《The Braindead Megaphone》George Saunders

The New Mecca

Part of me wants to offer to help.  But that would be, of course, ridiculous, melodramatic.  He washes these stairs every day.  It's not my job to hand-wash stairs.  It's his job to hand-wash stairs.  My job is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for writing about it than he'll make in many, many years of doing it. 

And of course, somewhere in India is a guy who'd kill to do some stair-washing in Dubai.  He hasn't worked in three years, any chance of marriage is rapidly fading.  Does this stair washer have any inclination to return to India, surrender his job to this other guy, give up his hard-won lifestyle to help this fellow human being?  Who knows?  If he's like me, he probably does.  But in the end, his answer, like mine, is:  That would be ridiculous, melodramatic.  It's not m job to give up my job, which I worked so hard these many years to get.  

Am I not me?  Is he not him?

*

In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar.  There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind.  And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins.  No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details.  The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.  What a powerful thing to know: that one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other - perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.  

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts.  Don't be afraid to be confused.  Try to remain permanently confused.  Anything is possible.  Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra

 It is what it is: massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death.  It is the manmoth and confusion and blood and death.  It is the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of a handful of men.  When someone says war is inevitable, or unavoidable, or unfortunate but necessary.  And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death.  It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men.  In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are.  In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, or will be, or could be.  

There's something sacred about reading a book like Slaughterhouse Five, even if nothing changes but what's going on inside our minds.  We leave such a book restored, if only briefly, to a proper relation with the truth, reminded of what is what, temporarily undeluded, our better nature set back on its feet. 

The United States of Huck

Twain would like this, I think, this continuing struggle to understand his book.  We have not had a writer as devoted to seeking out truth and outing lies.  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.