Top highlights from These Precious Days
As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, youre going to love this.
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People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you dont want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.
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The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, its assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.
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For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by.
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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
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We dont deserve anythingnot the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.
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MOST OF THE writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice, wed rather stay home.
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As for death, I have remained lucky. Its indifference has never waned, though surely it will circle back for me later. Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.
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Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.
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What if this joy you felt, this love, was so great that you wanted to share it with everyone, but they all rushed right by you, looking in the other direction? All these years later, its still the best description of how I feel about books. I would stand in an airport to tell people about how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.
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Part of not wanting children has always been the certainty that I didnt have the energy for it, and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing. The first time it occurred to me that I wouldnt have both, I was still years away from being biologically capable of reproduction. History offers some examples of people whove done a good job with children and writing, I know that, but I wasnt one of those people. Ive always known my limitations. I lacked the units of energy, and the energy I had, I wanted to spend on my work. To have a child and neglect her in favor of a novel would be cruel, but to simply skip the child in favor of a novel was to avoid harm altogether.
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To have a child required the willful forgetting of what childhood was actually like; it required you to turn away from the very real chance that you would do to the person you loved most in the world the exact same thing that was done to you. No, no thank you.
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Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive.
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Walking backwards is an excellent means of remembering how little you know. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a caf in the West Village with my friends Lucy and Adrian when a woman ran in and said a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. A plane? we asked. Like a Cessna? She didnt know. She hadnt seen it happen. We went out to the street on that bright morning to see a fire high up in the distance. The waiter came out and told us to get back inside. We hadnt paid the check. I paid the check. Lucy said she didnt have time for this. She was teaching at Bennington in Vermont, and this was the first day of classes. She had to make her train. We said our goodbyes and Adrian and I walked downtown to see what had happened. We both wrote for the New York Times. Surely there would be a story for one of us. We had just passed Stuyvesant Park when the first tower fell. I would tell you we were idiots, but thats only true in retrospect. In fact we were so exactly in the middle of history that we had no way to understand what we were seeing.
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This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didnt protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like many layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now, I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets Id accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.
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Death was the river that ran underground, always. It was just that we had piled up so much junk to keep from hearing it.
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In those happy dark ages before cell phones and the internet, such miscalculations were solved not by changing the situation but by changing yourself. I put on another sweater and my coat. I
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This storywhich begins and beginsstarts again here.
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People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don't add up to a plot. In life, time runs along in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed-one action springboards into another, greater action. and effect are so much clearer in novels than in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the becomes map clear.
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Snoopy got far more rejection letters than he ever got acceptances, and the rejections ranged (as they will) from impersonal to flippant to cruel.
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All you have to do, he tells me, is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair. The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, its assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.
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Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar store in the mall across the street from us. People want to know how well we are doing. Ill tell you how well were doing: theyve come to kill us. But well survive.
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just keep moving forward. By the time the book is written, theres little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation in California Pizza Kitchen. Still, Im able, for a while at least, to pick up the thread and walk it back. Everything looks so logical going backwardsYes, of course, thats what we didbut going forward its something else entirely. Going forward, the lights may as well be off.
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...in this present moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out just the same. AS the old saying goes, every generation believes they invented sex and war.
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When my sisters husband died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-nine, I fell down the open manhole with my sister and the rest of the people who loved him. But my father? Hed been gone for such a long time. He had told us how much he loved us, and wed told him how much we loved him, again and again and again, until there was nothing left to say. Except for this: Dad, there is joy in the place that you left.
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You are a duck, I would tell myself. This is rain.
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am bringing back a report from the Dark Ages. In those days, the workshop still fostered the Cult of Insanity which has played such a big part in the mythology of being a writer and artistthat misery, mental illness, drug addiction, and alcoholism were proof of your sensitivity and talent. Or to put it another way, the worse you were, the better you were. We still believed in Papa in those days, in the righteous dominance of masculinity. We believed the hallmark of literary greatness was going to war, racking up a long string of wives, and then blowing your head off in Idaho.
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That is, after all, Robins superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.
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How had one man acquired so many extension cords, so many batteries and rosary beads? Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through, because who would that mythical sorter be anyway?
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Chances are youll be alone at the end of your life. Dont you worry about that? I dont mind talking about this, I said. But I wonder, would you ask Jonathan Franzen the same questions? He doesnt have children. When the interview aired, all the questions about my childlessness had been edited out.
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Id been afraid Id somehow been given a life I hadnt deserved, but thats ridiculous. We dont deserve anythingnot the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.
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I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.
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possibility that life might not have been fair. The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, its assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality
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The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, its assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past. Despite his own experiences with unfairness, this is what Charlie has accomplished.
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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time
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created a barrier
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I loved my father, and I wished for him every minute of life that his body could afford him. He didnt want to die. Still, after his death, I wrote with an openness I had not previously known. I was fifty-one years old. I wrote about California and divorce and police officers, second marriages and stepchildren. I wrote about people who were like my family and nothing like my family. It was time to pull down the fences and let my story go wherever it wanted to go. I had been a good daughter, and my father had been a good father. He had helped me in every way he knew how. I would miss his advice, even the advice that had irritated me. His death marked a passage in my growth as a writer, but if I were able to choosethe book or my fatherI would have him back.
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the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship,
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Because in this present moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out just the same. As the old saying goes, every generation believes they invented sex and war.
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When we come home, I fill the blender with spinach, a banana, an avocado, two dates, some lemon juice, water and ice, and my husband and I drink the results for breakfast. From time to time I believe Ive found The Answer to Life, and right now I think its spinach.
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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers
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Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.
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All you have to do, he tells me, is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair. The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, its assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have
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worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past. Despite his own experiences with unfairness, this is what Charlie has accomplished.
