 So over meals the last couple of days, some students, some alums have talked to me about some of the readings for the seminar this afternoon and I realized I was getting anxious about doing this seminar because the same question kept coming up. Well, why are these like really spiritual essays, like why did you pick these? And I realized one of the things that I find difficult about doing these seminars is that the context is too big. The context is oh we're all here on this island and we're writing so now we're going to talk about like writing things. And so it's this need to put this seminar in a context, this material is a little problematic and one reason I picked these essays is because the writing is really, really, really good. So right there I think that they are exemplars of an elevation of the human. So that would be the broadest term maybe of spiritual. But another thing occurred to me as I was rereading them last night and today. In each of these essays the narrator is in extremis at the farthest reaches, that's what that Latin means, or at the point of death, either literal death, I mean in the Oliver Sacks he really thinks he's going to die. In the Joanne Beard piece she does talk about it as being the end of one life in the beginning of another. And most certainly in the Baldwin piece he sees what's happening with his feelings about his father as being a life or death decision he might need to make it again and again every day in his life about what's going on inside him but it is life and death for him. So I do think that these essays all have that in common. So then another thing occurred to me today which I wish we could do and maybe we'll try to do a little bit of it and this is going to throw more Latin at you. So I know many of you in here know this term, Lectio Divina, divine reading. So the Benedictines claim it as their practice but it predates them and it is a way of being with scripture, really the Benedictines as the Psalms, it's a way of being with scripture that is not analytical but that the reader, the prayer, the meditator puts themselves in the presence of the word and by putting themselves in the presence of the word they encounter the presence of Christ. And so if we could do something like that with secular literature that would be great. So I'm going to try to do a little bit of that in talking about these essays. So I'm going to talk about them individually or you're going to talk about them individually to begin with and at the end maybe we'll try to do some contrast to compare if we think that's helpful. So I want to start with the granddaddy of all essays basically. I mean it is, we came up with a seminar like in February so sadly the relevance of this just it never goes out of date. So let's open up your notes of a native son. What do you think this essay is about? I know it's about a lot of things. Just start, somebody. Okay, his father's death, right? On the most literal, overt level. That's the occasion for the essay, right? Right, it's the occasion to start telling you all this stuff. What else? How about going one layer down? Yeah, survival. Anybody else? I think it's a lot about seeing things in themselves that he doesn't want to see with a weak name. Okay, all right. So that is actually the progress of the essay, right? It's really about the soul's progress in a lot of ways, this essay. Not that he doesn't know these things at the beginning and find them at the end which is the way some essays work. He seems to, you know, throughout he has, there's a huge dialectic in this essay, right? And it comes in all forms. It's a bicameral view. He is somebody who is able to both be the evolved narrator of the essay and the adolescent that he was at the time of his father's death. And in those years predating his father's death that he talks about when he was in New Jersey and what happened there. So he is kind of, that's part of the dynamism of the essay. He's moving back and forth, right? He's moving back and forth between two states of consciousness in a way that older evolved narrator and the younger adolescent. The man who has figured some stuff out. The boy who is in an intensely emotional place. So we also, and that's reflected in the essay itself, right? There's a lot of analysis in here, right? There's a lot of cerebral stuff. And then there is a lot of raw emotion. And that's a very, very interesting mix that he pulls off here. How would you say this is structured? He's got those three parts, you know, one, two, three. What's that about? Anybody have a entry guess? What's the literal structure? What happens here, like from beginning to end? All right, I'm going to read the beginning. On the 29th of July in 1943, my father died. On the same day a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated and waiting for these events, there had been in Detroit one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. The day of my father's funeral had also been my 19th birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised to mark my father's end the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me too that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse, which had been central to my father's vision. Very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended, I began to wonder about that life and also in a new way to be apprehensive about my own. OK, so he lays out the whole thing. Everything he's going to do. I mean, that's pretty much what's going to happen throughout the rest of the thing. So how would you describe the persona of this narrator? And this is going to bring us to talk about voice, which is the ultimate important. OK, this is a contemplative guy. So when I say persona, I'm really I'm talking about what is he projecting, his personality of his character that's coming off the page. OK, contemplative. You think about it, but doesn't mean he's happy about it. OK, so now we come back to that. So the contemplative thing is that rational, analytical. I'm a writer. I'm an intelligent guy. I've read a lot. I'm pretty precocious intellectually, which he lets us know, right? He was a junior preacher. