Above All, Survive
I hate war movies, anything about serial killers, doomed characters and endings that turn out the lights on all existing hope. My sister used to make me cry by reading the end of the novel Of Mice and Men with Steinbeck’s bleak vision of a doomed relationship between two men during the depression. She would say, “Look at the rabbits,” and I’d burst into tears. I’m not a fan of Steinbeck. If I know that a story either real or imagined ends in despair, I will probably avoid it. But I love King Lear and other tragedies as proof that human suffering is universal. Novels like Invisible Man, Anna Karenina, and the dark stories of Alice Munro move me with the truth, life can be terrible. Not, life is terrible. Go figure. I don’t find the battle inspired speeches in Henry V or the slaughter in Braveheart anything but awful. When slaughter is the answer there are no more questions.
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Perfect Imperfection
If you look into someone’s eyes while toasting anyone, your sex life is unaffected. If you respond to a once-in-a-lifetime offer, it will be offered again, and again. You can stop smoking, drinking, taking drugs, eating poorly, start exercising many times. There is no cut-off. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they imply, you’re in or you’re out. Guess what? There’s a hallway, a doorstep, a toe dip, an effort that might not be perfect but there is hope and you can always ask for different cards. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Sometimes they just happen and they’re terrible and that’s too bad. Hopefully, things will get better.
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Reading Isn’t Writing
Reading and writing are, by their very nature, entwined; but they are separate skills with separate demands. Reading emphasizes close attention to the writer’s main idea, purpose for the communication, tone and method of narrative. Both are recursive activities although a skilled reader who annotates and takes notes may be able to skip a second read while a writer must see each draft as a work-in-progress. How many drafts are necessary is based on skill, experience, connection to the material and time, time between the last edit and the next, time to absorb both the strength and the weakness of the writing. There is a thin blue line in teaching. It may not be as intensely adhered to as say, law enforcement, but teachers rarely criticize each other’s methods of educating students.
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