Vonnegut's Blues for America by Kurt Vonnegut

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.

When I went to grade school in Indian apolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit – ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead – the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That’s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That’s correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

I’m kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about 10 to one.

I’m going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.”

But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s licence – look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: “What is life all about?’” I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

The Erotics of Quantum Physics And the Horrors of the British Press an interview with Jeanette Winterson by Laura Miller

British novelist Jeanette Winterson -- "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," "The Passion" -- has a reputation as a holy terror, a lesbian desperado and a literary genius. In person, she's petite and gracious, a brilliant, articulate pixie who holds her famous charm in careful reserve. Can this be the same woman who 1) while acting as the judge of a literary award, nominated her own novel as the best of the year; 2) conducted a torrid affair with her agent, the wife of novelist Julian Barnes; 3) menaced a former friend who said something uncomplimentary about her to the press; 4) claimed to have, in her youth, sexually serviced bored London matrons in exchange for Le Creuset cookware, then later gleefully taunted the media for swallowing such a baldfaced lie? Winterson maintains that her public image is outlandish, a "doppelganger" or "other self" over which she has little control.

The version of Jeanette Winterson who met with Salon during the recent book tour for her new novel, "Gut Symmetries," turned out to be quieter, but no less intense. "Gut Symmetries," like most of Winterson's work, involves an adulterous, bisexual triangle, but this time her heroine, Alice, is sleeping with both husband, Jove, and wife, Stella. Alice is a physicist, and the principles of quantum physics provide Winterson with a vibrant metaphor for the instability of identity once a "rogue element" like love enters the picture. As the symbolically fraught names of the characters suggest, there's more at stake here than just a marriage, and "Gut Symmetries" seethes with philosophy, fairy tales, mysticism and glittering prose, alongside a fairly brutal appraisal of human selfishness. "Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?" Winterson asks early in the book, in a characteristic mingling of the cosmic and the carnal.

Romantic triangles, particularly from the point of view of a woman having an affair with a married woman, seem to attract you as a theme. What makes you want to write books about this?

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy, when it stops being predictable, when there is a chance element which unsettles all the rules, which forces people back onto their own resources, and away from their habits. You see it often with animal behavior: They're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy. Then you see which ones eat the others, and which ones emerge stronger and better, and which ones just give up and die. Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

So, is Alice the rogue element in Jove and Stella's relationship, or are Jove and Stella that element in Alice's fairly calm life?

Well, I think it would be a mistake to think of Alice as a victim. Or as someone who is afraid. She's the youngest person in the book, only 24. Jove and Stella have been about a bit and seen the world. They know the score, but within their cynicism, there is also a huge naivete. They just don't believe that anything can knock them off their perch. There's a kind of smugness to them, which Alice completely detonates because she is the dangerous other who is out of control, because she is seeking and yearning. She is full of passion, and she will take huge risks emotionally. And that is a shock to both of them. In the end, Stella is changed. Jove sees himself as back within the world of safety where he's comfortable. He doesn't grow, he doesn't go forward, and that is always a choice when you have to decide whether you are going to cross over into a different place. There are no happy endings here.

Is that a principle of yours?

I don't believe in happy endings. All of my books end on an ambiguous note because nothing ever is that neatly tied up, there is always another beginning, there is always the blank page after the one that has writing on it. And that is the page I want to leave to the reader.

Alice says, "The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued." Is that Alice's condition or also Jove's and Stella's? Are they waiting to be rescued?

Yes. And I think Alice is the one who really understands that. Jove would always describe himself as a rescuer. In the end, he's rescued by the very element which he has despised: mystery, strangeness, a miracle that takes place at sea, not the rational world of common sense. What happens is entirely unpredictable, which is why he hates it. He likes to be the one that manipulates things. That's why his nickname is Jove.

Alice is very open, partly because she is young. She simply throws herself into this situation because she doesn't really have any emotional sophistication or experience. She's still raw. She has got that openness to her which young people often have, which is very charming. And it is also very risky because you long for them not to be hurt, but you know that they will be hurt, and you know that it's inevitable, that hearts are made to be broken. That's their function.

Even when Stella is raging over her discovery of Jove's affair with Alice, you get the sense that she's done this before.

Yes, and partly because she has seen it before, even though she was hoping she wouldn't see it again. I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. The trappings of life come to them, and they can function in the world, they have adapted. They have respect from other people, security. And none of that is any insurance at all against the big emotions when they arrive. I worry very much that we are inclined to fall in habits, to set shells of protection around ourselves to stop real emotions getting through. Young people don't do that. It's necessary to keep that openness throughout life. People turn out to be so rigid that they actually snap when a trauma arrives. I mean many people in mid-life ... It's a joke, isn't it, the mid-life crisis? And it's because they have spent 20 years pushing away all the big emotions, all the real feelings. Then, suddenly, those things just come back at you with all the force accumulated over those years.

Writers on Writing: Family Ghosts Hoard Secrets That Bewitch the Living By Amy Tan

This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributions, includes essays by John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Bellow and others. Related Articles • Featured Author: Amy Tan • Review: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' (Feb. 18, 2001) • First Chapter: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' • Writers on Writing Archive

In the last week of her life, my three half- sisters, my younger brother and I gathered around the easy chair in which our mother lay floating between this world and the next.

"Nyah-Nyah," she moaned in Shanghainese and waved to an apparition on the ceiling. Then she motioned to me. "Invite Nyah-Nyah to sit down. Bring her tea, and quick, fetch her my mink coat."

Indulging my mother these wishes, I began to write her obituary, with the help of my siblings. It was a task that kept our minds focused, unified us, made us feel helpful instead of helpless. That was how I learned for the first time what my mother's birth name was.

"Li Bingzi," my sister from Shanghai told me. My God, to think I had never known the name given to her by her own mother. "Born Li Bingzi," I duly put down, "daughter of Li Jingmei . . . " And another sister chided: "No, no, Grandma's last name was not Li. It was Gu. Gu Jingmei."

I sensed the ghost of my grandmother in the room. "Ai-ya! What a stupid girl," I could hear her saying, "This is what happens when you let them become Americans." I imagined other wispy-edged relatives, more frowning and head-shaking.

As my sisters and I chatted, we exchanged further notes. Our mother, one sister revealed, received a different name, Tu Lian Zen, when she was adopted after her mother's death. Then she chose a school name, Tu Ching, which she kept after she married an abusive man named Wang. Whether she ever legally divorced this man is not clear. Nonetheless, she fled the marriage, left behind three daughters and came to America under the name Ching Tu, then married my father, who christened her Daisy after a song about being half-crazy in love on a bicycle built for two.

