“Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”
This line, repeated throughout 10:04, reveals a theme shared by Whitman in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry – the theme of human experience. Both Lerner and Whitman opine the relationship between human experience and human connection. As Whitman looks at the Brooklyn Bridge and considers all the people that will follow the same path and consider the same views, the author of the novel within Lerner’s novel looks at a streetlamp and considers the people before him who have observed the same streetlamp. The lamp, like the Brooklyn Bridge, is a connection between people in different times “burning at once in the present and in various pasts” (67). Both Lerner and Whitman seem to believe that the human experience stays essentially the same, though Whitman focuses on future human experiences and Lerner focuses on past human experiences.
Lerner’s contemplation of human connection being attained through human experience is displayed more intimately in the narrator’s friendship with Alex. In this relationship, the author constantly shows that he and Alex are side by side: walking through Brooklyn, waiting out a storm, watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock. I think that Lerner does this to emphasize that the relationship between these two people is not anchored in experiencing each other, but in experiencing the world with each other.
I am a little perplexed by Lerner’s decision to have a novel within a novel and am not quite sure how to interpret this. My initial reaction is that Lerner is showing how art creates distance from reality (supported by the author realizing that he is checking the time while in a movie that shows the time) and this is the author’s way of coping with his medical diagnosis. But I’m not sure if that’s too topical an explanation. Regardless, I think the whole novel within a novel is pretty meta.
I love this analysis of human experience and human interaction. I too found that theme to stand out from the very beginning of the novel, as the narrator emphasizes his relationship with Alex as being less of a coupling and more of a “conjoining.” The idea of experiencing and navigating life in terms of a shared perspective, whether between the narrator and one other person or the narrator and his audience, is extremely Whitmanian and something we’ve focused on throughout our discussions.