Sometimes a day’s task list gets a bit long and you find yourself emptying the compost at 9:30 p.m. or so. Get out the flashlight, grab the little metal bucket, go outside to the bin tucked along a path of overhanging bamboo. In the flashlight stream the bamboo leaves are so green, bright and sharp-shaped against the dark. Then you notice something fine. In the same way a shaft of sunlight captures suspended household dust motes, the flashlight is capturing water, not rain but fog, the tiniest of water droplets floating in the air.
Cranky self recedes. Childlike self emerges. Something slightly magical in the moment.
Emily Carr evokes the eery feeling that unexpected utter darkness evokes. The Canadian artist thought a meeting she often went to would be in its usual location in a Victoria BC theater. She liked to sit in the balcony for these meetings. That meeting didn’t happen. Here’s what she noted about the experience.
I must be very late, I thought, and crept up to my usual seat in the balcony. I got no further than the gallery entrance. Ill-ventilated black met me, a dense smothering black as if all the actors and the audience had left something there, something intangible in that black hole of a place. That deathly silence was full of crying. It made you want to get out quickly, as if you were looking at something that you should not see.
It’s such a rich entry in a journal full of amazing observations, feelings, experiences. That day — December 2, 1934– is particularly rich. Here’s the paragraph that follows the one above.
I came out quickly into the dull street, Government Street in Chinatown, with all the dirty curtained windows and the shut shops. Two little Chinese girls were licking suckers, red ones that rouged their tongues, and were comparing tongues on the mirror on an outside door.
One of Canada’s beloved Pacific Northwest artists as well as a talented author, she was such a close observer. I love having this collection of her private thoughts.
What a challenging few days it’s been, watching the news, hearing the yelling match across the divide of people who see different things in the videos of the shooting of an American citizen by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
In the middle of all that, I stumbled on a New York Times interview with author George Saunders. I feel bad as a writer that I’d never heard of Saunders. He’s an award-winning author with essays, short stories, nonfiction and fiction books published over the last 30 years. He teaches writing at Syracuse University.
Here I am now, playing catch-up and grateful for it. Saunders is known for, has written about, the value of kindness. Not exactly what I would have expected from what I perceived to be an uptown posh East-Coast guy. (His background suggests some depth in the blue-collar world.)
My mistake. Here are a couple of lines from a convocation speech he gave in 2013 that eventually became a New York Times article: Here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. … It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
My go-to goal in this realm: Don’t be a jerk today. But a positive version may be the higher order. On the other hand: Start where you are.
Second reason I’m excited about Saunders is this book he wrote about writing: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 