High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

by Barbara Kingsolver

There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.

If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider horizons will be fatal.

two terrifying options are much worse than none at all. Give me any day the quick hand of cruel fate that will leave me scarred but blameless. As it

the friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

How remarkable that other people’s stories often sound more true to me than my own.

“It’s not so much what happens,” I try to explain, “but how the words fit together, and what carries over from it into your own life.”

“But only the President can issue that order,” Dave said. I believe he meant this to be reassuring.

by the wise Garry Wills: “Love of one’s country should be like love of one’s spouse—a give-and-take criticism and affection. Although it is hoped one prefers one’s spouse to other people…one does not prove that one loves one’s wife by battering other women.”

only that a thing runs counter to prevailing assumptions. If 60 percent of us support the war, then the expressions of the other 40 percent are political—

The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else’s point of view. It differs drastically from a newspaper, which imparts information while allowing you to remain rooted in your own perspective. A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, “How very sad,” then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter’s cheek. You would taste that person’s breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.

My imagination had more figment in it than my life could contain, so some of it leaked out here and there.