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have all this viscera, right, visceral rage. Yeah, so what else? What else about his persona? Right, right. So part of what any narrator's job to do is he's got the camera here, and the camera's looking out all the time, right? He's telling you about everything. And the next thing I'm going to read is his description of his father that's kind of who he was as a character. And he's pretty eviscerating on his father and on lots of things. I mean, he's got this really cold, steely way of looking at things. But he is totally capable of turning that same gaze on himself, which is, I think, one of the things that makes this really an exceptional experience for the reader. OK, so I'm going to read that. This is on 588. It's just the next page. He was, I think, which is a terrific little aside. He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs and from my own memories of him, dressed in his Sunday best, and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere when I was little. Handsome, proud, and ingrown like a toenail, somebody said. But he looked to me as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains. He really should have been naked with war paint on and barbaric mementos standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life. And he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met. Yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and even a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness. I think, again, then I think, he was very black with his blackness and his beauty and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life. All right, so what do you get from that passage? Not just about the father but about the guy telling you about his father. He was a human. He has to deny who his father was in a way. And it's really, really hard for him to do that. He recommends his father strength but he also sees a weakness in his son and he's kind of impressed it and probably thinks differently. Yeah, and how does he talk about these strengths? He thinks maybe his father had the positive things. I mean, how does that coming out, Alex? I mean, I don't know if this is what you're getting at but it's sort of, I'm sure it would say I'm sorry but there's this duality to everything. Sort of throughout the whole article but definitely it's one place where he's talking about and kind of both sides of each thing. Yeah, so he kind of gives it and takes it away at the same time, right? When he's, you know, when he's talking about his father. Probably he's like, he doesn't want to admit these good things. He can tell that he doesn't like him. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I thought he was saying that he has, he's got this natural desire like any man to be prideful of himself, to love himself or to think that he is something special but that the blackness and the things that have worked with that hold him back. In other words, there's this level that there's this thing out there and some discrimination or oppression or whatever out there that will not allow him to feel that way, to rise to the pride of what's happening about himself. Right, and actually it's that whole issue of self-hatred that gets exposed in this essay but it's a particular thing in the father, you know, for him to see that vulnerability in the father to come around in some kind of charitable way by the end to see that that was, that was in there. Throughout his observation, whether the observations are correct or not, he's like, but I pictured him as the opposite of what he was. He should have been naked. Like it's just a very honest, what he was to me. Well, that's really interesting. What else about that? Because that's a really, but he looked to me as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains. He really should have been naked with war paint on and barbaric mementos standing among spears. What's he really saying? Injustice, there's injustice in him as he's not to do that. What about the word barbaric though? What do you make of that? He's down to the group, he's being honest. I mean, there's some, there's some things there that sound quite glorified and some that he's being quite demeaning. At the same time, so it's all there, that dialectic throughout this thing is tension, which is because of the essence of self-hatred too. This is on the next page on 589. I do not remember in all those years that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that his inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven him out of New Orleans. There was something in him there for groping and tentative which was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and hoping to impress them, but he never did, not for long. We went from church to smaller and more improbable church. He found himself in less and less demand as a minister and by the time he died, none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine. Any thoughts about that passage there? Yeah, Kristine. Like his birthright is bitterness. It's not well, there was nothing left to be in the will, I didn't. Absolutely. It was sad. Yeah, and I don't know, I started to count and then I stopped. The word bitter and bitterness is used, I mean it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, right. And that's kind of the seed that he's dealing with. That's the seed in the soul that he's got to figure out what he's going to do with that. Okay, I'm just going to move through here and just actually just read some of these passages because I think it's just the way to get in here. So then this is still in that first part and now he's telling about that year in New Jersey, that year in New Jersey, this is on 592 at the bottom. That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again for the fever without an instance warning can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood. One has the choice merely of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. And as for me, this fever has recurred in me and does and will until the day I die. Let's just take a look at that passage. What, I mean, he's, in the beginning he's 19 and at the end he's flashing forward. Yeah, Elmer. It's very easy to be deceived by your own circumstances. Yeah. And so that's the fever that he's now realizing that he's unsuspecting predilection for it, right? Because it happens and you find yourself maybe six months pregnant and you're going back in time. That's a great analogy. Yeah, yeah, and he says, it stays in there. It's like this virus, it's this virus that stays in the body and yeah, yeah, that's a great, great analogy. Does somebody else have their hand up? Okay, that's a great analogy. So, you know, he has, in here, this is just sort of like a crafty thing that I just, partly what I want us to talk about is this is such a powerful essay. Where does the power come from? Sure, it comes from ideas. It comes from ideas. It comes from language. It comes from the rhetoric, right? This is a son of a preacher. He was a junior preacher himself. The rhetoric is very biblical. The syntax often is. He has elevated language that he uses, right? Elevated language, elevated circumstances. He takes his personal life and he puts it in an elevated political arena in a way. You know, he's conflating what's happening in his personal life. His 19th birthday, his father dying, his mother having her last baby. He chooses, right, to place that in a historical context too of what's happening. Of