Novelist George Saunders Says Recognizing 3 Common Delusions Can Save Us
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(OPINION) Children, long ago in a land far away, I aspired to be a writer of serious fiction rather than of ephemeral newspaper columns.
To that end, I read innumerable books by the masters, earned two degrees in English literature, hung out with older writers and wrote a steamer trunk full of turgid, thankfully unpublished works of my own.
In my nascent writing, I gravitated toward tales of wayward, hard-drinking, redneck young men from the rural South who find redemption. Wonder where that subject matter came from?
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Before I could succeed or fail, however, I bumped into the wonders of daily journalism, which offered instant gratification and, back then, a steady paycheck. So long, art.
Along the way, though, I observed a few things about modern literature — the “serious” kind. One was that the literary scene was dominated by a hip, sour view of humanity. To be joyful or optimistic was to be considered a lightweight.
Fortunately, there were and are exceptions to that rule, including Kentucky’s Wendell Berry.
Another great exception: George Saunders, 67, a lauded novelist and short story writer whose work is an antidote for the sort of lazy nihilism that characterizes so much artistic writing.
Saunders was interviewed by the New York Times. Interviewer David Marchese referred to him “as something close to a guru of goodness.”
Saunders is nobody’s lightweight. He earned the 2017 Booker Prize for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” and last fall was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Still, there’s what Marchese calls “the kindness stuff.” In 2013, Saunders gave a speech at Syracuse University which claimed that practicing kindness changes us for the better. The speech went viral and then became a bestselling book.
He was raised Catholic and now practices Buddhism, but as a young man he veered off into the ethos of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” the theme of which he interprets as, “You’re special, because you believe in selfishness.”
After attending the Colorado School of Mines, he worked overseas in oil fields. Then, one night in Singapore, he walked past a hotel that was going up. He saw some movement at the bottom of the foundation.
“I staggered up to the fence, and there were hundreds of elderly Singaporean women clearing the site by hand,” he tells Marchese. “They were literally carrying boulders. Something in that moment just snapped, and I made the connection between those women and my extended family, many of whom were struggling with the big boot of capitalism. And I thought, Oh, I’m on their side.”
That epiphany resonated with his Catholic upbringing, too:
“I always loved the woman at the well, when Jesus, as I understood it as a kid, comes up to this woman who’s scorned by all the people and goes, I see you, I love you, I forgive you.”
A willingness to embrace outcasts now informs how he writes, including in his new novel, “Vigil.” Sometimes his characters are people he’s hardwired to dislike. They’re venal.
The more he works through his drafts, though, he says, trying to understand why they act as they do, trying to nail the details, the more useless terms such as “like” and “dislike” become. He realizes how much he has in common with them, not how different they are from him.
“Specificity negates judgment,” he says. “So as I work harder and harder to know that guy, my sense of wanting to judge him seems juvenile. Anybody can judge. Let’s go deeper. I really cherish that feeling. Of course it doesn’t last beyond the page, and I’m sure if I met his real-life corollary, I’d be sneering at him. But what a blessing to, for a few minutes a day, ascend up out of your habit.”
Saunders’ last two novels, “Lincoln in the Bardo” and “Vigil,” both deal with death. He tells Marchese there are three illusions we must get beyond as we prepare to pass from this world:
First, our earliest sense of ourselves tends to be that we’re starring in a movie: “Your mom and dad are co-stars, and there’s a cast of millions out there, but you’re the main thing.”
Second, there’s the assumption that we’re going to be here forever: “That schmuck died, but you’re not going to.”
Finally, there’s the feeling that we’re separate from others.
“Death,” he says, “is the moment when somebody comes and says: You know those three things that you’ve always thought of? They’re not true. You’re not permanent, you’re not the most important thing and you’re not separate.”
Escaping these untruths can transform us, he believes: “Any moment in this life when you get clear of that trio of delusions, you’re saved. Because then what’s to be afraid of? The reason I don’t want to die is because I’m me. I’m so fond of me, and even when I’m not fond of me, I’m quite attached to me. I’ve had a couple of times in my life, just briefly, where I could feel, Oh, OK, there’s a little distance there between me and self. If you could get a lot of distance, then death would be no problem.”
Sounds a bit like the teachings of the biblical sages: love those whom others dismiss; realize you’re nobody particularly special; accept that you’re here for a moment and then gone; see that we’re all in this mess together and thus ought to help each other. Sounds like everything we need to know to become better people.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.