How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty – The Marginalian
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How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty
By Maria Popova
Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.
How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts.
Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being<br>In consonance with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s insight into narrative as the pillar of personal identity, Saunders examines the elemental impulse...