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Can goodness win? Or do good people always get shafted, evil being more reckless?
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Andrew Carpenter
But seriously! Is life fun or scary? Are people good or bad? On the one hand, that clip of those gauntish pale bodies being steamrolled while fat German ladies looked on chomping gum. On the other hand, sometimes rural folks, even if their particular farms were on hills, stayed up late filling sandbags.
We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.
You were just a caretaker. They didn’t have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.
Which maybe that’s what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better.
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squawking, others rapturous.
If we spend the hour before the shelf-cleaning talking down the process of cleaning the shelf, complaining about it, dreading it, investigating the moral niceties of cleaning the shelf, whatever, then what happens is, we make the process of cleaning the shelf more difficult than it really is. We all know very well that that “shelf” is going to be cleaned, given the current climate, either by you or the guy who replaces you and gets your paycheck, so the question boils down to: Do I want to clean it happy or do I want to clean it sad? Which would be more effective? For me? Which would
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The positive mental state will help you clean that shelf well and quickly, thus accomplishing your purpose of getting paid.
Have been sleepwalking through life, future reader. Can see that now. Scratch-Off win was like wake-up call. In rush to graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forgot former feeling of special destiny I used to have when tiny, sitting in cedar-smelling bedroom closet, looking up at blowing trees through high windows, feeling I would someday do something great.
Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death?
It was like the baby was demanding, with its eyes: Hurry up, tell me what all this shit is, so I can master it, open a few shops.
They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
You? I thought. You jokers? You nutty fuckers are all God sent to stop me? That is a riot. That is so fucking funny. What are you going to stop me with? Your girth? Your good intentions? Your Target jeans? Your years of living off the fat of the land? Your belief that anything and everything can be fixed with talk, talk, endless yapping, hopeful talk? The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present. My face got hot and I thought, Go, go, go. Ma tried and failed to rise from the porch swing. Ryan helped her up by the elbow all courtly. Then suddenly something
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Based on my experience of life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further, to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.
They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—
fiction is the ultimate form of “doing something.” An idea or notion or image leaves the writer’s mind, goes directly into the reader’s, and has the potential to change what it finds there.
I think of my stories as little lab experiments that try to investigate these issues. Just as a scientist would get the true measure of his materials by putting them under stress, my model of fiction is that we need to see human beings at or near their breaking points.
In the midst of a crisis is where we get the true measure of a character, and thus some new feeling about human tendency.
what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the fact and the value of her own existence.
the goal of writing should be to produce something that feels like a spontaneous joyful outpouring but that is, on closer inspection, too finely made to be (merely) that—the story as fossil evidence of a deep process of exploration that, in our reading experience of it, is as fast and natural as a pop song.
My first-level approach is to try and make my characters as much like me as I can. And then make things go badly and see how they do. I think a character who is basically like the writer and the reader (good, sensible, intelligent, well-intentioned, and so on) is going to produce a more deeply felt ride.
Fiction gets under our skin most, I think, when we find it impossible to distance ourselves from the narrated dilemma.
