George Saunders' "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain"-A Landmark Tutorial on Writing

 I found this a humbling and mind-opening book.  I left it realizing even more that I should have spent more time editing everything I have written.  Honing every sentence, deleting the extraneous and the too- expected.  It was humbling, too, in the intricacy of the Russian short stories which Saunders analyzes, acutely.  There is so much more to these stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy and Gogel than I appreciated on the first reading.  Saunders loved writing this book; that is clear.  He loves writing and reading, too.  Don’t we all?  We write and we read, because we love doing it.  That is how I feel even as I read more slowly, forget more of what I read and write more verbosely.  

Saunders practices good writing in this book with great care.  His ability to do that leaps off the page again and again.  “The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.  I consider myself more vaudevillian than scholar.”

I identify with the “vast underground network for goodness in the world.”  He identifies in the book clubs he has known, he has participated in:  “a web of people who put reading at the center of their lives because they’d often experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.”  That says it.  No more, no less.

A new perspective I emerge with: “a story is a linear, temporal phenomenon.  It proceeds, and charms us (or it doesn’t), a line at a time.  We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.”

Saunders follows in Einstein’s footsteps:  “No worthy problem is ever solved in a plane of its original conception.

 I believe Saunders is right. “All art begins in that instance of intuitive preference.”  The artist just comes to like it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he had the time or inclination to articulate them.  It just feels right.  It is appropriate.”  

When Saunders is writing well, he says, “there is almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on.”  He is trying different orders, looking for the perfect sentence, but mostly the artist “tweaks that which he has already done.  There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we are adjusting what is already there.  A story is frank, intimate conversation between equals.  We keep reading it because we continue to feel respected by the writer.  The idea of a story is an on-going communication between one person telling his story to another.”  Beautiful.

When it comes to Saunders universal laws of fiction—“Be specific!  Honor efficiency!, always be escalating.  That is all a story is really:  a continuing system of escalation.”

What will keep a reader reading?  The only method, Saunders asserts, “is to read what we have written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do.  What bores us will bore her.  What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up, too.”  He suggests reading the prose in front of us, the prose we have already read a million times, as if it is new to us.  How do we react?  In writing fiction, “we are in conversation with our reader, but with this great advantage:  we get to improve the conversation over and over with every pass.  We get to ‘be there’ more attentively.”

Saunders distinguishes those talented writers over the years that separates those who go on to publish from those who don’t.  “First, a holiness to revise.  Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.”  That may not seem sexy, Saunders writes, but it is the hardest thing to learn.  “It doesn’t come naturally, but all is  a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.”  “Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter:  a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing that the audience actually shows up for.”

Of all the short stories, I found Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov and Saunders’ comments on it and on Chekhov to be the most mind-opening.  I won’t try to summarize them here.  It is a very short story,  only ten pages. It is a complex, insightful and ironic story as is Saunders commentary on it.  The story appears to be asking “is it right to seek happiness, knowing that it is ephemeral and he cannot have much of it at all.  His life can be lived for pleasure or duty.  How much belief is too much?  Is life a burden or a joy?”

The story cautions us against being too judgemental.  Too fixed in our views.  It encourages open-mindedness, for seeing two sides of questions.  “Every human position has a problem with it.  Believed in too much, it slides into error.  It is not that no position is correct; it is that no position is correct for long” (or I would say guaranteed to be correct forever).  “We are perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.” It is more comfortable that way. 

Chekhov was open to criticism on this point.  Tolstoy accused him of having a “very good heart, but thus far it does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.”  But this quality, Saunders avers, is what we love him for now.  In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

Through Chekhov’s short life; he lived to be only 44, he seemed glad to be alive, he tried to be kind.  “His feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination.  Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage.  We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being a certain person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago that has never had any reason to doubt it.  In other words, we have to stay open in the face of actual grinding, terrifying life.”  And I would add new emerging facts.

Back to the joy and satisfaction from reading and writing.  “These days, it is easy to feel that we have fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love.  I mean:  we have.  But to read, to write, is that we still believe in, at least the possibility of connection.”

At the end, Saunders calls on himself to address the question:  How are we altered by reading?  He gave it a try: 

 “I’m reminded that my mind is not the only mind.  

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people:  what is in them is in me and vice versa.

My capacity for language is reenergized.  My internal language, the language in which I think, gets richer, more specific and adroit.  I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it.

I feel lucky to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.  

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

That is all pretty good,” Saunders concludes.

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That is a mighty fine summary, I believe. .

I wouldn’t want these several of notes to discourage anyone from picking up and reading this book, carefully, for it demands careful reading.  I assure you it will be a rewarding experience.

