Thank you to everyone who participated in our “Impossible Question” drill on Thursday. What a great list resulted. It’s interesting to me how the “rule” of only naming one forces us to really think about what might constitute a powerful reading experience.
The question was: What was the best (most intense, moving) reading experience of 2024?
You can find the results (and still add your pick) here.
Tonight, as the sky over Santa Monica goes a bright, Malibu-fire-related orange, I find myself thinking about this general sense of agitation that seems to have settled over the world (well, at least over me) these last few months.
What’s it about?
In thinking about this, I’ve realized something about myself, which is that I take (have always taken) a lot of comfort in being part of what I’d call “virtuous systems.”
My life is given meaning by this idea, which runs on background all the time, infusing even small actions with meaning: what I’m doing (all that I’m doing) is in service of what is ultimately, a positive worldview, in service to some larger, virtuous, system. (By “virtuous,” I guess I mean something like “reliably aligned with my deepest beliefs.”)
My agitation, of late (I’m thinking), is due, at least in part, to a feeling that certain systems I’d always assumed to be virtuous are, in their current form, maybe not so.
This is, approximately, a “the center is not holding” type of feeling, at least as I’m experiencing it.
For me, this feeling has to do, yes, with the election, but also with the strange skewing effect that is going on in so many areas – areas where I don’t find a corollary to my own internal sense of right and wrong.
In thinking about this, it occurred to me to simply lean into those systems of which I’m a part that still feel virtuous to me.
So, my family, obviously; my Buddhist beliefs; my Syracuse web of former and current students and my colleagues there; Story Club, for sure.
Also, importantly (and this is why I’m writing about it here): my art. My writing is “reliably aligned with my deepest beliefs,” or at least I can try to make it that way (through (guess what?) revision).
This realization – though, as I’m writing it, it feels kind of obvious – has given me a strange sense of peace. We can only control what we can control. If a person is feeling, as I am, that certain larger systems (the government, the economic structure, our auto-fealty to corporate interests, the distorted way we receive information, the corporate-entertainment complex, to name just a few) are disappointingly out of alignment with one’s inner sense of right and wrong; well: a person can (and maybe should, in the name of virtue) subtly send his energies elsewhere.
So, it’s occurred to me to ask myself: “When, George, are you at your most powerful?”
“When writing fiction, dummy,” I’ve answered.
One side-effect I can already feel: my (light!) despair and agitation are somewhat receding. I have this feeling a few times a day now: “I am not, at sixty-six years old, going to spend my time wailing and gnashing my teeth. I am going to really try to believe that, to be good, it helps to be happy (and vice versa). I’m going to try to be a model of happiness and positive engagement….of listening and trying to be fond of the parts of the world that I can still be fond of. And even the parts that I can’t, right now, be fond of (even those I am actively pissed-off with), I am going to try to bless with my genuine interest. But also (I continue, in this long mental aside, during which I may be, say, standing frozen on the sidewalk, muttering) I am not going to be a pushover or an ostrich with my head in the sand. I am going to try to find, and then defend, truth and kindness and honesty, and go up against power as necessary, in this, my best, mode, namely: my art.”
That is: I’m not going to crawl under a rock; on the contrary, I’m going to, through my work, find the biggest boulder I can, and, from the top of it, shout the most true (subtle, complex, compassionate) things I can, in the form of my stories.
This surge of optimism might, it occurs to me, also be related to the fact that I recently started working out again and taking vitamins. And that I’m just winding up a great semester with a truly remarkable group of students, and have a long stretch of pure writing time ahead. 😊
But, seriously.
I know that sometimes, here in Story Club, we’ve struggled with the possible insularity of art; of the question of whether it’s self-absorbed or isolationist to spend hours a day in imaginary worlds of our own making. And I suppose that, yes, it can be. Like everything else, it’s all in the details and the intention.
But it’s made me happy, these last few days, resolving to commit all of my feelings to my art and, in this way, to really believe in it again, with as much fervor as I can.
I recently made the case, in The New Yorker (among other cases I tried to make), that one symptom of contemporary life is that, as overwhelmed with information as we are (and as non-neutral as that information often is – that is, as agenda-laced as it tends to be), it makes sense that a person might sometimes feel outgunned and ineffective and inadequately engaged. A person might, that is, feel that he is not doing all that he should be doing.
But sometimes, I’ve found, this can lead to a sense of failure or paralysis which, paradoxically, means that one really is doing less than one can.
It’s such a short time we have on this earth, to be happy, to be present, to perform, every day, whatever acts of kindness we can.
Maybe, we could construe “writing a beautiful, timeless story” as a large-scale act of kindness, with the potential to bless anyone who reads it, on into the future, long after these hardships have resolved and others have arisen.
And, speaking of which…
I’d like us, over the next few weeks, behind the paywall, to try something different and, I think, exciting, namely: a slow, close reading of Dickens’ great “A Christmas Carol.”
More details to come, on Sunday – but those of you who want to participate might want to locate/buy a copy.
Happy holidays to all of you. Onward, onward, onward,
George
I've felt out of alignment with larger systems my whole life. Strange to say, given I was endowed with plenty of privileges. I just turned 76, an age that sounded impossible not so long ago, and I ask myself what to do every day. Well, what I do is not going to make a difference in the way what George does will make a difference, talking about literature here, but I can only do what I can do. Some things sound much the same as George. I have two young grandsons who look up to me - there's a huge place to do good. There's a wider family too, of which I am the oldest. I almost slipped and said patriarch ! I'm fortunate to live in an amazing town where strangers say hello when they pass on the street. Small things make a big difference. I just started thinking that years from now when we're gone, there will be books people will read as being definitive of our era. I wonder what those books will be.
I can't tell you how excited I am by this prospect, as a person who lives with books in a field in the remote English countryside. Thank you so much for this community. Its very existence is an act of kindness; at least it feels that way to me.