacy that an epiphany is this huge and monumental moment in your life when everything changes forever. People can experience many epiphanies which shape the way they interact with their surroundings. And they don't even have to be positive realizations; I recently had the epiphany that I'm often needlessly stubborn and probably won't ever change. But now at least I realize this, because sometimes knowing something bad about yourself is better than not knowing anything about yourself.

From this, I have decided that I like the way "Cathedral" ended. As a reader, I knew that the narrator had experienced an epiphany, even if his last statement was in his typical underwhelmed style. And I know that if the story were to continue, we would see the implementation of this epiphany in his life, hopefully for the better. I think we should all learn a lesson from the narrator and be more aware of the little epiphanies in out life.