Best Of The Daily Dreher
What you've missed over the last fortnight
Hello all, it has been two weeks since I sent out a message to all subscribers (not just the paid ones). Here is a collection of some of the things you’ve missed from my daily newsletter.
Books Are Not Mirrors
That’s a subtitled still from Episode Seven of Pretend It’s A City, Martin Scorsese’s chipper documentary series about Fran Lebowitz, now playing on Netflix. In this clip, Fran is talking about how reading liberated her as a child growing up in suburban New Jersey, introducing her to so many different worlds. She says that nowadays, young people whine that books have to be about them, or they can’t relate to the books. Lebowitz has no truck with that argument, saying what you see above.
I wanted to stand up and cheer. Of all the stupid arguments the politically correct trot out to justify savaging reading lists, the idea that kids should see themselves in literature is the dumbest — but just about perfect for our narcissistic culture.
Like Fran, I learned how to read at a young age, and books set me free. I never once saw in books a fat kid who lived in the country and who was no good at sports and hunting, and who felt like an alien ship must have dropped him off with these kind people, who took him in. Nowhere did I see stories about nerdy obsessives who were afraid of snakes and Bigfoot (okay, I kind of did in “Peanuts,” with Linus’s terror of queen snakes and gully cats). If I had seen them, I would have thought, “I’m living this life, and I don’t like it. Give me something better to read.”
I read lots of comics as a kid. I spent every minute I possibly could as a boy with my nose stuck in Superman or Batman comics, or the Justice League, or the Flash, or any of the other DC Comics world superheroes. (I had some Marvel titles, but I felt that there was something off about them.) I had so many comics that my mom bought me a trash barrel to keep them all in. The point is that I was so alienated from the world in which I actually found myself — this, despite having a pretty happy childhood — that I used books as a door to other worlds.
I also read anything I could get my hands on. The further away from my world, the better! I especially loved science fiction, as I recall, but I am vexed by being unable to recall a single title I read, because I made ample use of a library card. Reading was all about escape for me. It wasn’t that my life was tortured or anything; it was that my life was boring, and I wanted to be elsewhere. The kid next door was a big reader too, but he was a natural-born country boy, and had a big shelf of Westerns, and stories about hunters and other country people. I wonder if he read to escape, or rather to intensify the things he loved about where we lived, and how we lived.
I saw Star Wars the summer it came out. I was ten. My father had no interest in seeing a dumb sci-fi movie, so he dropped me off by myself at the University Four cinema, near the LSU campus — in 1977, dropping a ten year old off at a movie theater in the city was normal — and sent me in. I will never, ever experience anything in this life more exalting than that movie, as a ten year old boy in 1977. How could you? There was nothing like it, and had never been anything like it. I remember just sitting there, after it ended, wondering what had just happened, and being so sad that I had to go back to the real world.
If you had driven down our road that summer, you would have seen a tubby fourth grade boy sitting on a red Sears riding mower, going round and round to cut the grass in a big four-acre yard, sweat pouring off of him, looking miserable and pathetic. But what you didn’t know is that inside my head, I was Darth Vader piloting my modified TIE fighter throughout the galaxy, hunting for Luke Skywalker (what can I say, Vader was cool).
The first time I ever saw myself in literature was 11th grade English class, when I was introduced to the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Her stories are mostly set in rural Georgia of the 1950s — a time and a place that wasn’t so different from rural Louisiana in the 1970s. I could hardly believe what I was reading, with her dialogue. These people talk like the country people I grew up with! The scene in her story “Revelation,” when Ruby Turpin is in the doctor’s office, the conversational exchanges she had with the other patients took me right back to Dr. Alfred Gould’s waiting room in my youth. Though they were about my people, and my world, O’Connor’s books were not a mirror, in that I saw myself and thought I was good; they were a door into a deeper consideration of things I had taken for granted, and discarded. I was at a boarding school in Louisiana at the time, and eager to put as much distance between me and my boring country growing-up as possible. O’Connor’s stories made me realize that great literature could be written about people like us. And she made me look at the world I had come from through adult eyes.
You never know when you are going to find yourself in a book. Many years passed before I discovered Dante and his Divine Comedy. I was forty-six. You probably know that story, about how I stumbled into the poetry section of a Barnes & Noble, sick with chronic mononucleosis caused by deep stress, and decided to look at this book I had always heard about, but never thought to read. I was hooked by the first lines:
In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
For the straight path was lost.
