tenth of december: the swell and crash of a good short story

 From Tenth of December by George Saunders:

What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn't died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn't dead. He'd killed no one. Ha! Somehow he'd got it all back. Everything was good now, everything was-- 

The woman reach down, touched his scar. 

Oh, wow, ouch, she said. You didn't do that out there, did you? 

At this he remembered that the brown spot was as much in his head as ever. 

Oh, Lord, there was still all that to go through. 

Did he still want it? Did he still want to live? 

Yes, yes, oh, God, yes, please.

The thing - or, I should say, one of the many things - I love about short stories is how intense they can be. All crammed into something to be read in one sitting. So you, the reader, get it all in thirty minutes or so - all that build up and then the thing that breaks open. It's like an afternoon spent in the ocean, wave after wave crashing over you. The best are the ones you don't see building so high, the ones that take your over your body and toss you about and then return you to the sandy ground again, maybe a little scraped up by the shells but the joy of it all was worth it.

That might sound like melodrama (we're talking about reading, I know), but the best short fiction gives me this kind of thrill. And I was kinda expecting it from Tenth of December by George Saunders because I kept hearing so much about it... Halfway through the book, I'd say half of the stories lifted me off my feet, but overall it was a pretty average day at the beach. (To be honest, his voice was annoying me, it felt too affected to me. Like Rachel McAdams in half of the movies she's acted in. Just tone it down a little bit.)

Yesterday, I sat down on my couch with book in hand, intending to finish it. I was coming off a weird, emotional week, one in which I'd been able to push through some of the hard situations thrown my way. But there was one that felt like a last straw, that internally somewhere I was deciding to give up on. These little choices can be insidious because you don't realize that each one is really a choice to stop living. I was choosing to let my heart get a little bit harder, which feels like protection but is actually a living death.

This is how I found myself when I started the last story in the collection. The premise is two stories that intersect, that of a young boy playing make believe outside in ten degree weather, and a middle aged man who has decided to end his life my freezing to death because of a brain tumor. Their stories are filled out with wonderfully particular details - you understand why this man might end his life - but then he makes a decision to save the life of the boy when he is threatened, a decision which, in the end, leads him to choose to live himself.

I've excerpted that section above, the one where he realizes he wants to live after all. It came in a perfect swell, one that lifted me out of myself and made me realize that I, too, wanted more than little death.

That's the thing about a good story, it can make you want to choose the bigness of life.

if i could pack the sun

To avoid using a cliche, I won't tell you that my Dad is a man of few words. My guess is that that wouldn't even be true, that there are plenty of words that make him. Maybe they are all jumbled up inside like a box of rusted nails, sharp and mostly unused, or maybe they slip away just as soon as they form in his head. Ashes, heavy and dumb.

He clears his throat before he speaks, as if the act requires effort, preparation.

When, at 24, I told him I was moving to Los Angeles, the words must have gotten stuck somewhere inside as he turned the page of his paper that covered the lower half of his face. I waited, but not long, and then joined the rest of the family in the dining room. A few weeks later, I asked him out to breakfast, my way communicating that I wanted to hear his opinion about my move, even if I wasn't following it. We ate omelets at Perkins, and he told me that the last time he'd flown on an airplane was when he was younger than me, living in Virginia and working his first job. I hadn't known any of this. Later, we stopped at a plant nursery and, in silence, picked out flowers for my mother and him to plant around the house.

After I lived in LA for a few years, my dad finally got himself an email address (even a Facebook account!) and here is how I receive his words now: typed in one-sentence paragraphs, concise, sometimes poetic. Once, when I was getting ready to fly east for a family vacation at the beach, he told me to "pack the sun," which struck me as the most beautiful thing he could say, as if I could carry something capable of warming and spinning a whole solar system. Of course, he just wanted good weather to grace the unpredictable New Jersey August days.

