These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Imagination can be killed but facts are infinitely harder to snuff out. I know it might not seem this way. Time works tirelessly to erase facts—this country works tirelessly—but facts have a way of popping up, their buoyant truth shining all the more brightly with time. Maybe that was why death wasn’t interested in essays; essays don’t die.

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

What’s so easy for me to see now that all of them are gone, what was so impossible for me to see at the time, was that they were only occasionally thinking of me, and I was only occasionally thinking of them.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.

The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love. I have to think the pyrotechnics of sainthood—crucifixion and Catherine wheels, the fire and stake—would be easier than this tireless, unconditional love.

Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.

That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.

We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.