My God, me too! I ended up acquiring the books, and reading them as if they were a map leading me to safety. Here was a book that was both mirror and door. It showed me who I was, and also opened a door to a better life. No book has changed my life like that one. In fact, I wrote a book about it: How Dante Can Save Your Life.
Here’s the thing: if someone had approached me that year with a book written about a 46-year-old burnout whose family shocked him by rejecting him, and who was left questioning everything he thought he knew about life, while fighting a chronic illness brought on by the trauma — I would not have read it. I would not have had to think about it, in fact. Why would I want to read about that zhlub? To read Dante, though, about this 14th century Tuscan going on a fantastical journey through the underworld — that was captivating! I met myself in disguise in Dante’s verse, as will all attentive readers, whatever their background.
I feel sorry for kids today who are led into “relevant” and “relatable” books by adults who only reinforce the narcissism beat into their heads by popular culture. If you expect a book to be a mirror, you may never know what you can become, because you will never be introduced to other people, and other ways of living. Cicero said, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever.” Similarly, not to know, through books, worlds and peoples other than your own is to remain a child forever. It is to remain narrow, self-centered, and frightened of anything that is unfamiliar. I’m not the sort of person who is particularly interested in the life of a Norwegian farm woman of the Middle Ages, but Kristin Lavransdatter absolutely captivated me, because it transported me into a radically different world, but introduced me to people whose dreams and struggles seemed very human, and very relatable. What a poverty to hand a teenager some YA crap novel about alienated suburban teens cutting themselves and dreaming of changing their sex, when they could be reading Kristin Lavransdatter. What kind of culture does this to its kids?
Fran Lebowitz has this advice for teenagers:
“Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself–a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.”
How will young people ever think about wise and life-giving things if the only books we give them are books about themselves? How will we ever learn how to live, or the worth of the lives we have been given, if all we know is those lives? What a gift books are! Thank God for all those doors, leading to many mansions and many adventures, all for the making of our own perspective.
Walker Percy Is Still Catholic
From an interview with Walker Percy in the Paris Review, shortly after the novelist turned 70:
INTERVIEWER
Could you tell me how you feel about your inspiring beliefs, how faithful you have remained to them?
PERCY
If you mean, am I still a Catholic, the answer is yes. The main difference after thirty-five years is that my belief is less self-conscious, less ideological, less polemical. My ideal is Thomas More, an English Catholic—a peculiar breed nowadays—who wore his faith with grace, merriment, and a certain wryness.
I am coming up on thirty years after first starting to regard myself as a Christian — as an adult, I mean. I met Monsignor Carlos Sanchez, a miracle-witnessing nonagenarian priest spending his final years in an assisted living home, that summer. I did not have a eureka moment to become a Christian, but it was after meeting him, and writing a story about him for my newspaper, and allowing the truth of what he told me to sink in, that I started to regard myself as a Christian. I was formally received into the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil, 1993, but I certainly considered myself a believing Christian by then. I would say that sometime in the summer of 1991, I began to believe more than I disbelieved, and started admitting to myself that yes, I was a Christian after all.
What are the main differences between my faith now, and my faith then? I don’t know that I could say that my faith is less self-conscious now, though it probably is, insofar as I have now been Christian for over half of my life; it no longer feels like a pair of new shoes that pinch in the toes. It is definitely less ideological and less polemical — so much so that I wonder if 24-year-old me (the age I was in the summer of 1991) met 54-year-old me (the age I will be on my birthday next month), if he would think the old guy was a soft-headed sentimentalist.
In those first years, I was so animated by my Catholic faith. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. It brought joy and meaning to my life, and also purpose. Like many young converts, though, I was ready to fight for the faith, and I had a lot of bile built up against liberal Boomer Catholics who were watering Catholicism down, and taking the edge off of it.
I thought of myself back then as eager. When I think back on it, though, I regard myself with less charity. From this distance, I see myself as someone who wanted to fight. I had a lot of resentment against people like the priest and the nun who first instructed me in the faith. They were the quintessential Boomer “spirit of Vatican II” Catholics. I went through two months of instruction with my RCIA class at the LSU Catholic Student Center (though I had graduated, I had this naive idea that instruction there would be more intellectually challenging), without learning a thing about doctrine, or church history, or anything other than how to massage my emotions. If I had written a just-the-facts account of those classes and published it somewhere, people would have shaken their heads over how decadent the Church had become. I quit after I realized that all of us would be received into the Church without knowing anything that was required of us as Catholics.