Maybe he didn't realize that if I could give find a way to give him a light that would never fade, blue skies for days and that momentary glow in the heart at seeing the most beautiful sunrise over inexhaustible water that somehow stops just where you stand - if I could pack the sun and give it to him, I would. I am still searching for ways to tell him this.

reading about earth 39,000 feet above it

I bought The Sixth Extinction on a whim. That morning, I had finished reading the staggering Far From the Madding Crowd, and though I usually like to sit for a while with a book finished before I choose a new one to read, I faced a six-hour plane ride from my sister's back to California (and that's not including time sitting at the gate). I couldn't let that time be wasted.

So, an hour or two before I was due at the airport, my sister and I drove through the rain to the quaint local bookshop we'd already been to once that weekend so I could choose a new book and not have to take a risk on the selection in my terminal. I looked at memoir, then at the new books table, asked the cashier about a book I especially wanted to read (they didn't have it), then found myself in the Science section, and there it was. I'd heard of the book and had some interest in reading it, and then, a few weeks ago, had seen the book selected as No. 1 Nonfiction Book on the Guardian. (It's not clear to me if this means it's their top choice, or if it's simply the first one they chose to feature.) Because I'm a sucker for reading list selections and the shiny gold Pulitzer Prize emblems (and, yes, because I'm a nerd), I decided to go for it.

I read a good chunk of the book on that flight home a few weeks ago, and slowly finished it over the days since. What I liked about The Sixth Extinction - and, as a medical science writer, what I appreciated about it - is that the author presents a complicated subject that has lots of subjective and controversial arguments surrounding it in a simple, accessible and relatively unbiased way. There is a narrative to it, the main character being the earth itself, and centuries of species the supporting cast, their appearances and disappearances adding to the central conflict. That conflict is support and survival. Humans are just another of these species, thankfully not the villain. They are all fighting time, catastrophe, decay.

But the thing about the book is this: for me, it might not be that memorable. I enjoyed it while I read it - it was lively, and Kolbert's language was concise, resourceful, beautiful - but I didn't find myself thinking about it much after I put the book down for the night, or on my drive to work the next morning. It didn't move me emotionally. It didn't get me to think differently or to wonder. (Though it did make me want to travel to the Great Coral Reef or the Amazon, so there's that.) I know this wouldn't have fit with her as a writer or what she was trying to do with her book, but I think what would have made me more emotionally engaged is more reflection - like, what does all this mean? Or at least, what does it mean to her? After reading the book, finding myself not emotionally involved in her topic, I'm not sure it means all that much to me.*


*I also understand that this is because I don't "believe" in science. Like, I don't think it has the final say. I think there's lots of room for mystery. So, it might not be the way she wrote the book. It might just not be my cup of tea.

(Readers - you may or may not have caught on that I've been writing posts about the books I read, a tiny effort of mine this year. Not a book review. More a response in words.)

the breath, the Spirit, the beginning

There is always something happening, even it if is only the breath.
                                                                                                            -Alicia Jo Rabins

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering...

                                                                                                            -Genesis 1:2

Writing hasn't come easily the past few weeks. Ideas that feel promising when I think of them on my drive to work fall flat when I sit in front of a computer to type them out. I hold down the delete button to eat my words back up. I can tell you it has something to do with working through some hard-wired shame, which makes words feel too small and throws everything into chaos, something like that "without form," that darkness that existed before the light did.

Speaking of chaos, there's a lot of it right now. And I'm not just talking about politics and race and the things we all see posted all over Facebook. There are broken marriages, there is cancer, there are interrupted dreams and unanswered prayers. The other day, my dad's car slipped on ice, and now his body is sore muscles and painful bruises. I didn't hear about it until my mom texted me three days after it happened. I didn't know what to text back.

Sometimes writing feels like this, like groping around in the dark for the right words to counter deep fears and uneasy hurts. But then I've heard some writers talk about how, after periods of long silence, certain stories flowed right out of them. They weren't easy stories, but the words had germinated inside for months or years, who knows how. When it was time, out they came, ordered and beautiful and full of the stuff that pierces darkness and covers over shame. A whole universe, it seems, formed of words.