My mother, I realized, never told my sisters about the name Daisy Tan Chan, which she took when she married for the third time in her 70's. A year later she had the marriage annulled and reverted to Daisy C. Tan. As to T. C. Lee, the dapper gentlemen whom our family in Beijing met when he and our mother honeymooned there, well, the truth was, she and T. C. had simply lived together without the benefit of marriage. My sisters guffawed.

My mother's many names were vestiges of her many selves, lives I have been excavating most of my own adult life. At times I have dreaded that I might stumble across evidence of additional siblings, husbands and lovers, more secrets, ghosts and shame. I had once thought I was the only daughter, the middle child, a position I took to have great psychological significance. I then discovered I was actually the youngest of five girls, that one had died at birth. There were three brothers as well, including one I didn't know about; he died at age 2 in 1939. With all taken into account, I was demoted to No. 7 of eight children.

There was also confusion about my mother's age. She had one birth date based on the Chinese calendar of ancient lunar cycles and the method of considering a baby 1 year old the day it is born.

In determining her younger Western age, she miscalculated the year and date, thus writing that she was born on May 8, 1917, instead of May 9, 1916. When she was about to turn 64, she told me she was really almost 65. She knew this for sure, she insisted, because she was born in a Dragon Year, 1916, just as I was born in a Dragon Year 36 years later. There was absolutely no way she could confuse this. Thereafter, she fretted day after day, until my husband untangled bureaucratic knots and set the record straight in time for her to retire in the right year and collect Social Security.

But that was not the end to her questionable age. My sisters and I found out that for her obituary the international Chinese-language newspaper wanted to report her as 86 instead of 83, to account for the bonus years she had earned for living a long life. All the confusion about her age, her three marriages, her many names and the order in which her children, living and dead, should be listed led us to nix the idea of a Chinese obituary. It would not look proper if we told the truth.

In writing a simple obituary, I realized there was still much that I did not know about my mother. Though I had written three novels informed by her life, she remained a source of revelation and surprise. Of course I longed to know more about her. Her past had shaped me: her sense of danger, her regrets, the mistakes she vowed never to repeat. What I know about myself is related to what I know about her, her secrets, or in some cases fragments of them. I found the pieces both by deliberate effort and by accident, and with each discovery I had to reconfigure the growing whole.

"Nyah-Nyah," my mother kept calling in the last days of her life.

I finally thought to ask what Nyah- Nyah meant.

"A Shanghainese nickname for `Grandmother,' " my oldest sister, Yuhang, replied. And then I remembered a story my mother once told me, of her being 4 years old, delirious and near death as she called to her grandmother to stop the pain. My mother had been horribly injured when a pot of boiling oil fell across her neck. Nyah-Nyah had sat by her bedside, day and night, telling her that her funeral clothes had already been made but were very plain because she had not lived long enough to deserve anything more elaborate.

She told the little girl that everyone would soon forget her because she had lived too short a time for them to remember much. That was how Nyah-Nyah, who loved my mother very much, scared her back to life. Now my mother was calling for Nyah-Nyah once again. This time I think Nyah-Nyah was telling my mother that her funeral clothes had already been made, and not to worry, they were fancy beyond belief.

For four days my mother's breathing kept me in suspense. She would take three breaths, then nothing would follow for 45 seconds, sometimes longer. It was like watching the tidal wash in anticipation of a tidal wave. At night I lay next to her, sleepless, staring at the pulse bobbing in the cove of her throat, my own heart pounding to this steady yet uncertain rhythm. Later I put a pearl in the hollow so I could more easily see this proof of life. Though I dreaded that she would stop breathing, I was relieved that she would die of natural causes and not from suicide.

For as long as I can remember, my mother talked of killing herself. The threats came at least once a month, sometimes day after day. She would utter them in front of me, my brothers, anyone within earshot. On a few occasions she made an attempt. I remember seeing her lean out an open door as our car sped down the highway, and we, her mute children, sat in the back. Several times she ran into busy lanes of traffic with flailing arms.

In my memories of adolescence there are also flashes of a knife, a cleaver, a pair of scissors. The reasons my mother wanted to die were many. It could have been something my father did or didn't do. It was often something I said or didn't say. Whatever it was, we were supposed to make amends before it was too late. Once I refused to say I was sorry. Then I was really sorry.

I didn't realize until I was in my 30's that her suicidal impulses most likely started when she saw her own mother kill herself. She was only 9 when this happened. And thereafter some part of her would always remain the 9-year-old who believed that the only escape from any kind of unhappiness was the route her mother took, an immediate departure from this world to a heavenly form of China. As long as she was alive, her mother's death was an everlasting punishment to her. Whenever bad luck visited us, she asked aloud whether her mother was angry at her. Was this a curse?

Though my grandmother killed herself in 1925, she was a presence in my young life, a ghostly presence. Ever since I was 4, my mother had believed I could see my grandmother. That was because like most children I had complained about a bogeyman under my bed. Instead of reassuring me that this was only my imagination, my mother asked me to pass along messages. She was convinced my grandmother had taken me as her confidante.

I soon learned not to mention what scared me, and my mother did not press too much for me to talk to the ghost. That was because my father, an engineer, was also by avocation a Baptist minister, and the only ghost he believed we should talk to was the Holy Ghost.

But when I was 15, my father and brother died, both of brain tumors, and my mother began urging me often to ask their ghosts why this had happened. She had me sit before a Ouija board, then noted when the room grew cold, when telltale pings and creaks signaled that the spirits had arrived. She was always hoping for one last goodbye, one more message of love.

Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would also seek their advice on the stock market. With our fingers poised over the planchette, she would ask, "Should I buy I.B.M. or U.S. Steel?" I would push it to whichever answer was the shortest, a method of stock trading that, by the way, proved quite successful in my mother's portfolio.

For our mother's memorial card, our family selected the photos that captured her best: Grinning as she cooked with a gigantic wok. Smiling shyly for my father in the early days of their courtship. Staring solemnly as an 8-year-old adorned in mourning clothes for her grandmother, Nyah-Nyah.

My mother had always been a natural Shanghainese beauty and quite vain and snobby as a result. She bragged how spoiled she was as a child because she was "pretty beyond belief." She used to lament openly that I had not inherited any of her good Shanghainese features, that I resembled my father, a Cantonese. My nose was too broad, my skin too dark, my lips too coarse. I had long recovered from the wounds of those remarks when Alzheimer's began to erode her logic and memory. One day, my mother announced that I looked just like her. It was not too late to hear such praise.

As I studied the photos with my sisters, I saw that I did indeed resemble her. She and I had the same crimped chin, the wrinkling caused by holding back what we felt but could not say. In her case, it was secrets and hopes. In mine, it was protests and desires. For many years we had been unable to say, "I love you" to each other.

