A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

“Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

That’s how I see revision: a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.

Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it.

I find this happening all the time. I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier—his view of the world is wiser. When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty.

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.

When your lover dies or leaves you, there you are, still yourself, with your particular way of loving. And there is the world, still full of people to love.

To me, “The Darling” is about a tendency, present in all of us, to misunderstand love as “complete absorption in,” rather than “in full communication with.”

moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.

For some reason an element of sadness had always mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and now at the sight of a happy man I was assailed by an oppressive feeling bordering on despair.

“Yes, happiness can be self-indulgent, and our pursuit of it can oppress others,” she seems to say, “but, on the other hand, none of us can live a moment without joy and beauty and pleasure, as proven, gentlemen, by your reaction, just now, to me.” She makes us feel, viscerally, how joyless and pedantic and brittle it would be to deny that beauty is real or claim that happiness is best avoided.

“Careful not to neglect the reality of positive emotions in your quest for moral purity.”

It’s not just one thing. It’s many things at once. And it’s personal; even if I could articulate my answer (I’ve tried several times and each time have deleted the result, finding it reductive and insufficient), my answer would not be yours, precisely. Luckily, we don’t have to say. That’s part of why the story was written: to produce that irreducible final moment, about which nothing more needs to be said.

Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long.

In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

We ended the previous section by agreeing to confine our expectations for fiction to this: reading fiction changes the state of our minds for a short time afterward. But that may be a bit on the modest side. After all, as we’ve been seeing, reading fiction changes our minds in particular ways, as we step out of our own (limited) consciousness and into another one (or two, or three). So, we might ask, how are we altered, in that “short time afterward”? (Before I give my answer, let’s just say, again, that there’s no need, really, for me to do that. We know how our minds were changed as we read these Russians, because we were there. And we know, if we’ve been lucky enough to have other beautiful reading experiences in our lives, what those did for/to us.) But I’ll give it a try: I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind. I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid. I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa. My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit. I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language). I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be. I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them. So, that’s all pretty good.