course it's happening right in his neighborhood. But so he's talking about not just the personal sphere, but the sphere beyond that and all these layers. It's almost like anybody ever have that a three tiered like checker game where you can look through, it's loose sight and you can play it in a three dimensional way and that's what's happening in this essay. But for me, the pivot in this essay has to do with this scene and it's a scene of action. So he can use all this elevated language and these great powers of rhetoric, but he would be preaching at you and talking at you, not that he isn't in places, he is. But he also mixes it up with just, you know, straight out scene. This is on the bottom of 593. I walked for perhaps a block or two until I came to an enormous glittering and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the virgin would cause me to be served. I pushed through the doors and took the first vacant seat I saw at a table for two and waited. I did not know how long I waited and I rather wonder until today what I could possibly have looked like. Whatever I looked like, I frightened the waitress who shortly appeared and the moment she appeared, all of my fury flowed toward her. I hated her for her white face and for her great astounded frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening, I would make her fright worthwhile. She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated as though she had learned it somewhere. We don't serve Negroes here. She did not say it with the blunt derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but rather with a note of apology in her face and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands. So I pretended not to have understood her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad and repeated the formula, don't serve Negroes here. Somehow with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a nightmare, I realized that she would never come any closer and that I would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary water mug, half full of water, and I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed. I returned from wherever I had been. I saw for the first time the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already as it seemed to me rising as one man and I realized what I had done and where I was and I was frightened. I rose and began running for the door. A round pop-bellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered run and I ran. All right, so what's going on in that passage, which I do think the whole essay actually pivots on that. I mean, you can talk about rage, you can talk about anger, you can talk about all those things, but. Do you have a bird's-eye view? And he takes three years down into the focus of the day. You have a concrete example of a bird's-eye view of what I've just given him at 4.4 so that you can understand what line rage is. For you to experience it when you're large and calm. Absolutely, absolutely. Anybody else? Does he embody that for the leader of what shakes us up in the same way? We feel it and then we come to. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, this is like a super intellectual guy telling us a lot of really evolved things and then showing us what it feels like also to be him. So again, we're going back and also he's constantly trying to deal with his rage through his mind and then it just gets acted out and I love this word and with that sound my frozen blood abruptly thawed. What, why is that word frozen in there? That's really interesting to me. Lorenzo. It goes all the way back to the way he looked at his dad when he was a kid, like he said, he's a man, why does he act in this way? Why doesn't he act like he's beautiful, okay, right? But that is frozen blood. That is his inability to be able to see what his dad is really going through. The pain that he's really feeling, the light that he's really living. And his blood, that's actually coming alive. He just woke up, he just came alive, he just realized, oh my God, okay, this is it. That's how I see it. Okay, cool, thank you. Okay, so he came back to his higher self when he realized what he did. Okay, yeah, Baron. Because the shadow of confrontation is there for in every moment of his life, he could almost think he was confronting every moment in his life. Because in one sense, he was. But in another sense, he wasn't. And that's the frozen part. Yeah. And it took that moment for that to actually break. It brings a coolness to the people. Like he has this white, hot anger, and then all of a sudden it's frozen blood. Yeah, that's it. There's this coolness to the heat that he sees the people. He recognizes he's human. Like it's not just great, like human, and he sees himself and he's like, what have I done? I need to exit. I need to get out of here. And he, they calmed, they calmed his hot anger down. It's interesting, just that word. You've already, yeah. Well, as a reader, while reading it, I was frozen during the scene. So once, when you're saying that signal to me to go out, to calm down, to realize what just happened, win processes, and learn what is okay and what's not okay, not always okay to act on your anger, but sometimes it happens. It kind of showed this human aspect of things that happened throughout our lives. And it was just, it was really a wake up call. Like get out of the moment. Get out of your head. Get out of this anger. And that's the plan for it now. Yeah. I think that's a great point. Are you gonna say something, buddy? Yeah, I'm gonna say the other thing too is like he's actually put himself in a very dangerous situation. He's in a restaurant where he's not even allowed to be served any frozen glass at a white breakfast. So I think part of that thawing is realizing that he's in a great deal of danger and he's got a good eye on him. Yeah. So I'm really glad you brought that up. So prior to this, we see that he just keeps, kids are taunting him. Everybody makes fun of him because he's not going along with the Jim Crow laws in New Jersey and he just keeps showing up again and again and again. And now he's just, he's gonna do this thing that really could have fatal consequences for him. Eleanor, you can say that. That's why I think that kind of defined, he said in that case, constantly going back to those moments where he kept going back to the same place and they weren't conserving. He made it a habit of going back to the same place just to be in their faces and not serving. Now he's having these reflections and this disease starting to start occurring to him that perhaps he wasn't understanding his father. And now he's in a situation where he had again, he's wanted to be a president and he starts to thaw and realizes at that moment that he's put himself into a very dangerous position. But he hadn't up