During the last hour of her life, our family murmured to our mother that we loved her very much and were sad to see her go. We whispered to her all the things we would miss: her dumplings, her advice, her humor. To myself I mourned: Who else would worry about me so much? Who else would describe in explosive detail what might happen to parts of my body if I was careless? Who would be frank enough to warn that my husband might exchange me for a younger woman unless I forced him to buy me jewels so expensive it would be impossible for him to leave both me and the gems behind?

My mother did not speak during those last four days, but with her final breath, a long release of an exhalation, she uttered a faint sound, a single sustained note. I had to bend my ear to her mouth to hear. I was the only one who heard it, but I don't think it was my imagination. To me, she sounded surprised.

After my mother died, I began to rewrite the novel I had been working on for the past five years. I wrote with the steadfastness of grief. My editor and dear friend, the great Faith Sale, would have called that grief "finding the real heart of the story." My mentor, Molly Giles, said the bones were there, I just had to reassemble them in a new way. To find that heart and repair the bones, I had to break them into pieces, then start to dig.

And so I rewrote, remembering what scared me: the ghost, the threats, the curse. I wrote of wrong birth dates, secret marriages, the changing place one has in a family, the names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. And with the help of my ghostwriters, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.

School Lunches by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows. So: sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches–at parochial schools, private schools, twenty years earlier than mine, or ten years earlier, in Southern California or New York. And they always turn out to be similar to my middle-class Northern California public school lunches. But in important ways they are different, too, and this is even more interesting, for the obvious reason that when we study the differences, we see in bolder relief what we have in common. And for some strange reason, when my students start to jam with me about school lunches, they get off the phone feeling more enthusiastic and in better shape.

One time, in one of my classes, I asked my students to write about lunches for half an hour, and I sat down with them and wrote:

Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is. It was a precursor of the showers in seventh- and eighth-grade gym, where everyone could see your everything or your lack of everything, and smell the inside smells of your body, and the whole time you just knew you were going to catch something. The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like people, were Okay, and some weren't. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.

But in half an hour there was already too much material for me and some of the people in the class, and it threatened to immobilize us. So we decided not to even bother with our parents' handwriting on the outside of the brown paper lunch bag–how much it resembled a Turkish assassin's and what that said about us. We decided to set aside the bag itself for a moment. For the time being we'd stick with the contents, and, to begin with, the sandwich. That was the one-inch picture frame we were going to look through.

Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.

Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry for instance–

Now, see, I couldn't remember, as I wrote in class, just exactly what it was about raspberry jam that was so disconcerting. So when I got home that night, I called a friend who is also a writer, very successful and maybe the most neurotic person I know. I said, Remember how in elementary school, grape jelly was best in your lunch, strawberry jam was Okay, but raspberry was real borderline? Can you talk to me about your experiences with these things? And my friend went into an impassioned, disoriented riff about how there was too much happening in raspberry jam, too many seeds per spoonful. It felt like there were all these tiny little pod people. It was Body-Snatcher jam.

My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don't know why, but I'm sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.

I sat down that night and kept writing:

In general, come to think of it, when fathers made lunches, things always turned out badly. Fathers were so oblivious back then. They were like foreigners. For instance, a code bologna sandwich meant white bread, one or two slices of bologna, mustard, one wilted piece of iceberg lettuce. (The Catholics were heavily into mayonnaise, which we might get into later.) Fathers, to begin with, always used non-regulation bread and then buttered it, which made the sandwich about as tradable as a plate of haggis. Also, everything was always falling out of the sandwiches fathers made. I'm not sure why. They'd use anything green and frilly for lettuce, when of course only the one piece of wilted iceberg was permissible. Your friends saw a big leaf of romaine falling out along with the slice of bologna, and you might soon find yourself alongside the kid against the fence.

There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn't? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn't end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn't help.

He almost certainly ended up being a writer.

Now, who knows if any of this is usable material? There's no way to tell until you've gotten it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write.

I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away. I think this was some sort of Zen reference–the Buddhist disciple remembering Buddha's flower sermon, in which all Buddha did was hold up a flower and twirl it, in silence, sitting on the mountain. Me, I'm a nice Christian girl, and while I wish I could quote something kicky and inspirational that Jesus had to say about writing, the truth is that when students ask me for the best practical advice I know, I always pick up a piece of paper and pantomime scribbling away. My students usually think this is a very wise and Zenlike thing for me to convey. Mostly I forgot to give Natalie Goldberg credit.

But write about what? they ask next.

Write about carrot sticks, I tell them:

Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn't even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju. If you so much as glanced at him, a visible empathetic arc would stretch between you, and link you two in the minds of your peers forever.

And then there was the matter of the wrapping paper; waxed paper and later Saran wrap. If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right. So it was a little like making your bed at lunch. Everything should be squared. Sandwiches should be wrapped with hospital corners. Right?

Okay. That's all. But now I have this material to chose from, to work with, to shape, edit, highlight, or toss. (And that's very nice of you to suggest the later.) That is my version of school lunches. Yours might be different and I would be interested in hearing about it. (Now don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting you mail it to me. But I bet it reveals some interesting stuff about you and your family and the times in which you grew up.) And even though what I've quoted here is shitty-first-draft stuff, the boy against the fence appeared out of nowhere–I had no idea when I started writing that he was in my memory. To me, he is the most important thing that came out of this exercise. Tomorrow when I sit down to work on my novel, he will be someone who matters to me, whom I want to work with, get to know, who has something important to say or somewhere only he can take me.

Polaroids by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't–and, in fact, you're not supposed to–know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn't notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him. Now, maybe it's his family, or the family of one of the kids in the class, but at any rate these people are going to be in the photograph, too. Then the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer, and finally you see the husband and wife holding their baby with two children standing beside them. And at first it all seems very sweet, but then the shadows begin to appear, and then you start to see the animal tragedy, the baboons baring their teeth. And then you see a flash of bright red flowers in the bottom left quadrant that you didn't even know were in the picture when you took it, and these flowers evoke a time or a memory that moves you mysteriously. And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

You couldn't have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about.

Watch this Polaroid develop:

Six or seven years ago I was asked to write an article on the Special Olympics. I had been going to the local event for years, partly because a couple of friends of mine. Also, I love sports, and I love to watch athletes, special or otherwise. So I showed up this time with a great deal of interest but no real sense of what the finished article might look like.

Things tend to go very, very slowly at the Special Olympics. It's not like trying to cover the Preakness. Still, it has its own exhilaration, and I cheered and took notes all morning.

The last track-and-field event before lunch was a twenty-five yard race by some unusually handicapped runners and walkers, many of whom seemed completely confused. They lumped and careened along, one man making a snail-slow break for the stands, one heading out toward the steps where the winners receive their medals; both of them were shepherded back. The race took just about forever. And here it was nearly noon and we were all so hungry. Finally, though, everyone crossed the line, and those of us in the stands got up to go–when we noticed that way down the track, four or five yards from the starting line, was another runner.