Congressman John Lewis: An Icon of Courage, Persistence and Faith

 Jon Meacham’s biography of John Lewis is a wonderful book.  It’s not, as Meacham himself said, a “full-blown biography”; it stops in its detail with the Civil Rights movement. 

 

It was mind-opening to me.  First, in conveying in a cinematic fashion the brutal violence Lewis and others incurred during that period, 1960-65.  I’d read about it.  I didn’t feel it.  I do now, more than ever.  

 

But above all, what I discovered in the book was Lewis’ faith-based commitment to non-violence and his ability to continue to make progress despite all the setbacks.  He never gave up hope, nor the determination and courage to turn hope into reality, even knowing it would often be one step forward and one step back; indeed, sometimes seeming to be two steps back.”

 

There were other “learnings” 

 

It’s important to remember that the public very much disapproved of the Freedom Fighters’ efforts, the sit-ins and other public protests during the first half of the ‘60s.  Reform does not come without controversy.  I loved Lewis’ citation from Horace Mann:  “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

 

Lewis’ pursuit of “the beloved community” was unwavering. 

 

John Kennedy in the summer of 1963, reflecting on the Civil Rights Bill, remarked:  “Sometimes you look at what you have done and the only thing you ask yourself is—what took you so long to do it?”  That’s exactly how I felt when we at P&G finally gave the same rights to people of the same sex who were partners as we did to married partners in 1995.

 

Lewis kept his faith.  It wasn’t easy—it was, in fact, the hardest thing in the world.  How could you hold to a creed (non-violence) that appeared to produce more pain than progress?  The only way to explain Lewis’ persistent non-violence, his unending commitment to answering hate with love and death with life, is to take him at his word:  “We truly believe that we are on God’s side and, in spite of everything—the beatings, the bombings, the burnings—God’s truth would prevail.”  Lewis recalled, “The anguish and the duration of the struggle was, in a way, a vindication of the premise of the struggle itself.”

 

President Johnson was at his best as he spoke before signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965:  “The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such as issue (one that speaks to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation).  Should we defy every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a Nation.  For, with a country as with a person, ‘what has a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”

 

And, continuing:  “There is no Negro problem.  There is no Southern problem.  There is no Northern problem.  There is only an American problem.”

 

Here we are, just about 56 years after Johnson’s talk, facing the same existential challenge.  Human rights are still under attack. Yet, we dare not give up. 

 

Meacham aptly describes what drove John Lewis and Martin Luther King.  The journey begins with faith—faith in the dignity of the worth of every human being.  It calls for faith in God and that God gave us the courage to believe that the power of love is greater than the power of hate.  

 

 

President Biden's Infrastructure Bill—"A Bridge Too Far"

 

There is scarcely anything in President Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan I don’t agree with, even though, as many Republicans and some Democrats and economists are properly pointing out, some elements go well beyond any traditional definition of infrastructure.

 

But almost without exception, they are needed:  refurbished bridges, roads, tunnels.  Improved airline terminals.  All needed to bring us up to where China, for example, already is. 

 

And I agree there should be some incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles and funding to provide an electrical charging grid across the nation, just as the federal government contributed to the building of the nation's railroads and highways in decades past. 

 

And no one could believe more than I do in the importance of preschool education being available to all families who seek it as well as improved child care. 

 

My problem with this proposal is not what it’s proposing to fund—it is all strategically important--but how it is proposing to fund it.  I have long felt, for example, that preschool education should be funded in part at the federal level but even more at the state and local levels. There needs to be joint ownership at every level including the community because only there can one bring the tailored leadership needed for the programs to be effective and learn over time.   The same line of reasoning applies to improved child care. 

 

I worked closely with President Obama’s first Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, trying to persuade him and the Obama administration to change their proposal for universal preschool education—not to have it rest entirely on the federal government but rather have it be a shared funding and implementation responsibility at federal, state and local community levels. 

 

The Biden administration should pull back on this infrastructure bill to get bipartisan agreement to the essential elements of it and ensure careful thought is given to the apportionment of costs among the federal, state and local governments as well as private industry.

 

There is an undue rush about advancing this legislation based on the feeling that there is an opening to make it happen. The proposed legislation is sweeping together a disparate group of initiatives under one umbrella (infrastructure) without careful and prudent thought on how they should be funded and how much money should be spent.  This nation’s capacity to assume more debt is not infinite.  My advice to the administration is “Slow down.  Get committees together to study this. Achieve a bi-partisan outcome.”  I hope the Biden administration follows this course of action.