to that point. He had just been kind of pushing, pushing the envelope. At, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I said a mirror. Interesting, Lorenzo. I think he, at that point, it's like the little one away. Yeah, yeah. No longer intellectual anymore, okay. Right. And now he became, all that went away and became the, I haven't tried to feel the word to use before, but I mean it's like, okay, now I'm gonna take some of that. It's a sin. Yeah. Yeah. It's warrior that. Except, it makes that. Right, right. I'm gonna channel that, that, pardon me. Peter. So with Brett Staples' essay, you know, Scattering the Pigeons, it starts out where he's just doing that, then it becomes visceral and that's a result of much more dangerous. Yeah, yeah. Ibaria. It also hits on a larger point that at some point in our lives, we all base ourselves. And it can be in a moment where you don't expect to see yourself. In my mind, it's almost as if he saw himself in that working mirror. And that's how the blood began to thaw at the moment he saw it. It couldn't interfere. Yeah, so I mean I think also it's almost like. You know, frozen blood is blood that's not really working to make you a whole person. Right? So when he thaws, it's like, the feeling comes back everywhere and that could have been the end of everything. And this is gonna be a struggle that he, and he goes on in the essay to keep saying that the real thing that could kill him is his rage and that that's gonna be the enemy that he has to fight. But he kinda comes back to being like a full person in this moment in some way. The blood thaws and it flows back in, yeah. How do you take that line of that the rest of the restaurant was rising as one man? And it's a great, great line. Somebody else wanna speak to that? Yeah, Sam. Also, that's his experience. It's a, you know, might as well be one man. I mean it's just, it's this unilateral, yeah, force, yeah. That's always against him, yeah. Yeah, that's a great image, though, yeah. I'm sorry, I'm in the right place here, but this seems to be the reality is that when he steps out of the door into the street, he's kind of like, yeah, were you living in the top of the slum? Right, right. Right, right. Absolutely. I'm gonna move on here. And I'm just gonna read, this is the bottom of 594 and it's sort of now he comes back and he sort of, you know, synopsizes, sums up what's happened here. I cannot get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered, but the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. So this is this dialectic, those two, out this thing. The thing that's in me, I could make me kill somebody else, it also could kill me. I saw nothing very clearly, but I did see this, that my life, my real life was in danger, and not from anything other people might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. So that's like a huge place to get to from where we just were at in that scene of physical violence. And it's an amazing, it's an amazing realization to come to, and it's an amazing thing. I think to read on the page, I saw nothing very clearly, but I did see this, that my life, my real life, what do you think he means by that? That's an interesting idea. Okay, eternal life. Yeah, Lauren. The way he looks at himself, the way he lives with himself every day, the way he has to wake up and just everything, just being alive. Right. But just physicality. Right, not just his body, but his, yeah. The whole time he's sort of been dealing in abstracts and like this idea of blackness and barbarism and beauty, but when it comes down to it like his attached to him as an actual person, he's really threatened, like it's not just the ideas that are being threatened and that, it's himself. Also, it's his life, it's the one chance he has here on the planet. It's not just his body, it's about his presence being here. That's the thing that could get taken away. And then it's like kind of like what's going on today. Okay, what's going on with the black lives and how to move in and the police and all this. And every, pretty much a lot of black fathers and black families, they have this reality that they are part, they are citizens of a nation, citizens of a group, but then they see something else going on that they really try to figure out, how can I be a citizen and how can I sit up here and deal with this or whatever. They're gonna act out and do something, but they realize, in order to live their lives, in order to be alive, in order to live their real lives, they can't do that. They can't do that, they have to be part of the larger conversation. So I think that's what I'm seeing. Okay, yeah, thank you. Thank you, that was an important addition. My real life was in danger and not from anything other people might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. Okay, I'm just gonna, so then we get to the second part and he goes to visit his father, which is that terrific scene on the train with his aunt. And again, we have this, he has that whole thing about how he, he used to think of his aunt one way and now she made me feel pity and revulsion and fear. It was awful to realize that she no longer caused me to feel affection. That is the most interesting sentence in the world. What's going on in that part of you remembered, they're riding on the train together and everything this woman does is driving him crazy. She no longer caused me to feel affection. You see a relative, a face you recognize as a child is a cause and effect. As long as they're a nice person in general, that child's gonna feel affection in reverse because that's what we do for survival. Like we want to feel connected in love, but now he's growing up and he's experiencing the world and he has all this bitterness and emotions and he's like seeing her did not incite that. Well and also partly she's still trying and I didn't read, I took it out of context a little bit here, but I mean, in my childhood it not been so long ago. I had thought her beautiful. She'd been quick-witted and quick-moving and very generous with all the children and each of her visits had been an event. At one time one of my brothers and myself had thought of running away to live with her. Now she can no longer produce out of her handbag some unexpected and familiar delight. So this is another thing that's going on throughout the essay, right? I mean, his father's funeral is on the day of his 19th birthday. So he is moving across that threshold from childhood to adulthood and we saw also that even he at the end of that scene where he throws the mug at the waitress, he assesses that his behavior prior to that had been of a young person and now he's moving into this other sphere that has to do with the way he's looking at this aunt. And so it's just, and you know, the death of the father is the ultimate thing that kicks, gonna kick him full scale into adulthood. So then we get to the funeral which is a really, I think, a remarkable, remarkable part of this essay. It's on 599. There's so, so, so much going on here. So I'm just gonna read sort of the middle part of that page. This was not the man they had known but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him. This was in a sense deeper than questions of fact. The man they had not known and the man they had not, the man they had not known and the man they had not known may have been the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead. This was all that was sure and all that mattered. Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came, he too would be eulogized, which is to say, forgiven and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors and strings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other and it was what they demanded after all of the Lord. Only the Lord saw the midnight tears. Only he was present when one of his children, moaning and wringing hands, paced up and down the room. When one slapped one's child in anger, the recoil in the heart reverberated through heaven and became part of the universe and when the children were hungry and sullen and distrustful and when watched them daily growing wilder and further away and running headlong into danger, it was the Lord who knew the charged heart, endured as the strap was laid to the backside. The Lord alone who knew what one would have said if one had had, like the Lord, the gift of the living word. It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced. How to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child by what means a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself. Yeah, so that's like the whole thing right there, right? If like everybody, you know, every tattoo parlor, that was the only tattoo they could give. Maybe we do a little better here, yeah. Oh, okay. It is hot, okay. All right, I'm just gonna go to the very end and read the end and then I'm just gonna ask you guys a couple of questions and we'll move on to the next essay. This is at the bottom of 603, it's just the very end. This was his legacy, nothing has ever escaped that bleakly memorable morning. I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had equally made them that way but I knew that it was folly as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered. Blackness and whiteness did not matter. To believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law. It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first was acceptance. The acceptance totally without ranker of life as it is and men as they are in the light of this idea. It goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace but this did not mean that one could be complacent. That's really great, it goes from commonplace to complacent. This did not mean that one could be complacent for the second idea was of equal power that one must never in one's own life accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one strength. This fight begins however in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. Okay, so I'm just gonna ask you about the experience of reading this. I just wanna do a little meta reading meta. What happens to the reader from the beginning to the end here? What's going on? What happened to you? Forget about the reader. What was this like? Anybody in here, was this the first time they read it for this seminar? Okay, somebody wanted to, yeah, Lauren. I think for me I was just kinda wondering where do you end up? You know, cause you got the his side, the son's side and the father's side. I've got the black side and the white side. And is he going to be able to reconcile all that and find peace? You know, where's he going? My colleague came there. This was my first hand reading it and this is the story of my life here. And some of what I've been writing is of my relationship with people. And I said this story about survival goes a lot here that represents essentially how we live and what's happening today. Absolutely, I mean, this is like the bottom of the next page. She says, shaking her head, you're living with this crap? This is another just good detail. It's right after that. He wants me to reassure him that he's strong enough to leave me, I tell her. Elsie won't have fun on his bike ride. And guess what? I'm too tired to. But now I can see him in his dank little apartment wringing his hands and staring out the windows. In his rickety dresser is the new package of condoms. He accidentally showed me last week. Okay, so there again, that's just a detail, a concrete detail that, that's like three or four paragraphs worth of emotion there just with that detail. So she's very spare in that way. She's very economical. She's using stuff to get at that. Though all those abstract feelings, all those abstract feelings that, by the way, would make her kind of a victim, right? I mean, this is one of her challenges, I think as a writer in this piece, is all these things aren't really going so well for her. And so she's using that kind of little snarky, ironic tone to distance herself from, to get a leg up on her victim hood, I think, here. So that tone is really, really important. And also, I mean, there's humor in it, right? That's one of the things that's going to offset kind of what's coming, I think. So, yeah. Okay. Could you turn on that point? Right. So let's just talk about that for a second from, she does give you a few, she does flash forward a few times, right? Okay, so we get to, before I go to that, you raised a really good point. It is a punch in the face. So let's talk about sort of the contract that you have with the writer in the beginning, or the narrator with the narrator. How did you feel about that when you got slapped? She does, right? They don't know the clicking. So that's the first hint. So it should make you a little uneasy that, yeah, that there's something. I mean, if you're reading attentively, you know that there's something. And then there's a couple more. That we start having. I mean, we have the whole, this is on page 11. It's ganglue, the doctoral student, everyone lights up again. Ganglue stands stiffly talking to Chris while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely. Nose daggers waft up and out right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now, one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate bird-like features, will appear at my door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob's. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything because there's nothing to say. And she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point, her face loosens and she starts to cry in long, ragged sobs. An hour later, I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully where the numbers are ghostly and blurred. So, I mean, you read that and now you know that there's something's gonna happen, okay? And that's on page 12. So, it's not, you know, you're not completely blindsided but the tone is certainly not indicative, I don't think right, of what's going to happen. So, now that we sort of have gotten to that, you know, she flash forwards there. Then at the bottom of 12, this other thing, she does this other thing that I want us to talk about. I wish I could say it was speculation. It's not really that. She imagines into the shooter, right? So, I wanna know what you think about that. I mean, that's the last paragraph on 12. And then she does it again when she actually, we'll talk about that in a minute. Let's talk about this, where she kinda jumps ahead and imagines. Ganglou looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He's sick of physics and sick of the balloons who practice it and then it goes on like that. So, what did you think of that? Especially once you got to the end. She does imagine into it. Nobody can know what he was thinking. I just wanna know, anybody else have any thoughts about that in here? Well, I think she's really aware of it all because she's worked with them and she sees the students' interactions. She sees the competitiveness of the engineering students. So, I think she has a good idea of maybe what it is. Okay, so she's allowed to imagine into it. I think she's allowed to. She's with them enough. And she's unimaginable. Thank you, Tanya, for taking the loss. Okay, yeah, I think that's true. So then, you know, she does this kind of thing. We get to the end of that paragraph. Behind rim glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case, the verdict is clear, not enough that they don't respect him enough. That's at the top of 13. Then there's a double space break. The collie fell down the basement stairs. I don't know if she was disoriented. So, what's that? What's that? What? Nope, because later she goes back to work. But what's the effect of that? Is she kind of doing the same thing that Alan was telling us about my son, the fish tank, and then he got the dog, and the squirrel, and so she brings it to us again. But this is all threaded through here. Yeah, but it's not like your logical progression. Like she doesn't need this connective material. There's just that, this is non sequitur. You know, the collie fell down the basement stairs. Okay, okay, anybody else? The collie and the squirrel. Okay, so it's a little stress relief. And then her mind is in a format where things are starting to make sense. It's not yet, but she wants it to make sense in this way. Okay. Sam. She knows a deal about the collie. Yeah. It's dying, but she knows what to do. She's pulling down the stairs, and she reads it, and she makes it. Yeah, here's a smaller tragedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something should actually combine a solution for it. Yeah. But actually, in what we know so far, the collie falling down the stairs is actually still the bigger tragedy. So we don't know. So it's, it actually feels like a very steep drop, right? It feels like something terrible is happening. And then escalation, you kind of expect. Yeah. Yeah. But there's, in that white space is all kinds of emotion, unstated emotion. And that's what she does that a lot in here. So I just want you to be aware of that. She makes a lot of this white space of these juxtapositions, these weird juxtapositions. Yeah. Great point. It frustrated me when I was reading this, because it didn't match the subject matter. Like I'm sitting there waiting for this tone to go deeper and darker. And then it's like, the dog falls down the stairs. Like that's not the tone you're expecting. And so the subversion, like the subversive tone that she's seeing, how does that start from where it's frustrating to me? Okay. And does it serve for work? Great, great point. Somebody want to, somebody want to speak to that? Yeah, what about the tone? What's that? What's she doing there? Approach tragedy. If you can't really wrap your mind about it, do you have to sort of be cavalier or something or? Yeah, or she's like this, right? Yeah. She's a little frosty and funny and flippant about it. It's a way, I mean, my sense is that there is so much feeling here. There is so much loss. It is potentially so overwhelming that, and the way you know that it's so overwhelming is because it's pushing up against the very edge of her voice. It's just pushing and she can't let it, if she lets any of it out, it will obliterate her. You said before I did the recipe, look I had a time for her to say it. Right, and also that is actually from Isaiah. God says, cry with a full throat and let your voice resound like a shofar. So she needs to get it out. She needs to say it. She needs to tell her story. But yeah, that's such an interesting idea. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, absolutely. That's a great point, Ann. Okay, now you just raised a whole other interesting question that's going on here. Jen, do you want to say something? Yeah, well I think that's why we need the extended metaphor of the dog, because I think she's kind of stalling to sort of your word with how much she cares about her. One thing I would, because of her tone and because of the way she talks, I don't think I would have understood how much she really loved them and loved being around them if I wouldn't have seen her caring for this. That's really, really, that's a really interesting idea. Frustration, which I also felt with her constantly going back to this dog was actually her container for being. Right, right, she uses the dog, yeah, yeah. I agree, I agree. So I'm just gonna go back to what Ann said about this whole idea of bearing witness, which I think is also one of the things that I would say makes this kind of a spiritual essay. She's bearing witness to something that happened that was closer in her realm, but she has to tell about what she saw, about what happened. She has to tell about what happened to her, this kind of cataclysm. She talks about it being the end of the first half of her life, okay? It was like a death experience. She is in extremis. And so the job here is to bear witness and tell about it, and I think you're absolutely right that there's some stalling. There's definitely some throat clearing at the beginning, right? And some stalling and all kinds of things, like I have to do this thing that I don't maybe really wanna do. Sam. Well I think because she was really thinking about her being a woman, in order to show us just how devastating it is, she has to pull the beginning with a lot of kind of everyday things, because these things happen on a day. If you can't get up and catch that, that's