She was a girl of about sixteen with a normal-looking face above a wracked and emaciated body. She was on metal crutches, and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, Come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy girlish way.

A tall African American man with no front teeth fell into step with me as I left the bleachers to go look for some lunch. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, and I looked up at him, and he handed me a Polaroid someone had taken of him and his friends that day. "Look at us," he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down's syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. "That," he said, is one cool man."

And this was the image from which the article began forming, although I could not have told you exactly what the piece would end up being about. I just knew that something had started to emerge.

After lunch I wandered over to the auditorium, where it turned out a men's basketball game was in progress. The African American man with no front teeth was the star of the game. You could tell that he was because even though no one had made a basket yet, his teammates almost always passed him the ball. Even the people on the other team passed him the ball a lot. In lieu of any scoring, the men stampeded in slow motion up and down the court, dribbling the ball thunderously. I had never heard such a loud game. It was all sort of crazily beautiful. I imagined describing the game for my article and then for my students: the loudness, the joy. I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line–all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I could see it almost as clearly as I could the photograph of that one cool man and his two friends.

The auditorium bleachers were packed. Then a few minutes later, still no score on the board, the tall black man dribbled slowly from one end of the court to the other, and heaved the ball up into the air, and dropped it into the basket. The crowd roared, and all the men from both teams looked up wide-eyed at the hoop, as if it had just burst into flames.

You would have loved it, I tell my students. You would have felt like you could write all day.

An Interview with Seamus Heaney by Karl Miller

"All we have to go on."

'The Strand at Lough Beg' is an elegy for a murdered cousin, Colum McCartney. In a later poem of yours, 'VIII' in the collection of 1984, Station Island, Colum reproaches you for having 'saccharined my death with morning dew', and indeed there is some morning dew in the elegy. Next to the later poem stands one of your finest, least sweet, poems, in which the ghost of a friend, a murdered shopkeeper, appears to you, causing you to ask forgiveness for a former indifference.

That poem is sufficient in itself to show how a vigilance in relation to events whose significance is at once private and public, personal and political, can produce some of your best utterance. That friend, according to his deposition in the poem, squeezed his wife's hand before descending to the shop, where he was shot. Your Nobel Prize address mentions another squeeze of the hand, administered in 1976 to a Catholic workman by a Protestant workman, two of a party, all but one of them Protestant, which had been captured by gunmen.


I hadn't thought of them in relation to one another until you mentioned the matter. What is at stake in these cases is something frail and true. I did think long about whether or not the story of the murdered workers should be included at this very public moment. Its function in the lecture is pedagogical, I'd say; it's a fable about how little we have to go on, but how precious and real that 'little' is. I hesitated, I suppose, because of the uplift factor: you know, the suggestion that there is that much hope. Even admitting that much hope - there is something overly consoling in that.


The end of the story was bitter enough. They were all killed.


They were all killed. And maybe what should be left is the blood on the road instead of the squeeze of the hand. Nevertheless, the frailty of that gesture is all we have to go on.


The poem which has the apparition of your shopkeeper friend is visionary without being bardic. It encompasses a humbling of the bard, and uses the words that people say to one another in the street or the shop. How do you feel about it now?


It's one that holds up. It's almost twenty years since I wrote it, but I still occasionally include it at poetry readings. I suppose it comes across because it's a story, and because of the colloquial aspect. What I enjoy is the muted rhyming, the slightly Dantesque formality of the verse, being combined with the speech rhythms of South Derry. And you're right about the 'humbling of the bard'. I suppose what got released in it was something I wasn't consciously seeking to release. My conscious concern was with the killings in the North and the adequacy or inadequacy of my response to them in the poetry I was writing, but unconsciously what was going on was a dialogue between my pre-writing, mid-Ulster, adolescent self and the more politically-aware, published-poet side of me.

The speaker in the poem is unnamed, but he's based on a man called William Strathearne who was murdered in circumstances the same as those described in the poem - called down to the shop door in the middle of the night. I hadn't seen Willie for many years but I had known him when he was a young fellow, and famous locally for his style and gifts as a footballer. He belonged to the extra-literary, rural, parochial-hall part of my life, one of the people I gradually lost touch with as I moved on to live in Belfast during the Sixties, and then down to Wicklow, and into a different swim. For all the Troubles 'content', the poem is a kind of dialogue with myself.

One thing I worried about in writing that section of 'Station Island' was whether to make the killers in the poem members of the RUC - since it had been rogue members of the police force who had committed the actual murder. Policemen who were paramilitaries when off-duty, as it were. That was why Strathearne had answered the door in the middle of the night. He saw uniforms and presumably felt safe, although what was about to occur was a sectarian assassination. He was killed because he was an easy Catholic target, living in a largely Protestant village.

But even so, I felt that if I blazoned that into the poem, it would constitute an inflammatory, propagandist, almost pro-IRA gesture. It would be taken as saying that all the RUC were what the graffiti called them - murderers. So, for better or worse, I left the thing bare of political markings. Within the first circle of readers, of course, in Northern Ireland, most people would have known the incident on which it was based. Anyhow, I've never regretted the decision. And I'm inclined to elevate it into a proof of the rightness of Aristotle's claim that the poet is different from the historian, that the poet deals with what typically happens.


You've said that you think you've been lucky, lucky to have found love and poetry in your life. How lucky was the move from your first environment to a succession of very different ones? Did the move involve any forfeitings, any losses?


I don't see what was forfeited or lost. The really valuable thing about my childhood was the verity of the life I lived within the house and the sense of trust that I had among the people on the ground. I'm not away from that. And I'm not away, I don't think, from my first speech. I think of that speech as a kind of guttural bough - as opposed to a golden bough. It's a kind of passport through the perils of the fake speech you are bound to encounter, a register that stays reliable.

It's not that I believe you should confine yourself to the cultural or conceptual limits of that first language. Certainly not. In fact, it is precisely the experience of going beyond those limits that constitutes much of the luck of my life. But as a writer, I never want to get out of my phonetic depth, as it were. I like to feel that the line I am writing is being paid out from some old inner voice-reel, that it is coming up from the place I re-enter every time I go back to where I grew up. I still live a kind of den life when I go home, among my brothers and sisters in County Derry.


That den life is just as evident in the later poetry as it is in the earlier. In fact, one of the great exhilarations of the later poetry is the den that is celebrated there.