I carried that resentment with me into Catholicism. Even now, I don’t think I was entirely wrong. It was an outrage what that priest and that nun were doing to us — and I subsequently learned that our experience was by no means uncommon. From the beginning, I had clear ideas about who the good guys and the bad guys were in the Church, and I kept a fire of militancy burning in my breast. The thing is, I wasn’t a grim, humorless kind of militant — which made me a not-very-effective militant. I enjoyed being Catholic, and feeling that I was part of a tribe. I don’t say “tribe” in a negative way. I felt like I was part of a real fellowship built around shared belief — a lovely thing for a young man like me, who had never experienced that sense of belonging. What’s more, I really loved learning how to be Catholic. It was such a rich way to live.
Most people who have been reading me for any length of time know the story about how I got the faith beat out of me by the scandal, so I won’t belabor that by recalling the story. It was a blessing, in the end, because it forced me to come to God on my knees, bloody from crawling over the jagged shards of my faith. This event really was one of the great turning points in my life. It was not only a loss of Catholicism, but badly damaged my ability to trust myself to know anything. I had the world so clearly sorted out between the sheep and the goats — but facts made a fool of me.
God needed to break that spiritual and intellectual pride in me. As I tell people who ask me about it, I was proud to be Catholic — with all the negative connotations that word carries. I really did think I was better than other Christians. I was in the oldest church and the smartest church. Mind you, the Catholic Church didn’t teach me to be so arrogant: that was all me, but it was also easy to fall into if you were ambitious, conservative, and living in Washington DC and New York in those days, as I was, and running with the crowd I was part of.
I washed up in Orthodoxy in 2005, a shipwrecked pilgrim. How hard that was! Everybody at our Orthodox parish was so kind, but I was dying inside. I knew I could not go back to Catholicism, but I had loved it so much, and it had been so central to my identity, that to watch it fading into the past was extraordinarily painful. On the day I was chrismated, in 2006, someone in our parish hugged me and said, “Welcome home.” I wanted to cry. I knew I was where I was supposed to be, but it didn’t feel like home. There was no home for me.
Gradually that changed, but I emphasize gradually. I had to learn how to trust church again, knowing that I could never again trust as naively as I once had done. (There will always be a part of me that is holding himself back; I have come to accept that.) I gave up caring about church politics, though I allowed myself to be pulled back in for an honorable reason (though it blew up in my face). I have never felt proud to be Orthodox the way I was proud to be Catholic, and that’s a good thing: I have felt grateful for the gift of Orthodoxy. I don’t know if things would have been different for me had I been grateful for, but not prideful in, my Catholicism. Truth is, I don’t think I was mature enough back then to identify the sin of pride within me.
I have been Orthodox now for longer than I was Catholic, and I know for sure that I’m much less hard-edged about my faith than I was. I don’t think I believe any less, but I am far more merciful towards those who are struggling. It’s a difficult thing to do, trying to figure out how to be orthodox in belief but also charitable and compassionate. There was nothing charitable or compassionate about how that Boomer priest and Boomer nun treated us catechumens: denying us what we were all owed as inquirers into the Catholic faith. Catholic truth brought me out of a life of sin, but I had to learn early on that there are lots of Catholics — including priests — who are eager to bless sin (if it’s the fashionable kind of sin), or at least to dismiss it as no big deal. That made me pretty resentful. I still hate that kind of thing wherever I see it (and yes, we have it in some parts of Orthodoxy too).
But at the same time, the experience of living and suffering broke down my rigidity. I lost interest in arguing about things of the faith. It’s not that I think it’s unimportant to be able to do that. Rather, it’s that I never regained the shiny confidence I once had before the crisis that caused me to lose my Catholicism. I feel that I am holding my own just to tend to my own repentance. I used to be such a ball of fire. Now I’m a 40-watt bulb in the basement. I tend not to get involved in the Orthodox world of media and polemics, simply because I know my own weaknesses, and don’t want to tempt fate.
I certainly speak out about the things I believe, because I believe as much or more than I ever did that the church — the churches — are in a severe crisis, for which we are not prepared. I’m scheduled to give a big lecture on Saturday, over Zoom, and under the auspices of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. I’m going to talk about that crisis, and the kind of Christian response that’s called for. Some progressive Orthodox voices — academics and others — tried to get my talk cancelled, but St. Vlad’s held firm. I’m not going to pull any punches, but I am not going to punch any harder than I would have done otherwise. I don’t like these controversies, though I won’t back down from them when I think it’s important to face the fight.
