10-second review: The author tells how she became a writer--through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father's drug store, she read books given or loaned to her by all kinds of people and she consumed all of those books.
Quotes:
“A writer is buffeted into being by school hurts—Orwell, Forster, Mann!—but after a while other ambushes begin: sorrows, deaths, disappointments, subtle diseases, delays, guilts, the spite of the private haters of the poetry side of life, the snobs of the glamorous, the bitterness of those for whomresentments are a daily gruel….”
“Your hair is whitening, you are a well of tears, what you meant to do (beauty and justice) you have not done, papa and mama are under the earth, you live in panic and dread, the future shrinks and darkens, stories are only vapor, your inmost craving is for nothing but an old scarred pen, and what, God knows, is that?”
Comment: The pleasant (books) and the dark side of the writing life. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: Impressions of the world as it looks during a total eclipse of the sun. The world no longer looks ordinary, setting off reflections on that changed world. A dead world. The world when the sun burns out. But then the eclipse is over and people hurry back to the now familiar world of their daily lives.
Quotes:
“People were climbing the nearby hills and setting up shop in clumps among the dead grasses. It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day.”
“Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away.”
“I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.”
“This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic…. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead.”
“Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud.”
“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know.”
“The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.”
“The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far away, to keep the world alive.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: Living in Wyoming required the author to adjust to the wide open spaces, the laconic conversations and the feeling of being sealed in by isolation. In general, space is a good thing, enabling people to welcome all kinds of ideas, whereas we in the East build obstructions against space by filling up our spaces with the things we can buy.
Quotes:
“It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from the wind.”
“To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground.”
“It’s all a bunch of nothing—wind and rattlesnakes—and so much of it you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been and it don’t make much difference.”
“The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me.”
“In most parts of Wyoming, the human population is visibly outnumbered by the animal.”
“The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen.”
“Sentence structure is shortened to the skin and bones of a thought. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs: ‘Which one needs rode?’ ”
“If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind.”
“The individualism and optimism generated during those times have endured.”
“So the dark side to the grandeur of these spaces is the small-mindedness that seals people in. Men become hermits; women go mad. Cabin fever explodes into suicides or into grudges and lifelong family feuds.”
“One of our evening entertainments was to watch the night sky.”
“…being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy.”
Comment: Another model (“What Is Camp?”) of defining the indefinable. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: The author noticed that the sounds, not the words, of his native Spanish communicated intimacy with his family, that the public language, English, did not convey that intimacy. It's not the words, but the spirit behind the words that conveys intimacy among the family. It's not the language, per se, that communicates intimacy, but the sounds and the spirit communicated through those sounds that enclosed the world of his family.
Quotes:
“I was then a listening child, careful to hear the very different sounds of Spanish and English…. I’d listen to sounds more than to words.”
“I’d hear her hard English sounds. I’d wait to hear her voice turn to soft-sounding Spanish.”
“There was a new silence at home. As we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents.”
“Once I learned the public language [English], it would never again be easy for me to hear intimate family voices [in Spanish].”
“This message of intimacy could never be translated because it did not lie in the actual words she had used but passed through them.”
“The mystery of intimate utterance remains. The communication of intimacy passes through the word and enlivens its sound, but it cannot be held by the word. It cannot be retained or even quoted because it is too fluid. It depends not on words but on persons.”
“Intimacy cannot be trapped within words.”
Comment: An interesting point of view. Heightens the importance of the native language to the native speaker. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The author tells about and reflects on her experiences in 1968, experiences with the Black Panthers and college takeovers. She summarizes by saying that another author had said he put his experiences in writing so he could find meaning in them, but she has put these experiences in writing and still finds no meaning in them. Reflects the mood of the times.
Quotes:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson….”
“The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation.”
Huey Newton shows up at a hospital, shot and bleeding, and asks to see a doctor, but the admissions person would not take him to a doctor unless Newton signed an admission form and Newton said, “I don’t have to sign anything.”
“Playing it out in time for the six o’clock news.”
“It was another story without a narrative.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-Minute Review: Using the technique of Pascal's Pensees and Eric Hoffer'sThe True Believer, the author jots down random thoughts on the phenomenon of women and lying, which most often occurs in order to survive in a male-dominated world.
Truth is complex. The effort to learn the truth means that we must delve into greater complexity. Relationship is founded on the desire to understand the truth of each other. We lie by projecting an image we want the other to believe. The possibilities of a truthful relationship.
Quotes:
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
“The liar lives in fear of losing control.”
“The liar has many friends and leads an existence of great loneliness.”
“Truth…is an increasing complexity.”
“Lies are usually attempts to make everything simple—for the liar—than it really is or ought to be.”
“We [women] have been expected to lie with our bodies: to bleach, redden, unkink or curl our hair, pluck eye brows, shave armpits, wear padding in various places or lace ourselves, take little steps, glaze fingers and toenails, wear clothes that emphasized our helplessness.”
“The lie is the ‘happy marriage,’ of domesticity….”
“There is a danger run by all powerless people: that we forget we are lying….”
“…a culture which validates only male experience.”
“…lying…becomes an easy way to avoid conflict or complications….”
“We take so much of the universe on trust….”
“I also have faith…that you do not conceal facts from me in an effort to spare me, or yourself, pain.”
“Or, at the very least, that you will say, ‘There are things I am not telling you.”
“Truthfulness…has to be created between people.”
“Truthfulness …means heightened complexity.”
“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people…are the most interesting things in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of those possibilities.”
“That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: In looking for the burial place of Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, the author meets a number of people who knew her. Their stories sometimes contradict each other. But Zora's personality, her ability to look at life as it is, without tears, and her independent thinking, seem to have separated her from her family, from her husband, and from the majority of other blacks. "She was not a teary sort of person...." And she was a great writer and collector of African-American folklore, who died in poverty.
Quotes:
“Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America.”
“Our own school and good teachers. Do I need integration?”
“But Miss Hurston was clever, too—a student who didn’t let college give her a broad ‘a’ and who had great scorn for all pretensions, academic or otherwise. That is why she was such a fine folklore collector, able to go among the people and never act as if she had been to school at all.” Langston Hughes.
“Dr. Benton seems startled. ‘Zora didn’t die of malnutrition,’ he says indignantly. Where did you get that story from? She had a stroke and she died in the welfare home.”
“She was always studying. Her mind—before the stroke—just worked all the time.”
“Her English was beautiful. (I suspect this is a clever way to let me know Zora herself didn’t speak in the ‘black English’ her characters used.)”
“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes…. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. No, I do not weep at the world.” Zora Neale Hurston.
“There are times—and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them—when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
