But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” He has been drawn into an empathetic situation with the object of one of his many prejudices. This moment marks the turning point, as the narrator tells us pointedly, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.” He keeps his eyes closed even after, and the change within him has already taken place. After a time, Robert suggests that the narrator close his eyes as he draws. Just begin now like I’m telling you.” The narrator sketches a cathedral and Robert places his hand on the narrator’s, following the movements of his hand on the paper. The narrator wonders whether Robert knows what a cathedral is, and how he might possibly describe it to him. A documentary on the middle ages comes on, and at times the camera simply shows pictures of cathedrals. He expects Robert to retire to the guest room, but the man keeps him company as the wife dozes between them on the couch. The narrator tries to entertain Robert after a big dinner as his wife gets drowsy. The key to that change is a simple act of empathy. The change in the narrator, as he tempers his bigotry toward the handicapped, his passive racism, and his chauvinism toward his wife, is the payoff of the story. In the course of a long evening, with many drinks and a joint shared, the narrator comes to accept Robert, and then to be enlightened by him. The narrator is somewhat sullen about his wife’s intimacy-dating back to her first marriage-with this blind man with his big beard and loud voice. Robert, the blind man, and the narrator’s wife became friends when she worked as an aid for him and over the years they developed an intimacy by sending each other tapes on which they talked about their lives. In “Cathedral,” the taciturn narrator is pressed into hosting an old friend of his wife’s, a blind man whose own wife recently passed away. Something happens and, because of it, something (or someone) changes. It seems, on the evidence of the stories in this playlist, that, with rare exceptions such as Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” aside, the strongest short stories are the most straightforward. Raymond Carver’s most famous short story could not be simpler.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver