The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied⌠but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we donât need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.
One night in L.A., we were talking about the dreamy pleasures of old movies, and I told him I was impressed by the way that, in his own work, everyone is always filmed as if they were beautiful.
âYou know, I donât shoot them that way because I like beauty,â he told me. âI do it because I love them.â
How wild is it that every version of you probably exists still, somewhere, in someoneâs memory? The messy you, crying on the floor exists still in your mind. The happy, sun-soaked you, exists in your best friendâs memory. No part of you has died, all parts of us exist always, simultaneously and hidden.
Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don’t do
anything to make it impossible.
Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desireâto be loved, perhaps, or not to die.
I donât think I ever was quite naive enough to believe, even at twenty-one, that racially homogeneous societies were necessarily happier or more peaceful than ours simply by virtue of their homogeneity. My best friend during my youthânow my husbandâis himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes, and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government, and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.
Only by looking âoutward,â by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, he neednât bother with at all, by constantly asking himself all sorts of questions, and by throwing himself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making his voice count â only thus does one really become a person, a creator of the âorder of the spirit,â a being capable of a miracle: the re-creation of the world.
That old, dog-eared book containing âStory of Your Lifeâ lived on my desk during that stint, and I referenced it the way a priest returns to the holy bible. This is one of the great advantages of adaptation: You arenât alone.
Your question does make me think of an idea that I heard from the critic John Clute: the notion that certain scenarios are easily storyable, meaning suited to being told as a story, while others are not. I remember once having a conversation with him during which he noted that climate change, as a topic, was not very storyable. I was inclined to agree, but felt that a lot of ideas donât seem storyable until someone actually does it. I suppose one of the things that interests me as a writer is finding ways to make philosophical questions storyable.
How does one hate a country, or love one? I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Whatever the medium, the creative personâs task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.
What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?
What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.
Itâs possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possessâthe prison, the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited.
Spend less time crafting the perfect questions/ more time listening to and for the answers.
Instead of saying âI donât have timeâ try saying âitâs not a priority,â and see how that feels. Often, thatâs a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just donât want to. But other things are harder. Try it: âIâm not going to edit your rĂŠsumĂŠ, sweetie, because itâs not a priority.â âI donât go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.â If these phrases donât sit well, thatâs the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we donât like how weâre spending an hour, we can choose differently.
If you donât know how much you need, the default easily becomes âmore.â
Here is how you write a story: you take life, cut out pretty much all of it except for like four things, make up some other stuff, and then move all the stuff around, and just in general distort the world in all kinds of ways until it makes sense to our dumb primate brains.
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.
Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is ârefusing to look ahead, to be in the momentâ. And he says that a story puts its listener âin an eternal presentâ.
Forty-four years ago he was a charismatic presence, looking into the camera with piercing eyes and a frequent frown, as if constantly on the edge of disagreeing with himself.
When your kids are young, you have the wide-open opportunity to make your best life. As they get older, theyâll be much more resistant to change â theyâll want to cling to the familiar. So now is the time to think about your family culture â how you can make your daily life reflect your values.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Children learn from their families what to love and value. Some parents have the impression that they shouldnât impose their values on their children. But if parents donât teach their children values, the culture will. Good parents are what Ellen Goodman called counterculture. They counter the culture with deeper, richer values.