I guess I would say, then, that I’m like Percy in that I am less ideological and less polemical, though not less orthodox (or Orthodox). I take Percy to be saying that he holds the same beliefs he always did, but he holds them more lightly, and he doesn’t want to pick them up to beat people over the head as he once did. That’s me. There must be a connection to the fact that I can never imagine resting in the Church as I once did, pre-scandal. Maybe I need that permanent wound as a hedge against the kind of spiritual pride that helped bring me down. For me now, the main experience of faith is a deepening sense of mystery, especially the mystery of suffering, and less of a sense of building a structure of ideas within which to take refuge and from which to take on the world.
I would love to hear from you readers who have been believers for a long time, to know the difference between how you were when you first came to faith as an adult, and how you are now. If you have changed, how? And what caused it? Please write me at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com. I will publish your writing, but will not identify you by name.
A Poem About Insomnia
Deo gratias, I kicked my twelve-year Ambien dependence last month, but it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Lots of sleeplessness in the struggle. After one hard night, I wrote the following comic poem about my struggle:
INSOMNIA VINCIT OMNIA
My anxious head is a broad axe
Which upon a soft pillow rests.
Its goosedowny dream
Can only but seem
Reward for impossible tests.
Steel would transform into feathers!
The handle dissolve into dust!
My fate is to be
(Time’s cruel alchemy):
Complete the long journey through rust.
Thoughts make my skull a thunderdome;
Red glare of ideas lights my brain.
Barrages of notions,
Negate all potions
That would end this savage campaign.
Lady Dawn cleaves night sans merci,
Awake and defeated I lay.
The dread hours ahead
Teach truth of this bed:
‘The Kingdom of Night rules the Day.’
The Troubled Boy’s Shoelaces
Dan Millette once taught second grade physical education classes. This one little boy who would shred his own shoelaces got on Millette’s nerves. A lot. One day:
It was a gloomy winter day in February when tensions reached a climax. My young friend was running his warm-up laps in the gym when he tripped end over end and slammed hard onto the floor. There he was, all sprawled out. I went over and saw, quite evidently, newly mangled shoelaces which clearly would have tripped Usain Bolt in his prime. I sighed loudly in obvious frustration. This was it! This was too much! This boy and I had to have it out, right now! With anger rising, I cannot imagine what I was about to say.
Call it a direct intervention by God – a moment of grace – at that moment I suddenly looked on him and saw everything differently. I no longer saw my Phys. Ed. adversary, but rather a child who just needed something else. I stopped the rest of the class and had the students carry out some harmless activity away from the scene of the fall. Then I sat down beside the student in question. We calmly talked about whether or not he was hurt, as I patiently untied the remnants of his mangled laces from his shoes. A moment of grace indeed. With the laces off, I went out to the hallway and stopped a nearby teacher and asked if he had any spare laces. The kind-hearted teacher dropped what he was doing and raced back to his class to retrieve a pair which he had kicking around. A smart looking set of orange laces. The student and I sat together and patiently re-laced his shoes. Finally, I helped tie them up nice and snug, and Phys. Ed. class continued.
That moment was a turning point.
Trust me, you’re going to want to read how this story ends.
It is never wrong to show grace. Here’s a clip from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, in which my sister taught me a lesson from her early years of teaching kids in a rural public school:
On a visit home from Washington, I helped Ruthie grade papers at her kitchen table one night. These kids in her class missed easy questions. I asked my sister what was wrong with them.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with them,” she said. “See this worksheet? This little boy’s mother dropped him off one Christmas Eve on his grandmother’s doorstep, and disappeared. Pick out a bad worksheet, and I can tell you something terrible going on in that kid’s life. You can’t believe what kids these days have to go through. For a lot of them, it’s a victory just to show up in the morning.”
Since I’m telling stories about the difference a caring teacher can make in the life of a child, here are a couple more from Little Way:
Kendrick Mitchell, another of Ruthie’s early students, came from a strong home and made good grades. His problem was bullying. A self-described nerd, Kendrick loved Greek mythology and Sherlock Holmes mysteries – unusual tastes for West Feliciana sixth-grade boys, especially so for African-American kids. Kendrick took loads of taunting from classmates for his love of reading. Ruthie phoned me one night in Washington to tell me about this kid in her class who was smart and bookish, but whose spirit was being broken by bullying. This was the first time she had a student like this, and wanted my advice.