There's a ruminant aspect to a lot of the more recent poems. But there's a certain amount of ranging around as well as reaching back. For example, in that Macedonian poem we were talking about, there is the flypaper from fifty years ago in the farmhouse in Mossbawn, but there is also a memory of the sumptuousness of being served a meal on the Lufthansa flight from Belgrade, the learned behaviour of the frequent flyer. You want to be able to include the experience at the circumference and to find your bearings between the circumference and the first centre.

I sometimes wonder how I add up, and am tempted to think of myself as a very old-fashioned instance, a survival from the age of the priest and the plough. But after all, the whole species is going through certain changes in the conditions in which it lives, and whether you are living with your computer in a loft in New York or are still within the smell of silage in County Derry, as a creature of the planet you have to huddle at night, and you're haunted by your dreams.


So you'd mostly want to say that you haven't changed or been changed?


I've learnt far more, of course, but I haven't been changed, no, not in any fundamental way. The image that always comes to me is of ripples in a round pool. They are beaming and brimming out from the original point, but if you look at them long enough, you begin to think that maybe they are rippling back in from the outer edge.

That's what consciousness or selfhood or your meaning to yourself is like. Something inside you is still the same, an element at the centre of your being is still whatever it has been since you came to awareness, but obviously there's an acquired perspective too, new reaches of understanding and comprehension, a whole accumulated set of instincts and bases for judgement. Are there many people who cannot say, 'in my end is my beginning'?


To move into a world of professors and media people, reviewers, interviewers, and other creatures from Dante's Inferno, might be construed by some as a threat to the character. How have you managed to fight them off, if that is the word for it?


I don't think of myself as fighting them off. Conversations, contact with what Auden called the 'ironic points of light' in your life, the ring of vigilance around you which is your circle of friends, the merriment, the sardonic intelligence of people close to you - it's important to be able to trust that, to have internalized that, and to live with that springiness. I think the situation I'm in is eerie in one way: so many interviews, so many reviews, good reviews, but the natural backlash of bad reviews too, and being set up - no, not being set up, being there already, as some sort of phenomenon. Seamus Deane wrote to me after North came out, when I was still living in Wicklow, and he addressed his letter to 'Seamus Heaney', with the inverted commas.


And that was what, twenty-five years ago?


It was.


We spoke earlier about the Vendlerising of the Heaney oeuvre, about her aesthete's reading of the poems. Could you bear to complete the circle by returning to the subject? I'd accept that the category of the public work of art - cognizant, let's say, of fact, doctrine and community - can be made to appear archaic or inoperable, and that the opinions which aesthetes have judged extraneous to works of art can be hard to find, and hard to follow, in the poetry of the contemporary world. But they're there all right, and not always the worse for being hard to follow.

I think of the fine poet Anne Carson at this point. No one is less of a protest poet. She is inward, very much a writer for herself. She is sometimes oracular, if not esoteric, if not incomprehensible. And yet her work is alive with philosophical and political interest. Her Autobiography of Red ends with a gnomic interview with an Ancient Greek precursor of the author of this new long poem of hers: 'Identity memory eternity your constant themes,' her Ancient Greek is informed. And Carson's own poem has themes, which these words help to evoke. It also has the incisive portrait of a theorist, a student of 'the erotics of doubt'.


What Helen Vendler is saying is that there has to be more to a poem than themes, and I think she's right about that.


Yes, but you have themes, don't you?


I know I have.


And it's therefore appropriate - though this is something she can appear to deny - for your readers, if they want, to argue about them. The argument would, of course, do well to avoid the suggestion that you come at us in your poems with a tag saying 'Catholic', or 'Farm-boy turned Professor', or 'Nationalist', or 'Imperialist'. It's true that the attribution to poems of subjects and opinions can go wrong. Things aren't always what they theme, as someone once said. But the pursuit and discovery of themes, by writers and readers, look very like activities that have to happen - that will seldom if ever be entirely beside the point.



Helen Vendler is defending a position that is very much under attack. She has to educate the profession again, though she wouldn't necessarily put it like that. What she has observed, in her maturity, as a reader and critic and teacher, is the disappearance of a capacity for jouissance in the poem itself, and I think a lot of her polemic, a lot of her insistence on the private, aesthetic nature of the experience of literature, is a reaction against the politicization of oral discourse within the humanities.


Harold Bloom, another aesthete, has been reaffirming the need for a canon of great works of literature, which you either belong to or you don't, as if by the grace of God. Jeannette Winterson belongs to his canon, he rules, and Angela Carter doesn't. Candidature for the canon has nothing to do, he says, with themes or opinions; it has to do only with aesthetic considerations. Now, while I can understand a hostility towards its politicization, it seems to me that any experience of poetry should endeavour to take in its fullness what the poet has to say. George Herbert has been seen in some debatable way as a Calvinist, a believer in the wickedness of all but a happy few. And he has also been extravagantly described as a Stalinist.

It's all right, in my view, and more than all right, for the reader to be conscious of the opinions which have been attributed to his poems and other writings, and to ask what it meant doctrinally for this parson to be, as he put it, 'on God's side'. As opposed to saying, 'Let's just consider this aesthetically; let's not bother with what he believed.' You can still love the poems while bothering with, and being bothered by, some of his beliefs, so far as we can be sure that he held them.


If you are a Paisleyite reader of literature, do you come to the poems of someone like Robert Southwell - a Jesuit martyr - and say, 'We don't read them; he was a recusant'? What does it do to your reading of a poem by Herbert, reflecting on the fact that he would have damned people?


Damned nearly everybody, on one construction of the matter.


Yes.


Including you, for being a Papist.


We would have damned him right back: But surely even those readers you call aesthetes possess a vivid historical sense, and know that damning was a given of Herbert's times, just as we know that retaliatory killing was a given of the Beowulf poet's times. Even your aesthete concedes and needs that much context in order to enjoy a text. The sureness of a literary voice may derive from a set of convictions and attitudes which include some that are dismaying.

That One Ridiculous Palm by Anne Lamott

excerpt from Traveling Mercies, Overture: Lily Pads

The railroad yard below our house was ringed in green, in grass and weeds and blackberry bushes and shoulder-high anise plants that smelled and tasted of licorice; this wreath of green, like a cell membrane, contained the tracks and the trains and the roundhouse, where engines were repaired. The buildings rose up out of the water on the other side of the bay, past Angel Island, past Alcatraz. You could see the Golden Gate Bridge over to the right behind Belvedere, where the richer people lived; the anise was said to have been brought over at the turn of the century by the Italians who gardened for the people of Belvedere.

Tiburon, where I grew up, used to be a working-class town where the trains still ran. Now mostly wealthy people live here. It means shark in Spanish, and there are small sharks in these parts. My father and shy Japanese fishermen used to catch leopard sharks in the cold green waters of the bay.

