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I am hesitant about "going there," but... Those of us from emotionally negligent homes recognize these scenes all too well. In the emotionally negligent home, there is no overt abuse, so the child is always left to wonder "what is wrong with me?" Emotionally negligent parents provide food, water (milk), shelter and that's about it. There are attempts at real communication but they always come up short. There can be no call to child protective services because one can not be prosecuted for an absence. I had a very wise therapist who taught me (in my adulthood) to apply the legal phrase "Nemo dat quod non habet" ("no one can give what they do not have") to my childhood to help healing take place. (Yes, she had me learn it in Latin!) Emotional negligence is a multi-generational pathology that is hard to recognize and treat because it is a lack. And, yes, there is always an Uncle Andy who screams, "What's a matter with you, boy?" Sadly, Arnold has learned his lesson and now will most likely go on to be a negligent abuser himself without serious intervention. Nora has already begun her descent. And where will that help come from? Ms. Berriault leaves us with the deafening silence which is the answer...no one. This story is genius!

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George, I feel for you taking care of an old dog. We're doing that here, too. And, apropos of the opening of this post, Ilya Kaminsky tweeted this morning:

"Me, writing to an older friend in Odessa: how can I help, please let me know I really want help

He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.

And, that is in the middle of war. Imagine."

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Feb 27, 2022Liked by George Saunders

William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

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i'm struck by the absence of Nora in both this story and your analysis, g. Nora is the first member of the family to definitively reject Arnold by refusing to hand him the milk, and placing her hands in her lap. another gun shot. in doing so, she splits the family.

remember, both parents are making tentative bids to Arnold but, by her action, Nora secures a position for herself as the "good child" and for Arnold as "the bad child". it's over.

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Feb 27, 2022Liked by George Saunders

It is all but impossible right now to do much but worry; thank you for the gift of acknowledging this, and thank you for the gift of showing us how to forge over to thinking that is filled with heart, empathy, and meaning. If only everyone probed their hearts this way - but I would like to think many people are doing so already, and even more so now.

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Being 'on the spectrum, I interpreted his response as confusion.

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founding

I think literature also helps us face our own prejudices, not head on, kind of from around the corner, in a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down kind of way. When I first heard about A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I didn’t want to read it, because the stories were Russian and I didn’t like Russians. I have no excuse for this, I could blame society or the media but I don’t even really know what that means. In any case, my prejudice is egregious on multiple levels. First, because I’m Muslim and I know what immediate distrust feels like on account of that. Second, I’m a plaintiff’s employment lawyer—all day long I write mediation briefs championing people who’ve been fired from their jobs because of their race, gender, religion, nationality, and other protected reasons.

But there it was, when I realized why I was resisting reading A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, my prejudice sort of slapped me in the face. I don’t think I’ve ever acted on it but then again I’m sure I probably have. In any case, the book was by George Saunders and I remember loving that Escape From Spiderhead story so I said to myself, don’t be racist, Shaiza, read the book. And immediately, I was taken in. Marya lives within me now, just like Lily Bart and Lizzie Bennett and that sweetheart murderer from Escape From Spiderhead. Yet even while reading Master And Man I felt upset and annoyed in the middle, thinking ugh, this guy is going to die and his servant too and probably the poor horse because it’s a Russian story and so that must be what happens, how depressing. So the ending felt like a goddamn miracle, honestly. First, because Tolstoy managed this impossible seeming feat in such a natural seeming way. And second, because I saw my dad in Vasily, including what he did at the end. So how can I not like Russians when a Russian opened my eyes to that?

Anyway, after A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I tore through a bunch of Chekhov stories and it felt like no one needed to write anything again ever because Chekhov seemed to have lived every life, and expressed the essence of all of them. It was very enlightening, to say the least. So now, now that the crisis in Ukraine is back in the news in an even more terrible way than before (I’m remembering 2014), my reaction is not ugh these asshole Russians are at it again, it’s hang on, maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, like before. Speaking of which, I found this 2015 lecture from Professor John J Mearsheimer at the University Of Chicago super prescient and really helpful in trying to digest everything that’s happening right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

All that to say, as a person who is not always gentle, or inclined to care, literature has helped me be more like that.

