CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

by George Saunders

Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

But what’s there to do but behave with dignity?

Don’t think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”

A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else. They, too, wanted to be happy. They, too, wanted to succeed. Maybe they had people they loved at home. They, too, were doing some weird uninteresting job in order to ensure the security and happiness of those beloved people of theirs, and yet… And yet there were people sleeping on benches and muttering to themselves and getting fired, and there were nasty divorces and men slamming their fists into the sides of their cars when they thought no one was around.

As goofy as the story was, as far-fetched as its premise seemed, I could feel and see the people in it as real people, and I cared about them. What a relief that was: to work with certainty, toward fun, just for the hell of it.

“The writer can chose what he writes about,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”