There was one palm tree at the western edge of the railroad yard, next to the stucco building of the superintendent--one tall incongruous palm tree that we kids thought was very glamorous but that the grown-ups referred to as "that ridiculous palm tree." It did not belong, was not in relationship to anything else in town. It was silent and comical, like Harpo Marx with a crazy hat of fronds.

We took our underpants off for older boys behind the blackberry bushes. They'd give us things--baseball cards, Sugar Babies. We chewed the stems off the anise plants and sucked on them, bit the ends off nasturtiums and drank the nectar.

When I was five and six, my best friend was a Catholic girl who lived about fifteen minutes away, on foot, from our house--kids walked alone all over town back then. I loved the Catholic family desperately. There were dozens of children in that family, or maybe it just felt that way, babies everywhere, babies crawling out from under sofas like dust bunnies. We only had three kids in our family; my brother John, who is two years older than me and didn't like me very much back then, and my brother Stevo, who is five years younger than me, whom I always adored, and who always loved me. My mother nursed him discreetly, while the Catholic mother wore each new baby on her breasts like a brooch. The Catholic mama was tall and gorgeous and wore heels to church and lots of makeup, like Sophia Loren, and she had big bosoms that she showed off in stylish V-necked dresses from the Sears catalog. My mother was not much of a dresser. Also, she was short, and did not believe in God. She was very political, though; both she and Dad were active early on in the civil rights movement. My parents and all their friends were yellow-dog Democrats, which is to say that they would have voted for an old yellow dog before they would have voted for a Republican.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try to save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter. My mother used to take the Greyhound out to Marin City, which was a terrible ghetto then, and volunteer in an after-school program for boys and girls from impoverished families. She tutored kids in reading while other grown-ups worked with them in sports. My mother majored in the classics in college. She always brought along little paper candy cups filled with the fanciest candies from Blum's or the City of Paris to give to the children after their lessons. It used to make my father mad that she'd buy such expensive candies, but this didn't stop her.

My Catholic friend and I used to spend hours sitting on the couch with the latest Sears catalog spread across our knees, pretending that we got whatever was on our side of the page. I played this game with anxiety and grief, always thinking that the better dresses and shoes were on my friend's pages and that I would have been OK if they had just been on mine--and if I'd had her tall stylish mother, with the wonderful cleavage showing like the bottom of a baby in her low necklines. I knew I was not pretty because people were always making jokes about my looks. (Once, at a pizza joint, a stranger had included me in a collective reference to the Catholic children, and you would have thought from the parents' outrage that he had included a chimpanzee.) And I knew I was not OK because I got teased a lot by strangers or by big boys for having hair that was fuzzy and white. Also, I got migraines. I got my first one midway through kindergarten and had to lie down with my face on the cool linoleum in the back of the room until my father could come get me.

My friend and I gathered blackberries from the bushes in the train yard, and her mother made pies. She made apple pies too. We peeled each apple with precision, aiming for one long green spiral of peel, and my first memory of watching someone be beaten was on a night after we'd prepared apples for pie. My Catholic friend and I had been left with a baby-sitter and all those babies, and after we had sliced up and spiced the apples, we'd gone to bed without throwing out all those green snakes of peel, and I awoke with a start in the middle of the night because my friend's father was smacking her on the face and shoulders, fuming alcohol breath on the two of us in our one twin bed, raging that we were slobs, and I don't know how he knew to beat her instead of me because I don't remember there being any light on. We both cried in the dark, but then somehow we slept and in the morning when we woke the mother was frying up bacon, a baby slung over her shoulder, and the dad was happy and buoyant, thunderous in his praise of the pie now in the oven.

It was Sunday morning and I got to go to church with them. All the children got dressed up. The parents looked like movie stars, so handsome and young, carrying babies, shepherding the bigger kids, smooching in the car.

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, and the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows. I loved the curlicue angels in gold paint on the ceiling; I loved the woman selling holy cards. I loved the slutty older Catholic girls with their mean names, the ones with white lipstick and ratted hair that reeked of Aqua Net. I loved the drone of the priest intoning Latin. All that life surrounding you on all four sides plus the ceiling--it was like a religious bus station. They had all that stuff holding them together, and they got to be so conceited because they were Catholics.

Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father--God as borderline personality. It was like believing in the guy who ran the dime store, someone with a kind face but who was always running behind and had already heard every one of your lame excuses a dozen times before--why you didn't have a receipt, why you hadn't noticed the product's flaw before you bought it. This God could be loving and reassuring one minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in general what a fraud you really were. He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in, and trust, unless his mood shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah.

My father's folks had been Presbyterian missionaries who raised their kids in Tokyo, and my father despised Christianity. He called Presbyterians "God's frozen people." My mother went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve at the Episcopal church in town, but no one in our family believed in God--it was like we'd all signed some sort of loyalty oath early on, agreeing not to believe in God in deference to the pain of my father's cold Christian childhood. I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it. It slaked my thirst. But I pretended to think it was foolish, because that pleased my father. I lived for him. He was my first god.

My mother and her twin sister had come over from Liverpool with their mother after their father died, when they were twelve. My mother had a lifelong compassion for immigrants; she used to find people waiting for boats to their homeland or waiting for money to be wired from the East so that they could catch a bus home, and she'd bring them to stay with us until everything was straightened out. She and my aunt Pat had been confirmed as Episcopalians in England--I have their confirmation picture on my mantel, two dark-haired beauties of twelve or so in long white baptismal-style dresses. But that was the last of their religious affiliation. My aunt Pat married a Jew, with a large Jewish family in tow, but they were not really into Moses Jews; they were bagelly Jews. My closest cousin was bar mitzvahed, but other than accusing you of anti-Semitism if you refused second helpings of my uncle Millard's food, they might as well have been Canadians.

None of the adults in our circle believed. Believing meant that you were stupid. Ignorant people believed, uncouth people believed, and we were heavily couth. My dad was a writer, and my parents were intellectuals who went to the Newport Jazz festival every year for their vacation and listened to Monk and Mozart and the Modern Jazz Quartet. Everyone read all the time. Mt. Tamalpais loomed above us, and we hiked her windy trails many weekends, my dad with binoculars hanging around his neck because he was a serious bird-watcher. He worshiped in the church of Allen Ginsberg, at the Roger Tory Peterson Holiness Temple, the Tabernacle of Miles Davis.

We were raised to believe in books and music and nature. My mother played the piano most weekend nights, and all of us kids knew the words to almost every song in the Fireside Book of Folk Songs. When my parents' friends came over on the weekends and everyone had a lot to drink, my mother played piano and everyone sang: English ballads, spirituals, union songs, "The Golden Vanity," "Joe Hill," "Bread and Roses."

