Lewin theory of everything

Flash back to a week ago last Monday, when I first crack open E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel." The first sentence of the novel announces, "On Memorial Day in 1967 Daniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Mass., in just under five hours." So here I am, reading a novel about myself, struggling to come to terms with the American system that condemned my Communist parents to death.

Five days later, my room is on fire.

Don't worry, Daniel Lewin and his roommate aren't in the room at the time and the damage is pretty minimal (for my part, only my clothes were smoke-damaged, and, in the coolest twist I've yet experienced, my copy of "The Book of Daniel" is drenched beyond recognition from the hose that put out the fire). Although I didn't lose much, if anything, fire ranks among God's least subtle symbols, and it definitely got me thinking.

Thinking about how, 24 hours earlier, I was freaking out about my "The Book of Daniel" assignment. How, that afternoon, I found out I didn't get the RA position I had been hoping for. How concerns like those were earth-shattering Friday, and totally insignificant Saturday morning.

I know we hear about privilege a lot in these pages, though maybe less and less as the lacrosse case becomes more and more distant, but it took a fire hot enough to torch my roommate's bookshelf to let me truly understand what that meant. Privilege is more than just general unfamiliarity with the word "no," and it's more than getting a break in your workload when you want it. It's more than being in that thin crust of the upper-middle class that's only still called middle class because we have no landed aristocracy, and my parents and grandparents worked their tushes off to make that money.

Privilege is our protagonist, Daniel Lewin, not being in the room that's ablaze at 8 a.m., when he'd normally be sleeping, or, in this case, would have been quietly suffocating from smoke or catching fire. Privilege is knowing that at any hour of any day, that extension cord could have become a point of origin in an electrical fire, but it chose the one rare moment there was no one in the room. Privilege is some bizarre quirk of pressurization that closed the door to my bedroom and helped contain that fire and keep the structural integrity of my room, and the rooms above and around mine, intact. Daniel Lewin had no right to any of these chances of fate; they were all privileges.

As my English professor, who assigned me "The Book of Daniel," would say, "This is no coincidence." Reading about the other Daniel Lewin's parents, sister and self get screwed by the system, as it were, and this fire-these things are not unrelated. Where 24 hours earlier I was lamenting RLHS not giving me the RA position, Eddie Hull was now personally securing a new apartment for me and my roommate. Within three hours after the fire, I was fully moved in, and the very same RLHS had fixed the windows of my old room. Oh, and I didn't die in the fire.

My worries of the day before were quibbles in the face of what I, Daniel Lewin, could have gone through, and what the fictional Daniel Lewin had experienced. Having the other Daniel Lewin's troubles, including, but not limited to, a suicidal sister, an FBI raid in his childhood and a life of constant psychological trauma, in the back of my head, that fire wasn't such a big deal.