These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

But the theory doesn’t hold up, because my sister’s childhood was much worse than mine, and all she ever wanted was to have children. Children gave her the chance to give someone else the kind of childhood she’d wanted, and, in doing so, to find a repository for her enormous love. I, on the other hand, just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Had I met Robin early in my life, might that have made the difference? If someone had looked at me like that when I was a child, might I have had children?

No, but it would have come closer to changing my mind than the hypothetical man who might have taken half the responsibility for our hypothetical offspring.

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.

would be out both a boyfriend and a fellowship.

You are a very practical person. While that would have been synonymous of (for me) selfish earlier, it does not seem that way now.

For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by. A meteor could be skating past Earth’s atmosphere this very minute. We’ll never know how close we came to annihilation, but today I saw it—everything I had and stood to lose and did not lose. Thanks to this fleeting clarity, the glow from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of this small cardiac recovery room lights up the entire world.

Human beings cobble together their own mythologies over time: I was unloved, I was too loved, I was popular, a loner, misunderstood, persecuted, stupid, a winner. We use the past to explain ourselves.

I’d been afraid I’d somehow been given a life I hadn’t deserved, but that’s ridiculous. We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

Because in this present moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out just the same. As the old saying goes, every generation believes they invented sex and war.

As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.

It’s a dream to hand a stranger a copy of a Jane Gardam novel, or to connect just the right person with Halldór Laxness’s Independent People.

I’m sorry I made my students back in Iowa read Madame Bovary. I love Madame Bovary, but these were not literature majors. They were kids who may have had one shot in college to feel thrilled and engaged by reading, and I’m fairly certain I blew it for them. At the time, I thought that Madame Bovary was the essence of a liberal arts education, but the essence of a liberal arts education is the ability to be flexible and curious, to be able to teach Othello and then write for Bridal Guide, to publish several novels and open a bookstore, to promote the work of living writers, to evolve. I once believed that nothing could surpass winning a big literary award, but I was mistaken. The thing that’s been so much better has been to create jobs in my community, to be part of the Parnassus Foundation, which buys books for children who can’t afford books so that they can know the thrill of owning the book they love, to find as many ways as possible for literature to make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible.

the future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work. No one ever told me that, and I’m sorry it took this long for me to figure it out.

At a certain point the reader comes across the mention of the painting and realizes that the painting she’s reading about is the painting on the cover. The moment comes with a small jolt of electricity.

Oooooh! Like in Oh William

Nell went on to tell me that she had just finished reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to her son, and that it had cracked them open and made them better people. “You have to tell her that for me,” Nell said. “Will you do that?”

I remembered what it had felt like as a child to read a book and be certain the author was speaking directly to me. The work of Kate DiCamillo had opened something in me, an ability to see and feel things that were very far from me now.

Still awake, I asked my little dog Rose to come back, and she did, running. She had been waiting for me to call. She was perfect in her joy and I held her and kissed her. I called for my father then, just to see, and he came to me too, and took me in his arms, me and my little dog. My father was nothing but love, a love so certain and pure there was no space to doubt it. I called for my grandmother, my dearest Lucy, my stepfather, and each one came and folded me in her arms, in his arms. There never had been a moment like this in my life, so much love, and all of it free from doubt or exhaustion or misunderstanding. This love had always been there, it would always be there, no matter how I rewrote it or forgot it. I stood inside my gratitude and cried until finally I fell sleep.

That’s what I got from these books, the ability to walk through the door where everything I thought had been lost was in fact waiting for me. All of it. The trick was being brave enough to look. The books had given me that br...

How other people live is pretty much all I think about.

Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than in life.

Every childhood is strange in its own way.

In the twenty-six years that Karl and I had been together, I’d never had the experience of coming home to dinner being made. It was a minor footnote considering everything I got from Karl, but still, the warmth of it, the love, to walk in the door after a long two days and see that someone had imagined that I might be hungry knocked me sideways. This was what marriage must look like from the other side.

What Sooki thought she should have done with her life was paint. She had wanted to study painting in college, but it all came too easily—the color, the form, the technique—she didn’t have to work for any of it. College was meant to be rigorous, and so she signed up for animal behavior instead. “I studied what did not come naturally,” she told me.

We just kept sitting in the stillness, the kind of dark that electricity wants us to forget had ever existed.

All day long Sooki sent me pictures with her family and the subject heading Where is our other sister? She meant me.

We will never know all the things other people worry about.

I’ve never experienced anything like it, or you.

As it turned out, Sooki and I needed the same thing: to find someone who could see us as our best and most complete selves. Astonishing to come across such a friendship at this point in life. At any point in life.

But when the time comes, she’s awake. She digs in deep and finds one more vein of inner resources that has yet to be tapped. Inner resources! What could be left? For three years of illness she has mined herself: her strength and her sheer force of will, her mind over matter. She persists by borrowing from herself, borrowing reserves she does not have.