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As soon as I started the story I knew I shouldn’t tell it. It was the story about Captain Kale wanting to bring the Chinook into the middle of the hooches, and me letting him do it. I couldn’t find the right tone. My first instinct was to make it somber and regretful, to show how much more compassionate I was than the person who had done this thing, how far I had evolved in wisdom since then, but it came off sounding phony. I shifted to a clinical, deadpan exposition. This proved even less convincing than the first pose, which at least acknowledged that the narrator had a stake in his narrative. The neutral tone was a lie, also a bore. How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?
In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff
Whatever theory speaks to the reader, surely we are called to become more fully what we are, in simple service to the richness of the universe of possibilities.
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
James Hollis
During the Court fight he had assured Garner, “I have said fifty times that the budget will be balanced for the fiscal year 1938. If you want me to say it again, I will say it either once or fifty times more.” The prescription was as wrong for Roosevelt as it had been for Hoover. Stocks slumped. The President was tempted to say that conditions were “fundamentally sound”—he really believed that they were—but then, remembering his predecessor, he held his tongue. It made no difference. On October 19, “Black Tuesday,” wave after wave of selling orders hit the market, the tape was twenty-five minutes behind the trading, and the backup of new selling orders indicated that bottom had not yet been touched. The following winter brought painful memories of 1929–30.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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