On Description
If a depiction only distinguishes one thing from another, what else is lost?
Below is an excerpt of “On Description,” a new essay by Alfred Jung Lee in Issue 154 of The Believer and a recent Longreads Editor’s Pick, where it was described as “a remarkable puzzle box of an essay, one where description serves as both designation and disclosure.” Illustration by Lucas Burtin.
Not long ago, I was reading, in a magazine profile, a physical description of a person “who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows.” A photo of the person was included, and as I looked, I admired the efficiency of the description. Part of its efficiency was that it did not say that the man had two arms and a nose; these details were assumed, and if his appearance was otherwise, it would surely have been noted.
On the front page of The New York Times a few Sundays later was a description of an eight-year-old boy. The boy was reading the first Harry Potter book. He was learning how to cook, and liked to make grilled cheese sandwiches. He had been given twenty dollars to go to Starbucks with his siblings after school, which would mark his first time ordering on his own. These details might not have been worth noting, or made him distinguishable from any number of other boys, if he had not been killed that day at school by a mass shooter. While reflecting on these two characterizations, it occurred to me that when one describes something, one is also describing how the described deviates from the norm, and therefore also describing what is and is not normal.
Years ago, when I worked at a local newspaper and covered the morning crime calls, I arrived at the office early, while it was still dark, and called about twenty police departments in the Los Angeles area to ask for crime reports from overnight. The descriptions of the suspects followed a general formula: Usually included were race, gender, build, clothes. Among the descriptions my colleagues and I published around this time, using police reports, were “two gunmen dressed head to toe in black with black bandannas covering much of their faces”; “Latino wearing a white T-shirt and black cut-off shorts”; a man “described as between 25 and 30 years old… His most distinguishing feature is his hair, which is long on top and short on the bottom and pulled back in a ponytail.”
More recently, someone I’d never met was supposed to pick me up from an airport in the Midwest, and I offered a similarly succinct description of myself.
“Asian guy with too much luggage,” I texted.
I walked out of the airport, towing two suitcases, a carry-on, and a backpack. I heard a stranger shout my name; I was recognized before I’d even made it to the curb.
What varies commonly from person to person are size, shape, color. The greater the focus on what is most different, the better the description. It is likely to be noted if a person has a white beard or a black bandanna or a ponytail. Description draws attention to what is different about a thing: “Asian guy with too much luggage” is a good description in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; less so in Seoul.
In an online support group I attended for spousal loss, people often described their dead spouses. The descriptions were usually not physical, but they followed the same formula. The points of variation included their job: the dead spouse was an accountant, a store manager, a health-care worker. In personality they were “stubborn” or “loved to joke.” There was a woman who had liked motorcycles, a man who had been a tender father to kids that were not biologically his own. Sometimes we shared pictures.
Even as I looked at the pictures and listened to the descriptions, I found it hard to understand that they were once alive. When someone described their spouse as “stubborn,” I took it to mean their spouse had been more stubborn than the average person, but I wasn’t sure what this really said, any more than what a ponytail might tell me about someone on the street, other than that other people on the street did not have ponytails.
In a job interview one is asked to describe one’s strengths and weaknesses, one’s peaks and valleys of variation from the norm. If a description simply comes down to what is different about a thing, what can it really say? Most of a description goes unsaid rather than said; most everything is tossed into the pile of the unvarying, the uninteresting, the unremarkable.
After my spousal loss meetings, I would often drive to a local community college. My classmates and I would stand outside and gather around a tree.
“How would you describe this tree?” the instructor would ask.
“It’s about twenty feet high,” one of us would call out.
“It has a sort of arched habit,” another would say. “It has one main stem and not many stems.”
“Its leaves are arranged oppositely.”
“I would say near-oppositely,” the instructor would correct them.
We might then get out our dichotomous keys. These contained binary descriptions, a series of forking paths. If the leaves were lobed, we would turn to page 17; if not, we would turn to page 23; then there were another two paths, and so forth, until we arrived at one specific tree, an answer.
In this way, every week for a year, I learned plant identification as I trained for jobs in farming and horticulture. A basic distinction was whether the leaves were in an opposite or alternate arrangement. If they were opposite—that is, if the leaves were symmetrically arranged—the tree might be a maple or an ash. If not, it might be an apple or a sycamore. But such groupings were otherwise arbitrary. Whether the leaves were opposite or not, or curled at the edges or not, distinguished the species from one another, but revealed little else. I learned to differentiate a given number of plants, and to describe them with language, but this was not the same as knowing anything about the plants themselves.
Lately my reality has transformed without my noticing, and I have been struggling to describe it.
My father called me the other day from Korea, and it gave me a chance to try. I described the weather in my new hometown in the Midwest, the one where I’d been picked up at the airport, saying that it was in the seventies at the moment, late in the afternoon; that I was ten minutes from campus, where I’d decided to go back to school for a writing program, having given up on both horticulture and journalism; and that the city was hilly and not flat. If I had been talking to a friend on the street here, I would not have mentioned that it was late afternoon, or that the city was hilly and not flat. Description assumes a shared reality and communicates what is not shared; the less a person is familiar with what I am describing, the more that description is necessary.
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Related articles:
“The Alien and Mundane,” an essay by Emmett Rensin
“Russell Quinn in Conversation with Hopper Mills and Miranda July,” with an introduction by Hayden Bennett
“Ghosts,” an essay by Vauhini Vara
That Cedar Rapids and Seoul line is the whole problem of writing across a border. What ends up in the pile of the unremarkable depends entirely on where the reader is standing. I write São Paulo for readers in London, and half the work is guessing which details are still invisible to them and which ones have quietly become the point.