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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. The
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Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval.
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These precious days Ill spend with you,
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The future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work. No one ever told me that, and I'm sorry it took this long for me to figure it out.
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You are four days sober and I love you. Youre about to get in your BMW and I love you. You are not my problem to solve but my brother to love, all of you.
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We were all standing there waiting on the photographer, my father told me later on the phone. And Mike said, You know what shes doing, dont you? Shes going to wait until the three of us are dead and then shes going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece. My father said the idea hadnt occurred to him, and it wouldnt have occurred to Darrell, but as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what Im doing now.
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the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
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I'd been afraid I'd somehow been giving a life I hadn't deserved, but that's ridiculous. We don't deserve anything - not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.
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I can't imagine what kind of work it would take to actually put the past in order.
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The deeper 24-S was excavated, the more it yielded.
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Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I'm coming to know. In some ways it's not unlike putting together my own life. I think I know what I'm doing when in truth I have no idea. I just keep moving forward. By the time the book is written, there's little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation (...)
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Karl had been living in our house for twenty-five years. Id been there for sixteenthe longest Id ever lived anywhere by more than a decade. Ours was a marriage of like-minded nearness. Karls suit jacket went directly onto a hanger. I wiped down the kitchen counters before going to bed. Our never-ending stream of houseguests frequently commented on the tranquility of our surroundings, and I told them the secret was not having much stuff.
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Two hours later there was no call, and still no answer when I tried his cell phone. Around midnight, the clock and I had a conversation, I told the clock I wanted to wait another fifteen minutes before my new life began, the life in which Karl had been killed in a plane crash. I requested fifteen minutes more in this worldwhich I was quickly coming to see as the pastbefore figuring out who to call, who to wake up. Youll remember this feeling when the phone rings, I told myself. Youll remember how scared you were when he calls to tell you hes fine. And it was true. As many times as Ive been in exactly this situation, I never forget it, and it never fails to shock me, the flood of adrenaline that does not serve for fight or flight but drowns me. At twelve-thirty I shifted my perspective again, from wondering what it would be like if he were dead to the knowledge that he was dead, and I decided I could wait another fifteen minutes. He would be dead forever, so what difference did it make if I have myself a little more time? I still had no idea what I was supposed to do.After I had extended the final cutoff two more times, he walked in the door. Thats how these stories always end, of course, except for the one time they dont. I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief. I wanted to kill him because he had not been killed. I wanted to step into his open jacket and stay there for the rest of my life. How had he not called?I did call. I called you from Kentucky.But you never told me youd left Kentucky.It took a long time to get the transponder fixed.Then why didnt you call to say youd landed?It was too late. In the house, he went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He was dead tired but not dead. I didnt want to wake you up.He might as well have said, I thought you were sleeping because I have no idea who you are, or who any normal people.I stayed awake for what was left of the night to watch him, just to make sure he was really there.
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I read an article recently about how friendships can die over time. We shouldnt feel bad about it, the article said. People change after all, grow in different directions: nothing lasts forever. Its true, of course, that we have changed, but Tavia and I are in this life together. We found each other as little girls, and through everything, weve held on.
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The kid in the newspaper was named Stevie, and he was eight. I was thirty-nine and lived by myself in a house that I owned. For a short time our local newspaper featured an orphan every week. Later they would transition to adoptable pets, but for a while it was orphans, children your could foster and possibly adopt of everything worked out, the profiles were short, maybe two or three hundred words. This was what I knew: Stevie liked going to school. He made friends easily. He promised he would make his bed every morning. He hoped that if he were very good we could have his own dog, and if he were very, very good, his younger brother could be adopted with him. Stevie was Black. I knew nothing else. The picture of him was a little bigger than a postage stamp. He smiled. I studied his face at my breakfast table until something in me snapped. I paced around my house, carrying the folded newspaper. I had two bedrooms. I had a dog. I had so much more than plenty. In return he would make his bed, try his best in school. That was all he had to bargain with: himself. By the time Karl came for dinner after work I was nearly out of my mind.I want to adopt him, I said.Karl read the profile. He looked at the picture. You want to be his mother?Its not about being his mother. I mean, sure, if Im his mother thats fine, but its like seeing a kid waving from the window of a burning house, saying hell make his bed if someone will come and get him out. I cant leave him there.We can do this, Karl said.We can do this. I started to calm myself because Karl was calm. He was good at making things happen. I didnt have to want children in order to want Stevie.In the morning I called the number in the newspaper. They took down my name and address. They told me they would send the preliminary paperwork. After the paperwork was reviewed, there would be a series of interviews and home visits.When do I meet Stevie? I asked.Stevie?The boy in the newspaper. I had already told her the reason I was calling.Oh, its not like that, the woman said. Its a very long process. We put you together with the child who will be your best match.So wheres Stevie?She said she wasnt sure. She thought that maybe someone had adopted him.It was a bait and switch, a well-written story: the bed, the dog, the brother. They knew how to bang on the floor to bring people like me out of the woodwork, people who said they would never come. I wrapped up the conversation. I didnt want a child, I wanted Stevie. It all came down to a single flooding moment of clarity: he wouldnt live with me, but I could now imagine that he was in a solid house with people who loved him. I put him in the safest chamber of my heart, he and his twin brother in twin beds, the dog asleep in Stevies arms.And there they stayed, going with me everywhere until I finally wrote a novel about them called Run. Not because I thought it would find them, but because they had become too much for me to carry. I had to write about them so that I could put them down.
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It is possible to love someone with all your heart and still know your union would never have survived having children together. It was one of the many things that made Karl and me such a good match: I didnt want children and he already had them. I thought it when I caught him pouring half-and-half on the dogs kibble. It was best this way.
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