“The thing he can’t see now is that the rest of his life is not going to be like the sixth grade,” I said. “You need to let him know that there’s nothing wrong with him for liking books. You need to let him know that he shouldn’t give up, and that once he gets out of school, life is going to be great.”
“Would you write him a letter?” Ruthie asked. “I think it would mean a lot.”
I told her I would. I sent it off the following week.
For her part, Ruthie took Kendrick aside and told him he reminded her of her brother when he was younger.
“My brother is a reporter for a newspaper in Washington, DC, now,” Ruthie told him. “You can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it. Don’t let these kids get you down.”
Today, working in human resources for a Fortune 500 company in Houston, Kendrick says that the patience and encouragement Ruthie gave him – “She always, always had time for you, no matter what,” he says -- was even more important than the knowledge she imparted.
“Mrs. Leming taught me that it was okay that I didn’t want to be on the football field or in the streets doing bad things,” he says. “She would even go as far as recommending books to me. She watched the type of books that I liked to read, and when we would go on library trips, she would hand-pick books from the shelf and say, ‘I think you might like this one.’ That’s how she was. We weren’t just names and faces to her. She saw us.”
Of all the stories Ruthie’s former students have about her, few tell a tale as dramatic and moving as the story of Shannon Nixon Morell, who was a couple of years behind Kendrick Mitchell at Bains.
When she met her new sixth grade teacher, Shannon was one of eight African-American children living in a troubled home. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother worked three, sometimes four, jobs to keep the family fed. There was intense poverty, and chaos. Shannon never told Ruthie stories about what was going on in her house, but Ruthie knew. Shannon was ashamed of her circumstances, and felt trapped and angry.
Ruthie smiled at her, and said her name. That was enough for Shannon, who came from a home where nobody smiled, or seemed to care what happened to her. Ruthie saw promise in Shannon, and would sometimes spend their lunch hour in a field next to Bains, trying out strategies to help the struggling girl master her schoolwork.
“Shannon,” Ruthie would say, “your life is hard, but you can do better than this. I can’t let you feel sorry for yourself. If you feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to give up.”
Shannon liked that. It made her believe that she had within her the power to change her life.
One day she said to Ruthie, “Mrs. Leming, I want to be a psychologist when I grow up.”
“Why not?” Ruthie said. “If that’s what you want to be, go for it! You can do it, baby. Just put your mind to it, and don’t let go of your dream.”
After finishing sixth grade, Shannon moved up to the nearby high school building, but she kept in touch with Ruthie. When she was old enough for the cheerleading squad, she told Ruthie she wanted to try out, but wasn’t sure that she was good enough.
“Shannon, you’re awesome at this,” said Ruthie, who had been on the pep squad in high school. “You have the talent. I know you can do it. Believe in yourself. Don’t ever settle for being just okay when you know you have it in you to do better.”
Because Ruthie believed in her, Shannon started to believe in herself. She tried out for cheerleader, and made the squad. This caused some of her black girlfriends who hadn’t made the cut to turn on Shannon, accusing her of trying to be white. Shannon couldn’t talk about this with her family, who shared those racist views. So she went to Ruthie.
“Don’t listen to them, Shannon,” Ruthie said. “You know what you’re really worth. They’re just trying to tear you down. Be strong, sweet baby, and keep on going.”
Says Shannon today, “Ruthie saw need in people, and responded to that. Race didn’t matter to her. She was fair to everybody. She was all about love.”
Shannon left West Feliciana after graduation and joined the Navy. Today, Shannon is a married mom who lives in southern California and works in, yes, psychology, at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She lives with her husband and children far away from her hometown, and she doubts that she will ever return. Three of her brothers are in prison, and there is not much left for her back home. She is thriving in California, both personally and professionally, and thinks of Ruthie as the woman who gave her this beautiful life – a gift she tries to share with others.
“People say when your life is constantly miserable you either keep fighting or you give up and fall into the misery around you,” Shannon says. “Ruthie was a source of strength to me to get me through all that. In the work I do, it’s always my goal to make people feel like they’re important, that they’re worthy. That’s how she treated me.