Their friends, our family friends, were like us; they read as a vocation, worked for liberal causes, loved Dr. King and nature, smoked, drank a lot, liked jazz and gourmet food. They were fifties Cheever people, with their cocktails and affairs. They thought practicing Catholics insane, ridiculous in their beliefs, and morally wrong to have so many children; also, the non-Italian Catholics were terrible cooks. My mother made curries surrounded by ten kinds of condiments, including chutney she and her friends made every year in our kitchen. I bowed my head in bed and prayed, because I believed–not in Jesus–but in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed and that I did not tell a soul. I did not tell a soul that strange boys rode by on bikes shouting racist insults about my kinky hair, or that we showed our naked bodies to the big boys in exchange for baseball cards, or that the Catholic dad had beat his daughter, because I wanted to be loved, and so I stood around silently, bursting with hope and secrets and fear, all skin and bones and eyes, with a crazy hair crown like that one ridiculous palm.

Excerpts from Why I Write by Joan Didion

From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976

Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don�t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific�s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco�s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn�t think. All I knew then was what I couldn�t do. All I knew was what I wasn�t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I�m thinking, what I�m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Quotations | Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet

Voltaire lived in early eighteenth century France. I believe his insights prove the truth in the expression, the more things change the more they stay the same.

A witty saying proves nothing.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Neither holy, nor Roman, nor Empire.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies–it is the first law of nature.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

You see many stars at night in the sky but find them not when the sun rises; can you say that there are no stars in the heaven of day? So, O man! because you behold not God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.

The Making of a Writer: Listening in the Dark by Eudora Welty

Since being read to and after, when I began reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice.

I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers–to read as listeners–and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

In that vanished time in small-town Jackson, Miss., most of the ladies I was familiar with, the mothers of my friends in the neighborhood, were busiest when they were sociable. In the afternoons there was regular visiting up and down the little grid of residential streets. Everybody had calling cards, even certain children; and newborn babies themselves were properly announced by sending out their tiny engraved calling cards attached with a pink or blue bow to those of their parents. Graduation presents to high school pupils were often "card cases." On the hall table in every house the first thing you saw was a silver tray waiting to receive more calling cards on top of the stack already piled up like jackstraws; they were never thrown away.

My mother let none of this idling, as she saw it, pertain to her; she went her own way with or without her calling cards, and though she was fond of her friends and they were fond of her, she had little time for small talk. At first, I hadn't known what I'd missed.

When we at length bought our first automobile, one of our neighbors was often invited to go with us on the family Sunday afternoon ride. In Jackson it was counted an affront to the neighbors to start out for anywhere with an empty seat in the car. My mother sat in the back with her friend, and I'm told that as a small child I would ask to sit in the middle, and say as we started off, "Now talk."

There was dialogue throughout this lady's accounts to my mother. "I said. . . ." "He said. . . ." "And I'm told she very plainly said. . . ." "It was midnight before they finally heard, and what do you think it was?" What I loved about her stories was that everything happened in scenes. I might not catch on to what the root of the trouble was in all that happened, but my ear told me it was dramatic. Often she said, "The crisis had come!"

This same lady was one of Mother's callers on the telephone who always talked a long time. I knew who it was when my mother would only reply, now and then, "Well, I declare," or "You don't say so," or "Surely not." She'd be standing at the wall telephone, listening against her will, and I'd sit on the stairs close by her. Our telephone had a little bar set into the handle which had to be pressed and held down to keep the connection open, and when her friend had said goodbye, my mother needed me to pry her fingers loose from the little bar; her grip had become paralyzed. "What did she say?" I asked.

"She wasn't saying a thing in this world," sighed my mother. "She was just ready to talk, that's all."

My mother was right. Years later, beginning with my story "Why I Live at the P.O.," I wrote reasonably often in the form of a monologue that takes possession of the speaker. How much more gets told besides!

This lady told everything in her sweet, marveling voice, and meant every word of it kindly. She enjoyed my company perhaps even more than my mother's. She invited me to catch her doodlebugs; under the trees in her backyard were dozens of their holes. When you stuck a broom-straw down one and called, "Doodlebug, doodlebug, your house is on fire and all your children are burning up," she believed this is why the doodlebug came running out of the hole. This was why I loved to call up her doodlebugs instead of ours. My mother could never have told me her stories, and I think I knew why even then: My mother didn't believe them. But I could listen to this murmuring lady all day. She believed everything she heard, like the doodlebug. And so did I.

This was a day when ladies' and children's clothes were very often made at home. My mother cut out all the dresses and her little boys' rompers and a sewing woman would come and spend the day upstairs in the sewing room fitting and stitching them all. This was Fannie. This old black sewing woman, along with her speed and dexterity, brought a great provision of up-to-the-minute news. She spent her life going from family to family in town and worked right in the family's bosom, and nothing could stop her. My mother would try, while I stood being pinned up. "Fannie, I'd rather Eudora didn't hear that." "That" would be just what I was longing to hear, whatever it was. "I don't want her exposed to gossip" –as if gossip were measles and I could catch it. I did catch some of it but not enough. "Mrs. O'Neil's oldest daughter she had her wedding dress tried on, and all her fine underclothes featherstitched and ribbon run in and then–" "I think that will do, Fannie," said my mother. It was tantalizing never to be exposed long enough to hear the end.

Fannie was the worldliest old woman to be imagined. She could do whatever her hands were doing without having to stop talking; and she could speak in a wonderfully derogatory way with any number of pins stuck in her mouth. Her hands steadied me like claws as she stumped on her knees around me, tacking me together. The gist of her tale would be lost on me, but Fannie didn't bother about the ear she was telling it to; she just liked telling. She was like an author. In fact, for a good deal of what she said, I daresay she was the author.

LONG before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

It was taken entirely for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in adolescence before I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates and went to their parties, children lied to their parents and parents lied to their children and to each other. It took me a long time to realize that these very same everyday lies, and the stratagems and jokes and tricks and dares that went with them, were in fact the basis of the scenes I so well loved to hear about and hoped for and treasured in the conversation of adults.

My instinct–the dramatic instinct–was to lead me eventually on the right track for a storyteller: The scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions and promises of things to find out and know about human beings.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken–and to know a truth. I also had to recognize a lie.

It was when my mother came out onto the sleeping porch to tell me goodnight that her trial came. The sudden silence in the double bed meant my younger brothers had both keeled over in sleep, and I in the single bed at my end of the porch would be lying electrified, waiting for this to be the night when she'd tell me what she'd promised for so long. Just as she bent to kiss me I grabbed her and asked: "Where do babies come from?"

