gerry

how i slept last night

kind of had a night like this last night

it’s hard to maintain, the softness

“It’s hard to maintain, the softness. It’s an effort. That Dubai story ends with these lines, wisdom imparted from Saunders to himself: ‘Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.'”

–from the ny times interview with george  saunders

the endless cycle of meaningful activity

“…but he realized, with the force of epiphany, that the attempts to graft his life experience onto a Hemingway-Carver framework were foolish. There was an experience he was living that hadn’t adequately been represented in fiction yet. Not a Kafkaesque existential deadness, but something else, something that captured ‘not the endless cycle of meaningless activity but the endless cycle of meaningful activity.

‘I saw the peculiar way America creeps up on you if you don’t have anything,’ he told me. ‘It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored. Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.’”

–from the ny times interview with george  saunders, the only writer i have ever intentionally seen read

photo of george saunders by damon winter/The New York Times

snowy