Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Lisa's avatar

Is it just me, or is anyone else thinking today, on the Tenth of December, that Story Club has the potential to save a life?

Thank you so much, George, for your warmth, generosity, and inspiration, and for creating this community!

Expand full comment
Andy Lee's avatar

George, as someone who gave a shout-out for “The Falls” on the getting to know you post, I really enjoyed reading about how the story was born. I was struck by how as a reader, the only version of the text I can conceive of is the finished product, and so it’s hard to imagine you writing beyond the end of the story as it currently exists; the final line is what I love most about this story, and it’s so powerful and complete that in my imagination when you wrote it you knew instantly that the story was over because, duh, tautology-alert, there is it, the perfect finish to the story.

This led me to try to express why the last line is so important, and what it does to me as a reader. On the most basic level, from the first time I read the story and then called my wife and read it aloud to her over the phone because I wanted to share it with someone else immediately, it’s heartbreaking and heroic and despairing and hopeful, and that mess of emotions that it stirs would be ruined if anything else happened to resolve that ambiguity.

During a later reading, I remember being struck by how powerfully this story asks and answers a key question about the human condition: Why do you do when all the alternatives are hopeless? It’s impossible, of course, to do nothing, to watch the girls drown, but it’s also of course impossible to swim to the snag, and so we get to watch as Morse tries figure this out himself and juggle the impossible and unthinkable outcomes and there’s something thrilling about his thoughts circling around and justifying one course of action while his body has already taken flight. While reading I always appreciate the action that Morse’s body takes, independent of his mind, and see it as deeply moral and heroic and true: that watching the girls drown is the thing that you really can’t do, more than any of the other things that you can’t do, that cuts across your fear and despair and rationalizing and justifying. Knowing whether or not the heroic moment succeeds or fails is counterproductive: if it succeeded, the story of Morse feels as false as the thoughts of Cummings; if it fails we lose that glimmer of hope and our empathy with Morse gets broken and replaced by something else: sorrow, sympathy for his family.

Today, in light of your teaser about looking at sentences as a creative driver, I thought more about the rhythms and cadences of this story, and the ways in which Morse’s thoughts tumble out and over each other like water rushing over the falls. A good deal of the humor and the tragedy of this story for me is what’s happening in Morse’s head and how he can’t seem to stop it, this interior flood of memories and resentments and fears and bits of occasionally forced gratitude. In this way the final sentence feels like a kind of release from Morse’s neuroses: the sentence starts with his normal tumble and turmoil: eight thoughts on top of each other, separated by commas. Then the sentence suddenly slows down as he makes his decision, as we get this lovely “threw his long ugly body out across the water.” If the problem in this reading of this story is Morse’s indecision and anxiety, then this sentence brings it to a close quite nicely: even for just a split second, Morse and the reader are given a moment of grace, and the noble act is mirrored by a calmness of language and thought.

Anyway, glad to have some time today to sit back and think about this stuff; reading literature creates these moments of grace for me where I can sit back and ponder all these questions about being human.

Expand full comment
285 more comments...

No posts