“I came from a place where I didn’t feel important, and nobody missed you when you were gone,” she continues. “I always felt like I was important to Ruthie. She gave so much to us kids from a small town.”
Good News! Life Is Tragic
Here’s a challenging essay by Samuel Kronen, who has struggled for all his adult life with a debilitating chronic illness, talking about how taking the tragic view of life can make us stronger. So many of our problems today come from the refusal to accept that life is tragic — meaning that it is unfair, and we die, and that we cannot make the world perfect or live forever. Excerpts:
The denial of tragedy inevitably results in the denial of what makes us human, snipping the invisible thread that connects us to the lives of other people and draining the individual of moral gravity. It’s no wonder, really, that Jordan Peterson’s lectures on confronting our inner demons and cleaning one’s room quickly became so popular, in contrast to prevailing narratives that portray those demons as some political or cultural identity group which must be externally vanquished.
Likewise, an impulse has emerged across the political spectrum—from woke to MAGA—that attributes any undesirable outcome in the world to some nefarious individual or group that must be righteously inveighed against, and anyone who exercises constraint or expresses doubt is stigmatized as a traitor, a phony progressive, RINO, Uncle Tom, corporate shill, or whatever else. Society’s problems are understood as the product of bad intentions and bad people, who are conveniently imagined to be whichever politicized stereotype or caricature happens to irritate us the most—the redneck or the hippie, the globalist or the capitalist, the black hoodlum or the white racist. The obvious and parsimonious answers to the problems we face (that we are experiencing entropy like every society in history) are exchanged for self-satisfying conspiracy theories which accelerate our decline. The breakdown of mutually agreed-upon reality gives way to zero-sum narrative warfare between political and cultural tribes with each narrative providing such meaning and identity to its believers that you can’t get a damn word in about anything meaningful or interesting without offending the sensibilities of someone nearby. This is politics as salvation; the absence of tragedy. The upshot is that nothing gets done while the public grows increasingly bitter and resentful.
Isn’t that the truth! The most difficult things I have ever had to endure have come from the recognition that no matter how hard I prayed and I tried, I could not rightly order my world, because I could not control the choices and actions of others. Slamming hard into limits like that is extremely painful. I have never really considered suicide, but there was a time in my life when I could understand the appeal. The brokenness of the world — of my world, anyway — felt unbearable.
But that is what everybody faces, sooner or later, unless they choose to remain a child. I will never make the major leagues. My novel will never be published. I will retire without having made vice president. My legs are not ever going to heal. I won’t have children. We will never be financially secure. My husband will never love me again.
The litany is endless. Every single one of us, if we live long enough, will have something to add to it. And if we don’t live long enough, well, we died young, and that is its own tragedy.
Kronen says that we have to learn to live with double vision: one eye focused on the tragic, and the other focused on the comic:
The trick is to remain mindful of our inherent limitations while always staying open to new possibilities—to learn as much as possible from accumulated experience while always looking for something better. The visions need each other. Identifying too strongly with one cuts us off from the other. We ultimately need a conducive interplay between the tragic and the comic, and a framework that allows for an attitude of both acceptance and rejection towards experience—an acceptance of that which we can’t change and a rejection of that which must be changed.
And:
Going too far in either direction elicits bitterness. Taken to its extreme, the comic vision creates an expectation gap between image and reality that can only be filled with incoherent rage. We think life should be better than what it is and are angry that it isn’t. This is what happened to James Baldwin. Despite his early humanism, Baldwin grew increasingly bitter over the course of his life about the distance between “The New Jerusalem” and the world as it was, even after contributing to the great moral victories of the civil rights movement that established racial equality under the law. His later message seemed geared for no higher moral purpose than assaulting the consciences of white liberals, setting the tone for the excesses of modern progressive activism which really went no further than milking historical guilt. Conversely, the tragic, without the hope of transcendence or fulfillment, creates its own very different kind of bitterness—the hard, cold, and silent bitterness that comes when novelty has been blotted out from one’s life and complacency has set in. Purifying one’s vision might be politically expedient, but it isn’t existentially or culturally replenishing. One must look at the world both ways.
