Perception (Again)

APRIL 14, 2006—William Sloan Coffin passed away Wednesday, and today WETA in Washington, D.C., rebroadcast a conversation he'd had with Terry Gross. He recounted how, when he was chaplain at Yale and young men were turning in their draft cards to him, he was told that New York's Riverside Church was considering him as their next pastor. He admitted to a moment’s pause as he realized he would have to curtail his “radical” activities for causes he believed in if the church was going to take him seriously as a candidate. But he chose not to, and, in his words, Rivrside passed on him for another nine years. During the 1960s, Coffin was known for objecting to the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights, and in general championing the powerless in the face of power, both at Yale and abroad.

Roughly forty years later, in a short story published by The New Yorker exactly five months ago [“The Best Year of My Life,” November 14, 2005], Paul Theroux recalls a year he spent in Puerto Rico with a young woman hiding out from both their parents while she had his baby. They were both students at UMass in Amherst at the time and didn’t have much money, so they rented a room in Old San Juan while young Paul worked as a waiter. “One day,” writes Theroux, “I saw a man I recognized from a provocative political lecture he had given in Amherst, at the time when Mona and I were living together there. He was William Sloane Coffin, a well-known radical, walking with two other men. They pushed past us, talking, and entered La Zaragozana, and, because that was a restaurant we couldn’t afford, I stopped viewing him as a radical. He was a privileged man from the other world.”

Again, perception versus reality versus perception, but which is real? One's perception of another's reality can become an entirely different reality altogether simply as it is perceived by yet another. And the worm is always turning.