Andrew, can you end with a family-friendly joke? This was a Louis C.K. joke that Seinfeld told when they were doing a conversation — comedians on comedians. The joke is something like: You know, going on vacation with the family, I put the kids in the car seats. I put my wife in the car. Put the coffees in the coffee holder. I put the bags in the back. I close the trunk. I close my wife’s door. I close the kids’ door. And when I’m walking from my wife’s door to my door, that’s my vacation.
I know exactly the joke you’re talking about. I think about it constantly. It’s so good, and at its core you could say quite mean. That’s the beauty of a joke. It allows us to access these darker thoughts and emotions that we have: He loves his family, but in that moment, they’re safe, and I don’t have to deal with them. We all have that feeling, and then we come back to reality. And that’s what would be awesome: If people get that these things that we’re saying — it’s just what we feel in that little moment, and then we step back.
57° F. yesterday, Spring is in the air. I contemplate dragging out the outdoor furniture from the basement.
Then, this morning arrived. 20° F, feels like 3° F, winds up to 20 mph from the North. Brutal.
I walk, thinking about sitting on the outdoor furniture in the basement, reading a chapter or two — with a floor heater at my feet. Maybe the furniture goes out next month.
I walk. It’s been 1,762 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.
The park, with its handful of regulars, has had a new entrant. Let’s call her Janet. Janet rolls into the park taking the same route each morning, skipping along the breakwall to the cliff, pausing for 5-10 minutes to belt out a tune at the top of her lungs, arms and hands clutching for the heavens. Unclear what she’s singing and why she needs to belt it out at earsplitting levels that can be heard at the far reaches of the Park.
So this morning, just another morning, here comes Janet. And there goes the Wildlife, DK and other park patrons quickly moving in the other direction.
Charlotte Wood: “The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all.“
Benjamin Markovits, in his lukewarm NY Times Book Review titled Life Descends Into Chaos in This Year’s Booker Prize Winner, states “the ’emergency’ is never explained…the political crisis here is a kind of blank; it has no history…we never learn what they’re arguing about, apart from the rule of law…The other big decision is stylistic. There are sections and chapters in the novel but no paragraphs. Dialogue is not punctuated with quotation marks, and is often interrupted by descriptions and sudden dives into interiority. All of which means that following a conversation takes some detective work…”
Markovits is right, all true. But set it all aside. Easily, this was the best book I’ve read in 2023, and one that will stick for some time. I’ve shared a two excerpts from the book below:
Tell me, he says, do you believe in reality? Dad, what is that supposed to mean? We belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on – the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing… (they are) trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book… Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales——
For how many days the shelling and gunfire has continued, the fighting stopped for the night but her body does not believe the silence, a sensory prickling in her nerves, the banging deep in her skull. She turns to Molly inhaling from her hair the fading scent of jasmine, sensing the mind at peace beneath the sleeping breath, to reach in with her hand and pull the terror out by the root, to caress the mind back to its old shape. Something has winged from the dark of her mind and she holds very still, then turns from Molly, gets up and goes into the kitchen. The sky in astronomical twilight, watching the trees rooted in the earth, thinking, there will be goodness again, there will be high and happy voices, the sound of feet seeking for slippers and the clicking of bicycle wheels through the porch.
I hunger for a transcendent reality — the good, the true, the beautiful, those things which somehow lie beyond mere argument. Yet often, as a writer, a pastor and simply a person online, I find that my life is dominated by debate, controversy and near strangers in shouting matches about politics or church doctrine. This past year in particular was marked by vitriol and divisiveness. I am exhausted by the rancor.
In this weary and vulnerable place, poetry whispers of truths that cannot be confined to mere rationality or experience. In a seemingly wrecked world, I’m drawn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn” and recall that “there is One who holds this falling/Infinitely softly in His hands.”… I think a particular gift of poetry for our moment is that good poems reclaim the power and grace of words.
Indeed, in our age of social media, words are often used as weapons. Poetry instead treats words with care. They are slowly fashioned into lanterns — things that can illuminate and guide. Debate certainly matters. Arguments matter. But when the urgent controversies of the day seem like all there is to say about life and death or love or God, poetry reminds me of those mysterious truths that can’t be reduced solely to linear thought…
In one of my very favorite poems, “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of a beauty that is “past change.” In this world where our political, technological and societal landscape shifts at breakneck speed, many of us still quietly yearn for a beauty beyond change. Poetry stands then as a kind of collective cry beckoning us beyond that which even our best words can say.
Q: I want you to think about the generation that comes after Generation Z, people born in the last 15 years. What things do you hope will be better for them than they were for your generation?
Elizabeth, 82, Kan., white, Republican, retired: I’d like to see less crime, less hatred and more kindness in this world.
Barbara, 71, Ore., white, Democrat, retired: I want to see the next generation be more concerned about taking care of this planet and each other as human beings. I want to see more tolerance.
Elaine, 83, Mass., white, independent, retired: I hope there’s going to be more kindness, people getting along. Right now, it’s just not good at all. We need more time, more love. Money’s not the answer to everything.
Ray, 76, N.J., Black, Democrat, retired: Hopefully the next generation will study our generation and correct our mistakes, because what’s happening in the world, we can’t pass it all off to the generations after us. We have been responsible for a lot of how the world has become today. And hopefully, the next generation will return to a feeling of being one set of people, united together as one country.
Elizabeth, 82, Kan., white, Republican, retired: Wisdom does come with age. It’s the little things in life that really do matter. You shouldn’t stress about so much in this world. It’s easier to just enjoy life and do what you can for others.
— Kristen Soltis Anderson, excerpts from “Opinion | What Happened to America? We Asked 12 People in Their 70s and 80s.” (The New York Times · April 10, 2023)