About “the tragic, without hope of transcendence or fulfillment”: In one place I lived in my adult life, I was acquainted with a woman in late middle age who complained constantly about how unfair life was. You know the type. The thing is, I came to find out from other reliable sources that this woman really had been a victim of bad circumstances in her life, particularly an abusive childhood. Yet I was around her often enough to see people try to cheer her up, and suggest some new thing that might brighten her life (I tried to do it myself). She always had a reason why whatever one suggested wouldn’t work — and it was always somebody else’s fault. I finally understood what the people who had to work around her knew: that this miserable woman secretly loved being a victim.
That was the first time I was ever confronted with the sort of person who defines themselves wholly by their pain. I had always figured that if someone was sick in some way, that they would naturally want to get better. Thinking back on that unhappy woman, I think she was actually afraid to be made whole, because she would not know how to live. When I was working on my last book, and I read about the kind of people in the former Soviet bloc countries who longed for the return of communism because freedom was too frightening, I thought about that poor woman. The freedom that comes from hope, and the possibility of fulfillment, was too much for her to bear.
And yet, there were times later in my life when I was at risk of becoming that kind of person. It is hard to know when to accept that something or someone is not likely to change, and not to be crushed by that fact, but to also understand that life goes on, and it can be good without the thing, the person, or the set of circumstances you wish were otherwise. If I keep emphasizing in my writing in this newsletter the secret that the Christian dissidents told me — that you have to accept unavoidable suffering as an opportunity to share in Christ’s passion, to purify your own soul, and to grow in love of God and others — it’s because that is the secret to living a meaningful life.
‘Pay attention, I told myself. Pay attention every minute.’
Here is a non-fiction account from Harpers magazine, by the novelist Ann Patchett, of how she met Tom Hanks, and through him got to know his personal assistant, Sooki Raphael. In the story, Patchett writes, “Pay attention, I told myself. Pay attention every minute.” You’ll see why when you read it.
Patchett begins by talking about writing novels:
How other people live is pretty much all I think about. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out. People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don’t add up to a plot. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed—one action springboards into another, greater action. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the map becomes clear.
How she found herself onstage in Washington DC with Tom Hanks is rather unlikely. But there she was:
The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtain—Tom Hanks, his assistant, and I. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. “Such a beautiful coat,” I said to her. We’d been introduced when I arrived but I didn’t remember her name.
The woman’s name was Sooki, as she was reminded at the end of the evening, when Hanks said “Come on, Sooki. Let’s go back to the hotel. I need to find a Belvedere martini.” They didn’t invite Patchett to join them. The story should have ended there.
But it didn’t end there. She goes on:
There is nothing more interesting than time: the days that are endless, the days that get away. There are days of the distant past that remain so vivid to me that I could walk back into them and pick up the conversation mid-sentence, while there are other days (weeks, months, people, places) I couldn’t recall to save my life. One of the last things I understand when I’m putting a novel together is the structure of time. When does the story start and when does it end? Will time be linear or can it stutter and skip? At what point does our understanding of the action shift?
The action shifted when something terrible happened to Sooki that brought her into the daily life of Ann and her husband. And then there was more calamity (I’m being deliberately vague, because I don’t want to spoil the story.) But out of this suffering, a beautiful friendship was born, and Sooki’s late vocation as an artist, and, for the novelist, well:
What Sooki gave me was a sense of order, a sense of God, the God of Sister Nena, the God of my childhood, a belief that I had gone into my study one night and picked up the right book from the hundred books that were there because I was meant to. I had a purpose to serve.
And:
“What Sooki is,” Tom [Hanks] wrote to me in an email later, “is all that is good in the world.”
Read it all. Please. I would have quoted it at greater length, but you really need to go on this whole journey with Ann Patchett yourself, and allow yourself the pleasure of surprise. A hopeful lesson for us all: The map is not clear. We don’t know how our own stories are going to end.
I needed to read that tonight, because a friend of mine is suffering. Obviously I won’t give any details of what he’s going through, but he is very much on my mind tonight. He had a door to one of his dreams slammed in his face by a cruel, spiteful person. He is a good man who tries hard to do the right thing, and given the circumstances of his life, is made to suffer because of his fidelity to his family. I can’t say more, because it would be indiscreet, but what happened to him today was crushingly unjust. And there’s not a lot he can do about it. This is his world for now.
My friend subscribes to this newsletter. All I can say, brother, is take heart: nobody knows how your story is going to end. There is something good and true and beautiful that will be born out of this grief. What is so encouraging about Ann Patchett’s account of her highly unlikely friendship with Sooki Raphael is that we just do not know what tomorrow will bring, and how brokenness can be an open door.
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