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

by George Saunders

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us.

The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can do only if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

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.

So, why the index cards, on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer. Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.

As the colors of the rainbow unite into one white light, so all these different impressions mingled into one,

Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, “Given how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,” Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully, not as “merely my opinion” but “the way things actually are, for sure.”

Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

“Why must we wait, I ask you? For what reason? I am told that nothing can be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in its own time. But who is it that says so? Where is the proof that it is just? You cite the natural order of things, the law governing all phenomena, but is there law, is there order in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand beside a ditch and wait for it to close up of itself or fill up with silt, when I could jump over it or throw a bridge across it?

I am oppressed by the peace and the quiet, I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is nothing that pains me more than the spectacle of a happy family sitting at table having tea.