The past few months, I feel as if I'm being taken back to a beginning, learning where words come from and how to use them. In the beginning was the Word... and through Him all things were made. I go back and forth about how explicitly I want my faith to show through my writing. I've been timid because of the way Christian artists get labeled as sentimental, derivative, not as quality. Words like Jesus and the cross are somehow too definitive and carry too much baggage. Better to be vaguely spiritual, to use words like faith or spirit (with a lowercase "s"). But when I think about using words, it is God's Word that I want to fill my heart first, to show me how to speak them in way that brings light, that opens up darkness. Without him was not anything made that was made.

Spirit of God, hover. Be the Word that is in the beginning.

of love in far from the madding crowd

(Excerpts from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy)


Of love, as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.  (Chapter XIII)

:   :   :

What a way [Gabriel] Oak had she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher, and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt any more than she herself the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave -- that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.  (Chapter XLII)

:   :   :

[Bathsheba and Gabriel's] was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- camaraderie, usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because they associate not in their labours but in their pleasures merely. Where however happy circumstance permits its development the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death -- that love which many waters cannot quench, not the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.  (Chapter LV)

favorite essays: it will look like a sunset

One afternoon, a hummingbird flew through the open door of the apartment to the window in the corner and beat at the glass. It was panicked, trying to turn glass into sky. I wrapped my hands around it, the hummingbird heart pulsing against my palms, then released it on the stoop.

From It Will Look Like a Sunset by Kelly Sundberg

:   :   :   :   :   

On a Saturday early in December, I went alone to a bookstore. All day I had been with friends doing fun things, and yet I'd been carrying around a sadness I couldn't shake, and which source I didn't entirely understand. It was the rare kind of sadness that sharpens senses instead of dulling them. That kind that feels like a fire in the heart.

I wandered around, admired book covers and titles. I opened a book of essays by various authors and my eyes settled on the title of the last one in the collection: "It Will Look Like a Sunset." I bought the book and took it home with me and skipped to the end to read it.

Before I started reading, I didn't even guess what the essay would be about, though the title made me think of summer nights, when sunsets come late and bring warm colors. Or, at this time of year, when the sun is setting over the freeway ahead of me as I drive home from work, and the clouds and sky seem to be showing off.

But sunsets are endings, slow ones that bring with them hours of night. In this particular essay, the ending comes to a relationship. There is love and commitment, and also abuse and apologies and false hope. Near the end, a doctor tells the author that her fresh injury will change color and heal over time. "It will look like a sunset," he says. Which you, as the reader, come to understand is also how leaving looks: bruised and final.

There are many things I love about this essay: the structure, the way she handles time, her images. I especially admire her ability to make the reader understand her love for her husband. Why she stayed. Domestic violence stories can be told with so little empathy for the abuser, and even for the abused. As if leaving should be an obvious, easy choice. You forget about the love. At close of the essay - after we know that she has indeed left - the author recounts simple memories of family-hood with her husband, and her mother's advice to try hard because living without him will be hard. You get it, why she tried like she did. Why she put up with all that hurt and fear.

It will look like a sunset, but then it will heal. During the night, as the earth makes its turn, the sun still burns. Eventually, you see it again.

(Oh, and that's what happened with that sadness I was carrying around, too...)

blanketed

When I was getting ready to make the transition to living alone, I asked my mom to knit me a blanket, a keepsake to remember my first "own place" by. Deep purple with flecks of color, the blanket is thick and heavy. She made it just long and wide enough to cover my body. I use it now when I pray, laying it on my folded legs in the dark early mornings, steaming coffee and lit candle on the coffee table in front of me, heart expectant. I drape it over my legs and shoulders during weekend naps, allowing it to still me under its comfort and warmth. I think of the first story of love and separation, how God clothed his beloved to show them his merciful and steadfast heart toward them. I think of the instinct to cover and be covered, how in times of need - in sorrow, in sickness, in growth - to be blanketed is to know security and presence and compassion. It is to know love.