My poor mother! But something saved her every time. Almost any night I put the baby question to her, suddenly, as if the whole outdoors exploded, Professor Holt would start to sing. The Clark Holts lived next door; he taught penmanship (the Palmer Method), typing, bookkeeping and shorthand at the high school. His excitable voice traveled out of their dining room windows across the two driveways between our houses, and up to our upstairs sleeping porch. His wife, usually so quiet and gentle, was his uncannily spirited accompanist at the piano. "High-ho! Come to the Fair!" he'd sing, unless he sang "Oho ye oho ye, who's bound for the ferry, the briar's in bud and the sun's going down!"

"Dear, this isn't a very good time for you to hear Mother, is it?"

She couldn't get started. As soon as she'd whisper something, Professor Holt galloped into the chorus, "And 'tis but a penny to Twickenham town!" "Isn't that enough?" she'd ask me. She'd told me that the mother and the father had to both want the baby. This couldn't be enough. I knew she was not trying to fib to me, for she never did fib, but also I could not help but know she was not really telling me. And more than that, I was afraid of what I was going to hear next. This was partly because she wanted to tell me in the dark. I thought she might be afraid. In something like childish hopelessness I thought she probably couldn't tell, just as she couldn't lie.

On the night we came the closest to having it over with, she started to tell me without being asked, and I ruined it by yelling, "Mother, look at the lightning bugs!"

IN those days, the dark was dark. And all the dark out there was filled with the soft, near lights of lightning bugs. They were everywhere, flashing on the slow, horizontal move, on the upswings, rising and subsiding in the soundless dark. Lightning bugs signaled and answered back without a stop, from down below all the way to the top of our sycamore tree. My mother just gave me a businesslike kiss and went on back to Daddy in their room at the front of the house. Distracted by lightning bugs, I had missed my chance. The fact is she never did tell me.

I doubt that any child I knew ever was told by her mother any more than I was about babies. In fact, I doubt that her own mother ever told her any more than she told me, though there were five brothers who were born after Mother, one after the other, and she was taking care of babies all her childhood.

Not being able to bring herself to open that door to reveal its secret, one of those days, she opened another door.

In my mother's bottom bureau drawer in her bedroom she kept some treasures of hers in boxes, and had given me permission to play with one of them–a switch of her own chestnut-colored hair, kept in a heavy bright braid that coiled around like a snake inside a cardboard box. I hung it from her doorknob and unplaited it; it fell in ripples nearly to the floor, and it satisfied the Rapunzel in me to comb it out. But one day I noticed in the same drawer a small white cardboard box such as her engraved calling cards came in from the printing house. It was tightly closed, but I opened it, to find to my puzzlement and covetousness two polished buffalo nickels, embedded in white cotton. I rushed with this opened box to my mother and asked if I could run out and spend the nickels.

"No!" she exclaimed in a most passionate way. She seized the box into her own hands. I begged her; somehow I had started to cry. Then she sat down, drew me to her, and told me that I had had a little brother who had come before I did, and who had died as a baby before I was born. And these two nickels that I'd wanted to claim as my find were his. They had lain on his eyelids, for a purpose untold and unimaginable. "He was a fine little baby, my first baby, and he shouldn't have died. But he did. It was because your mother almost died at the same time," she told me. "In looking after me, they forgot about the little baby."

She'd told me the wrong secret–not how babies could come but how they could die, how they could be forgotten about.

I wondered in after years: How could my mother have kept those two coins? Yet how could someone like herself have disposed of them in any way at all? She suffered from a morbid streak which in all the life of the family reached out on occasions–the worst occasions–and touched us, clung around us, making it worse for her; her unbearable moments could find nowhere to go.

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then:

One secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret, when nakedly exposed, is often the more appalling.

Perhaps telling me what she did was made easier for my mother by the two secrets, told and still not told, being connected in her deepest feeling, more intimately than anyone ever knew, perhaps even herself. So far as I remember now, this is the only time this baby was ever mentioned in my presence. So far as I can remember, and I've tried, he was never mentioned in the presence of my father, for whom he had been named. I am only certain that my father, who could never bear pain very well, would not have been able to bear it.

It was my father (my mother told me at some later date) who saved her own life, after that baby was born. She had in fact been given up by the doctor, as she had long been unable to take any nourishment. (That was the illness when they'd cut her hair, which formed the switch in the same bureau drawer.) What had struck her was septicemia, in those days nearly always fatal. What my father did was to try champagne.

I once wondered where he, who'd come not very long before from an Ohio farm, had ever heard of such a remedy, such a measure. Or perhaps as far as he was concerned he invented it, out of the strength of desperation. It would have been desperation augmented because champagne couldn't be bought in Jackson. But somehow he knew what to do about that too. He telephoned to Canton, 40 miles north, to an Italian orchard grower, Mr. Trolio, told him the necessity, and asked, begged, that he put a bottle of his wine in Number 3, which was due in a few minutes to stop in Canton to "take on water" (my father knew everything about train schedules). My father would be waiting to meet the train in Jackson. Mr. Trolio did–he sent the bottle in a bucket of ice and my father snatched it off the baggage car. He offered my mother a glass of chilled champagne and she drank it and kept it down. She was to live, after all.

Now, her hair was long again, it would reach in a braid down her back, and now I was her child. She hadn't died. And when I came, I hadn't died either. Would she ever? Would I ever? I couldn't face ever. I must have rushed into her lap, demanding her like a baby. And she had to put her firstborn aside again, for me.

Of course it's easy to see why they both overprotected me, why my father, before I could wear a new pair of shoes for the first time, made me wait while he took out his thin silver pocketknife and with the point of the blade scored the polished soles all over, carefully, in a diamond pattern, to prevent me from sliding on the polished floor when I ran.

AS I was to learn over and over again, my mother's mind was a mass of associations. Whatever happened would be forever paired for her with something that had happened before it, to one of us or to her. It became a private anniversary. Every time any possible harm came near me, she thought of how she lost her first child. When a Roman candle at Christmas backfired up my sleeve, she rushed to smother the blaze with the first thing she could grab, which was a dish towel hanging in the kitchen, and the burn on my arm became infected. I was nothing but proud of my sling, for I could wear it to school, and her repeated blaming of herself–for even my sling–puzzled and troubled me.

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.

"I'm going to let you go to the Century Theater with your father tonight on my ticket. I'd rather you saw 'Blossom Time' than go myself."

In the Century first row balcony, where their seats always were, I'd be sitting beside my father at this hour beyond my bedtime, carried totally away by the performance, and then suddenly the thought of my mother staying home with my brothers, missing the spectacle at this moment before my eyes, and doing without all the excitement and wonder that filled my being, would arrest me and I could hardly bear my pleasure for my guilt.

There is no wonder that a passion for independence sprang up in me at the earliest age.

It took me a long time to manage the independence, for I loved those who protected me–and I wanted inevitably to protect them back. I have never managed to handle the guilt. In the act and the course of writing stories, these are two of the springs, one bright, one dark, that feed the stream.