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And what will you do if we let you go? I ask him in my mind. Will you try to get in here again? Next time, you could be looking at five years.
He hesitates, averts his eyes.
Seriously? I say. My God, is it worth it? Are things really that bad where you live?
And he just looks at me, as if to say: Would I keep trying if it didn't make sense to keep trying, if the possible reward didn't justify possibly getting caught? Do I look stupid?
He doesn't look stupid. He looks handsome and sad and ashamed.
But mostly what he looks is: busted.
Busted, and waiting to pay the price.
about a Mexican guy who gets caught crossing the border
this is one of the best moments in the essay (maybe the entire book)
If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive--if only for a few seconds more--the possibility of transformation.
very This Is Water, though not as well-written tbh
[...] Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.
I don't think I've read either but even so, this is an interesting analysis of the two characters
The questions about race in Huck Finn tend to center around the presence in the book of the word "nigger", but my guess is that, if the book were free of the types of missteps described above, and if the ending weren't such a fiasco, that word might not be such a problem. That is, if our wishful dream of the book (in which Jim is always fully human and three-dimensional, and in which Huck steadily and then definitively comes to understand this) had been perfectly realized, I think most readers would tolerate the n-word as an important and even essential indicator of character. It is crucial that we understand Huck as a possible nascent racist, and so he had better talk like one. [...]
[...] Can we ever really know to what extent this man or his book was, or is, racist? When we identify racism in the book, aren't we really just identifying racism in the culture out of which it came? Is it fair to expect Twain to have vaulted himself out of his own time and place and arrive, clean-booted and upright, in our own? Isn't the book still funny and deep? Aren't I actually enjoying it? How does one do the complicated math of Ultimate Racism: If we determine that, relative to our time,
Twain was a 40 percent racist, while relative to his own, he was only a 12 percent racist, or was in fact a 0 percent racist--what do we know, really?
good point--it's not a blanket judgment, but it has to do with sensitivity, and so it's very case-by-case (a point that a lot of "omg free speech" people ignore)
though tbh I'm still annoyed when people use "racist" to refer to individuals as concentrating on cultural and systemic factors (maybe it's a spectrum not a binary idk)
[...] Huck Finn is a great book because it tells the truth about the human condition in a way that delights us. It is a great work of our national literature because, more than any book before or since, it locates itself squarely on our National Dilemma, which is: How can anyone be truly free in a country as violent and stupid as ours? The book still lives, because the question does.
the perfect ending to a great essay
Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.
We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.
But it's nowhere near enough.
For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.
I was an engineering student in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, and came to fiction late, with a particular understanding of fiction’s purpose. I’d had a powerful experience one summer, reading The Grapes of Wrath at night, in an old RV in my parents’ driveway in Amarillo, after long days working in the oil fields as what was called a “jug hustler.” My fellow workers included a Vietnam vet who, there in the middle of the prairie, periodically burst into the voice of an amped-up radio host (“THIS IS WVOR, AMARILLO!”) and an ex-con, just out of jail, who, every morning, in the van on the way to the ranch where we were working, would update me on the new and perverse things he and his “lady” had tried sexually the night before, images that have stayed with me ever since, sadly.
As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.
The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
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Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences.
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What are you curious about?
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Where do you think the story is headed?
Whatever you answered, that’s what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).
In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.
We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something.
Here, Chekhov gives us an opportunity to reconsider the scary term “structure.”
We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.
Me, at the end of the first page: “Poor Marya. I already sort of care about her. How did she get here?”
Story, in the first paragraph of its second page: “Well, she had some bad luck.”
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.