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I can't agree. It's a tragically sad story...but the author( born in 1924) was a daughter of Russian immigrants who escaped sometime close to or shortly after WWI, extreme poverty, Russian upheaval, and came to farm in California at the beginning of the Great Depression and cusp of WWII. The accident...tragic.Parents, uncle, community....the key for me was the uncle saying Arnold picked the peas...he did what was "reasonable"....For those people, it was more important to survive, to learn hard lessons and the sooner the better for males. Only Nora, the sister could harbor horror/resentment...but dad steps in to stop that at the breakfast table. It's only been in the last generation or so that we've taught "real men cry." It's a brutally sad story....but I think brutally true of past generations. I wanted to cry...for my older brother...my uncles....and obviously, for Arnold. (How do any of us know how we'll respond to a shocking incident? When my 15 year old daughter feel down a flight of stairs -- face first -- onto the tile floor below...I cleaned the bathroom while I waited for an ambulance. I'm sure anybody nearby thought I'd lost my mind....maybe I had?! To this day, I can't possibly give a logical explanation.)

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Feb 27, 2022·edited Feb 27, 2022Liked by George Saunders

Thankyou for showing up on time, it was a relief to turn away from the news on Ukraine. Liked your remarks about role of literature when there are imminent problems in the world and that it Literature only affects those who are gentle and so inclined. Half of fiction's "job" I think is to make the unseeable seen. Darknes-, our minds fight to shut it down and we want to look away. Fictionalized happy endings serve as the balm on the pain of looking at reality. Why do we need this? It irritates me that we do. Why is there a time lag between bad things happening and the appropriate counter action to it? And yet non fiction is mostly boring and unreadable, inconclusive and unbelievable. Is the driving force in reading fiction like seeking a soothing medication? Or is it providing us the ability to see reality in small doses? Why is good slow and stupid and evil fast and clever? These are the questions in my mind today.

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I read George's post on returning from a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Some protesters there were British like me, but the majority Ukrainian or otherwise Eastern European. Having spent the last three days also feeling sad and ineffective, it was extraordinary to hear the Ukrainian speakers expressing neither of those feelings. Desperation, yes, but to a much greater degree pride, courage, defiance and disgust for Putin. Their determination to fight back is incredible. I was thinking how, a week ago, I was asking naive questions about what 'out of season' meant in the context of The Stone Boy, and reflecting that I have literally never seen a gun, except on film or in 'museum conditions'. I wouldn't even know how to clean or load one, let alone shoot with it. And now Ukrainians as young as 14 are learning how to use them. This brought up number of conflicted feelings.

Also, was anyone else struck by the fact that when we were thinking about the escalation exercise a while back, (escalation in the sense of Rising Action, which we want to master,) another undesirable kind of escalation was going on in the world?

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Mar 1, 2022Liked by George Saunders

As a father of an impulsive and curious 13-year-old boy - prone to some disobedience and boundary pushing - this story leaves much to digest and reflect upon. I am quick to scold, to remember, to knit past misdemeanors into a quilt of being that casts doubt on his character... this story reminded me of who he needs and what my role is. No doubt, in our childhood, we have all encountered adults who planted seeds of self-loathing or doubt in our developing souls; I was most shocked not by the sheriff or by Andy, who are these recognisable entities, but by the devastating silence and corroboration of Arnold's dad, albeit temporary. May I never be silent when my son most needs me; as tough as it is sometimes to push the anger or disappointment aside, God willing, help me be the bigger person and remind him of his magnificent light when all seems dark.

