A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts.

In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon.

Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctors’ assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.

She is not, never has been, a teacher for the love of it. This is part of what has worn her down, this absence of love for her work. She started out not full of hope but disliking the work: understanding it as beneath her, something at which it was possible to fail, rather than as something she might do out of love.

summer it was a shallow stream, easily