A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

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.

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. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just decide to live as an anti-happiness zealot? Disallow yourself all pond swimming, frown whenever you meet a Pelageya. Completely consistent, you’ll never need to be confused again. You can just stalk around, having sold your bathing suit, looking down your nose at everything. For that matter, wouldn’t it be nice to just throw down on the side of being happy? To decide to live life as an ardent pro-happiness advocate, always striving to celebrate, dance, have fun, maximize your joy? But then, before you know it, you’re an obnoxious turd on Instagram, standing in a waterfall with a garland of flowers, thanking God for blessing you with this wonderful life you must have somehow earned via your immaculate mindfulness.

But, as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to “prove” anything. (If I make a dollhouse out of ice cream and put it in the sun, it doesn’t prove the notion “Houses melt.”)

“The secret of boring people,” Chekhov said, “lies in telling them everything.”