Hi all,
Just a few posts ago, I wrapped up the TOA 2018 Book of the Year process by naming Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko the winner of ‘the most irrelevant prize in world literature’ ahead of Simone Weil’s First and Last Notebooks. I realized after the fact that since I’d sent off all the other books from my nominee list with a ‘parting thought’, it would only be appropriate – and consistent – to do so with these finalists. Since these books made it all the way to the end, however, I’ll grant each book an extra thought or two to reflect how far they advanced in the process.
First and Last Notebooks
Parting thought – second runner up: The idiot is the one who takes the oven to the bread for baking.
I can’t add much to this comment except a warning – there are equivalents that are less obvious than someone dragging a stove along the sidewalk.
Parting thought – first runner up: The collective is better than the individual in all domains – except for thought.
One of the delights of reading old books – Weil probably conceived of First and Last Notebooks throughout the Interwar Years and finalized it as the Nazis unleashed their full military potential across Europe – is how it brings past context to what many mistakenly identify as new, modern problems. Weil wasn’t on Twitter (I’m sure she would have been a delight) but the seductive pull of groupthink, the ever-present appeal of the herd mentality, and the voices crying out against these in all their outrage have been around for as long as people have come together.
Parting thought: There is profound value in suffering, given that one made every legitimate attempt to avoid it.
I liked this thought, or perhaps I should say its qualifier, for I think we sometimes needlessly glorify suffering as beneficial or even virtuous just because some have used their suffering to grow into stronger and more resilient people. This reality unfortunately does not account for those who have wilted under the great torment of suffering. Those of us in a support position must understand that it is not the act of suffering alone that matters.
Pachinko
Parting thought – second runner-up: Saying someone is a 'good' representative of a group is no different than discriminating against the group because the 'good' representative exists only when the rest of the group is comprised of the 'bad'.
The rip current underlying Pachinko is the well-meaning complicity of the perfectly kind, perfectly average person in an otherwise discriminatory environment. Groups, organizations, and even societies change through small steps that build up over time. The easiest of these small steps is changing the language, the way we describe ourselves and others, because words form the casual foundation of custom and tradition that enable the worst of our passive thinking to live on. When we incorporate a new vocabulary into public life, the patterns of thought and speech that encouraged simple comparisons slowly give way to words and sentences that allow us to engage with others on new terms that no longer reference our surface differences.
Parting thought – first runner-up: Insurance is a way to make money from fear, loneliness, and chance.
I would add poverty to this list, as well – how else could I convince you to pay me a total of $110 over the next ten years for the privilege of covering a single $100 charge that might come up during the decade?
Parting thought – It's important to have someone to share your life with – your experiences, your thoughts, even just what took place that day.
If the rip current underlying Pachinko is complicity, the vast ocean into which it pulls is erasure. Erasure starts by dismissing or ignoring another’s story and ends when stories stop being told. A life disappears in this way, when the stories of experiences and thinking are ignored, dismissed, or regarded as lies. A society’s complicity means systemically reducing, refuting, and rejecting the stories of the marginalized or the oppressed until those stories stop being told.
When someone shares a story, it reverses the current and brings back into sight what our predecessors allowed to drown. Those in a society that knows how to share lift each other up instead stepping on each other’s backs. Like any massive task, the only way to start is through small steps. It means sharing with those who have earned the right to listen and listening to those who have privileged you with their story. By sharing the daily or the trivial, we reinforce the importance of our stories and develop a society’s most important skill.