the negative of the talk, you know, so. Yeah. And it's really, I think that makes it more shocking that her personal delivery is so... Right, so she's not telling you about something that happened to her. She is giving you the experience of the very thing that happened to her, okay? And that's a huge difference. And she wants you as much as she can do it as much as possible. She wants you to feel the thing she felt. She wants you to feel how she felt. And that has a lot to do with why she made a lot of the decisions she made here about how to tell this story. And part of what's going on is, how do I make you feel this thing that I still don't even understand this? Unfathomable thing happened to me. And I want as much as I can to make you experience it along with me. So before we move on to the next one. So did that happen? I mean, what happened to you when you read this? Some part of it you brought up where there is no transition and she goes back to the college on how the reason is there. So I thought, Liz, there's a huge sense of people who can see and read it. And I thought she's so, after reading and thinking about it, and thinking how she went about, wondering how she went about writing these two stories. She's reconstructing, because this is the story of her living forward. I know that my husband has vanished. My dog is dying. The squirrels are the thing. You know these things are happening. But she doesn't know what's happening. But she's transiting it about happening. So when she goes back and re-enact it, she's reconstructing almost what was going on that she wasn't supposed to. Yeah. And then creates that. Which I think is really such a difficult thing to do. Now she has to, in order to give you the experience she had, she can't really tell you what she already knows. So she has to live her life as she was living it without too much foreknowledge. I mean, is the way we, and that's so counter to the way we tell stories, right? Because we tell stories, but we know the whole thing. She's pretending in a way or giving you that experience, which is the experience of moving through life, which is to not know literally what is going to happen to you in the next sense, in the next moment. And in the end, she's there like a war axe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's true. So before we move on, I just wanted just one thing that I thought was interesting here. So it's on page 15 after that big white space. So here again, she's really imagining into a place she's not. This is the scene of the shooting. She was not at the shooting. She was not in that room, okay? Did anybody notice what happens? It's one, two, three paragraphs before we come back. She does something very different. The voice is completely different in those paragraphs. It's just the fact she just tells what happens as if she were in the room, but not her. I mean, it's just a kind of camera. It's like a police report. Yeah, yeah, and our trusty girl guide through this world is gone, right? That narrator's not there, that persona's not there. It's all fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. Then we have that white space at the top of 16. The first call comes at four o'clock. I'm reading on the bench in the kitchen, one foot on a sleeping dog's back. Now we're back into her perspective. So I just thought that was an interesting, she doesn't choose to stay in the narrator's perspective and just have the news come to her, the phone rang. Anybody have any ideas about why she, I have no idea, so I'm just asking you. Do you have anybody know why she made that decision? Okay, that's interesting. Interesting idea. Tracy. I think she's letting the narrator feel it and she's saying, okay, now you do it all. You take it on. That emotion, I'm not gonna lose you again, but here. I'm gonna lose you in the past. Real, I know I am. I'm dumping it on you. Okay, the really interesting idea in. That is right. We don't have to go through all that information. Okay, that's actually makes, right. All of a sudden you're back, now you're protecting her. She's been protecting you all along, giving you little bits of information now in a way you're protecting her character. Like it's almost as if you know something she doesn't in that moment when it comes. Yeah, that's a really, really, really interesting point. I think that's true. Plus, this idea about experience and information. There's information she has to give you literally about what happened. And it takes three paragraphs to do that. But her main concern is with the experience. It's with the emotional experience of what happened. And she separates them. She separates those two things there. So she gets that information out of the way and then she goes back into that experiential thing. All right, before we move on to the Oliver sacks. Anybody want to, just anything I, you know. I didn't, yeah, muddy. That's a great, yeah, that is true. That is true. And so that takes a... Yeah, I mean, when I first read this it wasn't in there. And so I went, but I, right, when I went to, had to find it for you guys for online, then I did, yeah, I've noticed that, yeah. Yes, that was, yeah. Yes. If you look at when this was published and when the event happened, that's a really, really great point. Yeah, thank you. That was a really, really good point. Yeah, fine. That's just like a, because we're here, like that's what we're talking about, you know. I mean, I know, but you know, the truth is like, unless you're like teaching this stuff or talking about it in that kind of way, I don't really know, is that even helpful to like really discuss that, I don't know. But when I was reading it, I did notice that, you know, that of course I got to tell you that was, I've read this at least 10 times and that was the first time I noticed that because usually I'm too taken up with the experience of it to be able to read it in that way. All right, so let's look at the last piece, really, really, really different. But if the Baldwin was kind of a struggle for moral, spiritual survival and Beards is kind of a struggle for an emotional survival, this is really like a physical struggle in a lot of ways. I mean, it becomes other things. So, you know, Oliver Sacks, what's the persona here? What's this narrator's persona? Because he really does develop himself into quite the character in this piece. Okay, he's an adventurer. That's a great word, he's giddy. Right, he talks to himself, he exclaims to himself quite a lot, right? Yeah, there's a lot of exclamation points in here. Yes. Right, and he is, I met him once, he's very eccentric because a word you could use, definitely, but he knows it, like he's self-aware. I mean, there's a way, there's a self-mocking thing that goes on here, right? So, and what do you see right in the beginning that lets you