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When we reached the pier, Steve was waiting there along with a group of fishermen and a handful of locals and tourists. Steve said that one of the fishermen on an offshore boat thought he had sighted the mother whale near one of the oil rigs. The oil rig was about a mile and a half offshore and it was almost in a direct line with the pier. I had swum out there only once before, during an open-water race, but at that time, I had had a paddler with me on a long paddleboard. He had helped me stay on course, and he had watched for danger. But the baby whale had already turned and started to head offshore. He looked over at me as if to say, Please come swim with me. I knew it made no sense to follow him. I could think of many reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t, but I didn’t want him to go off alone. Sometimes things just don’t make sense, sometimes there’s no reason to explain how or why I wanted to do them; I only knew that I had to, I had to try. Without trying I would never know what could happen. It was like reading a great mystery and never knowing how it finished, always wondering who did it. Sometimes the things that make the least sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me. Maybe I knew this, too, because I didn’t always fit in. I was shy and large, and I believed that I had to work hard and study hard to do well. I had different friends—from computer wizards to the guys on the water polo team and the girls on the swim team to friends in drama and music—but I didn’t fit into any one group. I had things I knew I wanted to do and didn’t play the teenage boy and girl games. I was more interested in studying people who had been leaders, made discoveries, or explored, men and women who were always going against established thought. It was always difficult to swim against the tide, doing something new or different, because the ideas that could result might cause something to change. Many people are happy with things as they are. They are comfortable with what they already know. But if I didn’t move outside my comfort level, how would I ever experience anything new, how would I ever learn, or see or explore? I believe that each of us has a purpose for being here, that we have certain gifts and certain challenges we need to learn from and fulfill for our lives to have meaning and richness. “I’m going to swim with him,” I shouted to Steve.
“To not pay too much attention to what’s worked before,” Rosanne Cash insisted, “but to keep pushing and digging and exploring and following instincts about what’s next. That’s the sole motivation of an artist. I can’t even imagine that Bruce would have gone, ‘Oh, I’ve got to follow up “Hungry Heart.” That’s a good formula, let me keep doing that.’ That’s not what a real artist does. In fact, that’s killed a lot of people. Eventually, it’s death to any authentic impulse to create art. And I don’t think Springsteen would’ve ever fallen prey to that. So, no, in that sense Nebraska didn’t surprise me.”
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
Perhaps the most damning comment Bolton offers, in the end, isn’t about foreign policy but Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Trump’s reflex effort to talk his way out of anything . . . even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice.” John F. Kelly, Trump’s harassed chief of staff, mutters to Bolton at one point, “Has there ever been a presidency like this?” To which Bolton replies tartly: “I assured him there had not.”
Book Review of the Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton - The Washington Post
washingtonpost.com
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