JuJu and George

I finished reading Hatchet, along with my nine year old son recently and toward the end of the book he recognized that my voice was “getting different” as I fought off emotion. I was emotional for two reasons: one was just finishing a good book that involves a teenager (not that far away for my nine year old) being rescued after surviving in the Canadian wilderness for close to two months and two, the more powerful reason is that we read it together, as father and son. And the truth is that he is difficult and I am more difficult but reading this book together, we had powerful moments of connection and it became a beautiful, what Heidegger might call, project. A project is powerful in this sense because it posits a future. Over the nights reading I could ask him questions as his excitement showed on his sleeve and I talked about the power of a good story, a good paragraph, a good sentence. We were inside of this book, and it was beautiful and of course, books come to an end, and we would no longer be inside, and I became emotional. The time ended. Which made me think about my radical thanatism: The steadfast belief that I am finite and that I do not transcend this earthly life and how this focuses THIS life and makes seemingly simple moments like finishing a novel with my son, into intense cherishable moments that connect me to meaning and value in the absurdity (absurdism is realism around 18:22). In short my thesis stands, my radical thanatism is healthy, believing individual humans are eternal is, not; it cheapens our individual and collective lives. 

Later that night I also finished George Saunders’ most recent, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain and cannot help but bring relief to the subtitle: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. The next day I would share Saunders’ thoughts on the power of a good story with my JuJu and I would again become emotional but I prefaced it by telling him why I was emotional the night prior. Because we did that thing together and that time, with you, that time we have, runs out. 

Pardon the imperatives here: Value time, cherish time, it is all you really have. If you don’t believe me, please believe George Saunders (bolding mine):

Hi – I'm reading "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life" by George Saunders and wanted to share this quote with you.

"We ended the previous section by agreeing to confine our expectations for fiction to this: reading fiction changes the state of our minds for a short time afterward. But that may be a bit on the modest side. After all, as we’ve been seeing, reading fiction changes our minds in particular ways, as we step out of our own (limited) consciousness and into another one (or two, or three). So, we might ask, how are we altered, in that “short time afterward”? (Before I give my answer, let’s just say, again, that there’s no need, really, for me to do that. We know how our minds were changed as we read these Russians, because we were there. And we know, if we’ve been lucky enough to have other beautiful reading experiences in our lives, what those did for/to us.) But I’ll give it a try: 

I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind. 

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa. 

My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit. 

I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language). 

I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be. 

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them. 

So, that’s all pretty good."