A question from our office hours. One that I’m hit with on the regular — probably because I’m always talking up reading and probably because, given the neoliberal assault on reading, all of us are desperate for ways to encourage reading in ourselves and our communities.
"If you're a writer and you're writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are.
Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries, so — to make your story go. So I look at it from that point of view and also from the point of view that cynicism is like — cynicism in a story is toxic. You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to them push past their boundaries"
Like I’ve been saying, stories contain games as well, and these Games Within also ask us to show our quality: At the level of sympathy. At the level of compassion. At the level of character. The very best of these Games Within will invite us to deepen our humanity — to grow our souls.
This reminds me of something I heard James McBride say about how you can't really have deep cynicism in literature.. because art has to expand the possibilities of our empathy for it to be transcendent.. for cynicism is the distancing, dismissive, default stance, but we want and need more to evolve beyond that; and that instinct towards growth towards heaven is hard-wired and the most transcendent art taps into that expansive potential.
Here's James McBride:
"If you're a writer and you're writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are.
Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries, so — to make your story go. So I look at it from that point of view and also from the point of view that cynicism is like — cynicism in a story is toxic. You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to them push past their boundaries"
Like I’ve been saying, stories contain games as well, and these Games Within also ask us to show our quality: At the level of sympathy. At the level of compassion. At the level of character. The very best of these Games Within will invite us to deepen our humanity — to grow our souls.
This reminds me of something I heard James McBride say about how you can't really have deep cynicism in literature.. because art has to expand the possibilities of our empathy for it to be transcendent.. for cynicism is the distancing, dismissive, default stance, but we want and need more to evolve beyond that; and that instinct towards growth towards heaven is hard-wired and the most transcendent art taps into that expansive potential.
Beautiful essay by the way
This really resonates. I’ve been grappling with this very issue in some of the comments to my posts. Thank you.