Everything

But instead of walking along in his usual way, greeting people and passing a few words with them, he found himself bursting into speech. The minute anybody asked him how he was this morning, he began in a most uncharacteristic, even shameful way to blurt out his woes, and like the waitress, these people had business to attend to and they nodded and shuffled and made excuses to get away. The morning didn’t seem to be warming up in the way foggy fall mornings usually did, his jacket wasn’t warm enough, so he sought the comfort of shops.

“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” from Alice Munro‘s Best Selected Stories

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Dear Alex,

I think Alice Munro - homemaker, story-teller, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature - knows me without having known me. She simply gets it, the “it” as a nifty all-in-1 sack bundling up the complexities of human being and becoming.

When she first published, the local paper introduced her as “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.” She was a small-town shy Mom of 3 young daughters, creating short stories between their naps and the neighbors’ ringing of her doorbell to borrow condiments. Her life seemed as ordinary as the characters she sculpted on page - until you begin to ask if life is one big seeing blind and hearing deaf.

So I am re-quoting her short story above after reading it for my first time in one sitting last week. You sense from the start a chilling climate - the morning not “warming up” as expected, “his jacket wasn’t warm enough”. Then in the pivot of a brief paragraph and morning, we blur into the man who “sought the comfort of shops”, smudged in the grey of Autumn.

But it is only morning! And her passing and pausing from one to another character would churn and curve to her last line with a sparkle: “- what fate has in store for me, or for you -” You never know what you may find or who may find you in “the comfort of shops” or fate in store.

Earlier today I passed by a gift shop and saw this plaque. The blocked letters looked too pink to be taken seriously, their sensibility too generic to be trusted.

Then I got a phone call from someone I had mentored two years ago at work. I had forgotten about her but she recalled the details of my previous path weaving with hers through this day. She was looking for work and asked if I could be one of her two references.

She was far enough to be in a different time zone from mine. I was up close on the receiving end of the phone to see a bit of her personal stories. When our dialogue ended, I wondered if she felt braver, stronger or more loved than the moments before our brief reunion. Was her day warming up to hope restored? Jacket warm enough to bypass the comfort of shops?

By evening I walked out of office to the parking lot, my coat crisp in the swing of dusk, winding up the staircase to the rooftop, swayed by the panorama of the valley below and beyond in longing for the sun to return tomorrow with fog or chill for more story-telling.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

This passage from Alice Munro, one of the two Canadian Nobel Prize winners for Literature, reminds me of an unforgettable titular character from a novel of the other winner Saul Bellow (though he is really more American than Canadian, despite his nationality.)

Here's an excerpt from the opening of Herzog:

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Late in spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.

At that time he had been giving adult-education lectures in a New York night school. He was clear enough in April but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering “Excuse me,” reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed, his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything – everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative – he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear – longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.

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"His white face showed everything – everything."

What is the "everything" in us?  And have we ever allowed ourselves to get stupid or crazy enough to show it all?

Two passages from two Nobel winners.  Enough said and I shall remain utterly silent.

Yours, Alex