know what he thinks of himself sort of? Right, I mean this, yeah, right. I foresaw no particular problems or difficulties. I was as strong as a bull. Well, if you've read the title, you already know there's something ironic here. I was as strong as a bull in the prime, the pride, the high noon of life. I mean, there is a kind of, I mean, Baldwin has one kind of elevated language. This is another kind of elevated language. I looked forward to the walk with assurance and pleasure. Then at the bottom of the next paragraph, so he sees the sign. To my surprise, there was a fence and a gate at this point and the gate bore a still more surprising notice. Beware of the bull in Norwegian. And for those who might not be able to read the words, a rather droll picture of a man being tossed. That word droll is the word that is the perfect counter point to the word giddy. I just, I got there and I thought a rather droll picture. Could there really be a droll picture of a man being tossed, but that was just, and also that tells you, that one word tells you a lot about the guy who's telling you this whole story, right? I stopped and scrutinized the picture and scratched my head. A bull, question mark, up here, question mark. What would a bull be doing up here? Another question. I not seen even sheep in the pastures and farms down below. Perhaps it was some sort of joke, tacked there by the villagers or by some previous hiker with an odd sense of humor. Or perhaps there was a bull, summering amid a vast mountain pasture, subsisting on the spare grass and scrubby vegetation. Well, enough of speculation, exclamation point, onward to the top. So he sets himself up, right? As like a just almost a borderline buffoon in a way, right? I mean, he's proud. So we get on to the next page. Again, he repeats this onward, upward thing. It's several times in here. This is on page two. And so I forged ahead, keeping up a brisk pace, despite the gradient, blessing my energy and stamina, and especially my strong legs, trained by years of hard exercise and hard lifting in the gym, strong quadriceps muscles in the thighs, strong body, good wind, good stamina. I was grateful to nature for endowing me well. And I drove myself to feats of strength and long swims and long climbs. It was a way of saying thank you to nature and using to the full the good body she had given me. What was that? What's that about? Yes, literally. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's definitely true. Yeah, definitely true. So yeah, he's setting himself up. Yeah, or maybe there's a way that he's smocking himself to even, you know, so he has a complicated relationship with himself, a relationship that will actually stand him in really good stead when he finds himself coming down the mountain in a very different manner than he went up, right? So this is at the bottom of that. And this is a great, because the way this whole essay is constructed, it is kind of like, almost like a physical quest or sort of situation. This is the description of the Bologna. I practically trod on what lay before me an enormous animal sitting in the path and indeed wholly occupying the path whose presence had been hidden by the rounded bulk of the rock. It had a huge horned head, a stupendous white body and an enormous mild milk white face. It sat unmoved by my appearance, exceedingly calm, except that it turned its vast white face up toward me. And in that moment, it changed before my eyes, becoming transformed from magnificent to utterly monstrous. The huge white face seemed to swell and swell in the great bulbous eyes and became radiant with malignance. The face grew huge and huge all the time until I thought it would blot out the universe. The bulb became hideous, hideous beyond belief, hideous in strength, malevolence and cunning. It seemed now to be stamped with the infernal in every feature. It became first a monster and now the devil. So, okay, so what now is what's going on? I mean, they're still really... He's freaking out. I don't know what I'm feeling. Yeah, yeah, okay. So it is a real bull. He really is climbing up a mountain and now we've got like all these metaphors, right? So he's taken himself and made him into kind of a character and now he's taken his fear, is becoming something else, this kind of heightened thing. But he's also, I think really, is that a whole thing about the devil and all that? I mean, as we move on here, something else happens for him that really isn't just physical, okay? And I do, that was one of the reasons I picked this. So then, blind, mad, panic and enthusiasm. And this is on page three, right before that white space break. To be full of strength and vigor one moment and virtually helpless the next in the pink and pride of health one moment and a cripple the next with all one's powers and faculties one moment and without them the next. Such a change, such suddenness is difficult to comprehend and the mind casts about for explanations. And this is really, that's kind of really the crux of the whole thing. And now, because he's a supremely cerebral person as well as being full of him and vigor or was before this happened, it's his mind that that's all he has, right? To really get him back down the mountain. So let's just talk a little bit because his, oh my gosh, okay. We'll talk about one thing really quickly because his language is so different from the language in the other two, right? So who is this guy? And what is he, just, his syntax, his diction, his references. Let's just talk about his references. What are some of the references that he makes in here? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the preacher and the devil, I mean. Yep, okay, definitely, definitely. What else? Okay, we got Tolstoy. He keeps, yeah, yeah. We have a mathematical Leibniz, a mathematician and a philosopher. I thought of a dream related by Leibniz. You know, only this guy is like in extremists trying to get down the mountain but this is the way he helps himself to stay alive, actually. And music, right? Music becomes this huge part of this. He hears music. It was only after chanting the song in a resonant and resounding bass for some bass for some time that I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the ball or more accurately, I had forgotten my fear, partly seeing that it was no longer appropriate, partly that it had been absurd in the first place. I had no room now for this fear or for any other fear because I was filled to the brim with music. And he moves through, basically, everything he's acquired in his life, right? To help him. So it's a scientific knowledge, right? As a physician and then he has this. And it was only later that I said to myself, what is this mood? And realized that it was a preparation for death. Let your last thanks all be thanks, as Auden says.