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George, thank you. One thing I appreciate in your post is how you have pulled out something I was only dimly aware but gives the story its force: the discordant 'arc' of each characters' response to what happened. Considering the story again, I can see it sort of musically, in a sense they are all out of rhythym (and there is clearly a power differential at play too), with a terrible result (the isolation and shaming of a young child). Sort of reminds me of collage, how the pattern is fractured, or no pattern at all. The writer was very insightful, how a family, or a community, can be a collection of energies each spinning at their own pace.

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Feb 27, 2022·edited Feb 27, 2022

First of all, Ukraine. By the time I write this, who knows what will have happened? The sadness is overwhelming. But I am struck by the way regular people can rise up to be heroes, as the president of that country is currently doing. His moral core is so very strong. In the face of what could very well be his own destruction, he stands up for what is right. A Jew whose family somehow remained in the area despite all odds (and long after my own Jewish grandparents, aunts and uncles fled in 1922 from this same part of the world), and a man called to act in face of evil, I feel very connected to this human--which is, I think, the purpose of being here on earth. We are all One. All strength to the people of Ukraine.

But as for Arnold. His fate, I think, was sealed the day he was born into this dysfunctional family. Whether or not he survives and goes on to live a life of peace is less of a question than the question of how he became who he is. We are all products of the home we grew up in. That his parents react as they do in the moment of this story is very telling. It's not like they have changed and suddenly become people who treat Arnold poorly. I have to believe that they, at their core, have always been lacking in their love and understanding of this particular child. And that is the story's real sadness for me. I think Arnold probably already felt a void inside of him before the accidental shooting of his brother. Now, the actions of this day cement it for him. If we are not loved properly as children, we are damaged, possibly forever. But his parents are also the product of their own parents. And so it goes, generation after generation--people who have not learned to love or to show their love. People who look outside of their own hearts for an indication of how to act. It's heartbreaking.

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Whenever a person has in some way participated in a death, the questions, from within and without, swirl forever. People can tell you, "You didn't do it," or "you didn't mean to do it," or "don't be so hard on yourself." But inside, most of us are hard on ourselves. Until or unless we harden our hearts so we can go on, survive. My father committed suicide when he was 61 and I was 27. I was far away, he had remarried after my mother's death, a troubled marriage. How could I have been responsible, even a little bit? Well, I was his only child and we had been at odds for many years. I didn't do with my life what he wanted me to. Oh, and he died on Father's Day, before he got a letter I'd sent saying I was sorry for being a bad daughter . . . 50 years later, I still wake up, thinking, "What if. . ." And don't let Uncle Andy off as an aberration. One of my aunts said openly that my father died "because he couldn't live without YOU!" My heart aches for all the "wrong ones," that is, for us all, on some level or another. Arnold's story is one I will never forget.

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I don't quite accept that "No story is changing anything now." I have a friend, a fiction writer, who's been in Kyiv teaching the past year. Last week she told me that she hasn't been able to read anything lately, can't focus, can't get words to make sense -- except for one thing: Carolyn Forche's memoir What You Have Heard is True. She said Forche's story of the confusing build up to a confusing war was like a life jacket right now.

We have no idea how many specific stories are consoling or giving courage to or providing tenacious companionship for countless individuals at this very moment. And while that may not change Russian politics, it might well be making an even more essential difference.

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Thank you for talking about Ukraine before carrying on with "The Stone Boy". Your words resonated with me.

What also resonated was describing the tragedy of the story being one of timing. Stories that are satisfying for me are often where the mistiming - the missed opportunities for connection and understanding - are believable and leave you asking the "if only so and so had only said such and such at the right time" kind of questions, and the thoughts of "Imagine if this character was a different kind of person."

And these questions are maybe answered because the characters cannot do what you the reader want them to do to avoid pain because they are who they are. And that's the beauty and the tragedy of it.

For some reason while thinking about this I keep going back to what the writer Rob Bass said about his screenplay for Rain Man. It was something along the lines of how he discovered that the movie was about the human need to connect and how difficult and yet how vital that is. I feel that about "The Stone Boy".

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