2023/02/16

Awake: The Life of Yogananda - Wikipedia

Awake: The Life of Yogananda - Wikipedia

Awake: The Life of Yogananda

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Awake: The Life of Yogananda
Awake-Yogananda.jpg
Film poster
Directed byPaola di Florio
Lisa Leeman
Produced byCounterPoint Films - Peter Rader
Music byVivek Maddala, Michael Mollura
Release date
  • October 10, 2014
DVD 2/2016
Running time
87 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Awake: The Life of Yogananda is a 2014 documentary about the Indian yogi and guru Paramahansa Yogananda who came to the West in the 1920s to teach yoga and meditation. The film is in English with subtitles in seventeen languages.[1][2][3]

The film, which was commissioned by Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship, includes interviews with disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as with Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, Krishna Das, and others.[4][5] It was filmed over three years with the participation of thirty countries, including on pilgrimages in India, at Harvard Divinity School and its physics labs, the Center for Science and Spirituality at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California.[4]

Awards[edit]

  • Winner of the Audience Award for Best Film at the Illuminate Film Festival[6]
  • Winner Maui Film Festival, Spirit in Cinema Award[4]
  • Winner Conscious Life Award, Conscious Life Expo Film Festival[4]
  • Official Selection Seattle International Film Festival[4]
  • Official Selection Tel Aviv Spirit Film Festival[4]
  • Herat International Women's Film Festival, Afghanistan[4]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Gates, Anita. "When Being a Yogi Had an Exotic Air - 'Awake,' About the Life of Paramahansa Yogananda". New York Times. Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  2. ^ Merry, Stephanie (2014-10-30). "'Awake: The Life of Yogananda' Movie Review". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  3. ^ Vijayan, Naveena (2016-10-18). "Finding Yourself". The Hindu. Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g Hall, Sandra (2015-06-27). "Awake: the life of a Yoga pioneer". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  5. ^ Linden, Sheri. "Awake: The Life of Yogananda': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 11 May 2022.
  6. ^ "2014 Award Winners". Illuminate Film Festival. Retrieved 2017-05-24.

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Awake: The Life of Yogananda (documentary).
  • Awake: The Life of Yogananda at IMDb
  • Awake: The Life of Yogananda, Official Website
  • Awake: The Life of Yogananda, Official Trailer
  • Facebook
  • Film Festival Openings


    hide
    v
    t
    e
    Paramahansa Yogananda
    Bibliography

    Books
    Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)
    God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita (1995)
    The Second Coming of Christ (2004)

    Founded
    Yogoda Satsanga Society of India
    Self-Realization Fellowship
    Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine
    World Brotherhood Colonies

    Lineage
    Mahavatar Babaji
    Lahiri Mahasaya
    Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri
    Direct disciples of Yogananda

    Related
    Bishnu Charan Ghosh (brother)
    Kriya Yoga
    "Dear One" (1976 song)
    Awake: The Life of Yogananda (2014 documentary)
    "Unshaken" (2019 song)

    =
    ==============

    Review: 'Awake' shallow biography of Yogananda
    Kerry Lengel
    The Republic | azcentral.com

    Paramahansa Yogananda was born to be a guru. Raised by devout Hindu parents in the shadow of the Himalayas, he claimed his first memories of seeing beyond the physical world came before he left the womb.


    In 1920, Yogananda moved from India to the United States on a mission to teach the ancient practice Kriya Yoga as well as a new "science of religion" that would replace dogma and conflict with a universal inward journey to enlightenment and self-realization.

    His story is told in a new documentary, "Awake: The Life of Yogananda." Unfortunately, while the swami taught his disciples to explore the depths of their very souls, the film barely scratches the surface of his life and teachings.


    Drawing heavily on Yogananda's 1946 book "Autobiography of a Yogi," the film mixes in handsome photography and effusive interviews from former followers as well as the likes of Deepak Chopra and the late Beatles guitarist George Harrison. It follows Yogananda's journey from India to New York to Los Angeles, but it it fails to paint a full portrait of the man or to offer insights into the historical context and legacy of his ministry.

    For example, "Awake" intriguingly asserts that new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics provided a new metaphorical language to express ancient spiritual ideas, but it doesn't explore the specifics. Nor does it put his lifelong mission in context of the explosion of spiritualism in the West in the early 20th century.


    On the personal side, the film notes that Yogananda and his lifelong friend Dhirinanda had a "falling out" without explaining what led to it.

    The result is a gauzy hagiography that lacks the intimate details that would let us see the man who touched so many lives. Yet "Awake" doesn't even work on the level of an infomercial because it includes only a cursory discussion of yogic practice and philosophy.

    'Awake: The Life of Yogananda'

    2 stars

    Directors: Paola di Florio, Lisa Leeman.

    Cast: Paramahansa Yogananda, Deepak Chopra, George Harrison.

    Rating: PG for thematic elements, some violent images and brief smoking.

    Note: At Harkins Valley Art.






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The 16 Best Books on Buddhism & Meditation | Buddho.org

The 16 Best Books on Buddhism & Meditation | Buddho.org

THE EDITORS

The 16 Best Books on Buddhism & Meditation




You started meditating, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a way to relax a bit more, to let go of stress, or to make suffering that you have experienced more bearable. Maybe the meditation is driven by the feeling that there is more we can access, or it is part of an investigation of reality.

It could just be that at some point you want to complement your meditation with some book-wisdom. Although absolutely not necessary, from time to time a book can be motivating and inspiring and can help you to put experiences into perspective.

So you have decided to read a book on meditation or buddhism (or both). But where to begin?

Choosing the right book at the right time is not that easy. Many different authors have dedicated many words to the Buddha and his teachings. There are books that might be easier to read first and books for people who want to go even deeper, books about Theravāda, about Zen, about Tibetan buddhism, books that contain translations of ancient writings, and books that mainly contain the authors experiences, opinions or interpretations. And with all books, the question always arises whether the author really knows from his own experience what he/she writes about and whether the content can really be trusted (at least to some extent).

You might even wonder if it is not just best to start with the Pali Canon (the ancient writings that contain the direct teachings of the Buddha). The answer to that is yes and no.

Ahba has indicated that when reading the Pali Canon you are at least sure that the content is good, this cannot always be said with certainty for many other works by modern authors. However, Ahba also gives warnings for delving into the sutta’s as well as the Abhidhamma.

The reason fort his caution is that the sutta’s (teachings of the Buddha) are context-dependent. That is, the Buddha was a master at adapting his message to his audience so that his teachings had the best effect. This also means that the wisdoms in the sutta’s are context-dependent. Without knowledge of the context and the accompanying nuances, one can arrive at wrong insights or interpretations.

Ahba indicates that it is like trying to catch a fish in a very cloudy pond. The fish can’t see you, but neither can you see the fish. All you can do is move your hand haphazardly back and forth in the water, hoping to meet a fish. Maybe you’ll catch a fish, but maybe you won’t, and who knows how long it will take.

Of course it’s fine to read the sutta’s, just be careful with thinking you gained all kinds of true insights from them.

When it comes to studying the Abhidhamma (the teachings on ultimate reality), Ahba also makes it clear that wanting to dive too deeply into the Abhidhamma, i.e. reading the seven books of the Abhidhamma itself, makes no sense without a trained Abhidhamma teacher. The chance of confusion and speculation otherwise is too great.

This warning given by Ahba actually also applies to the Abhidhammattha Sangaha, the summary of the Abhidhamma.

It is like trying to catch a fish in a very clear pond. You can see the fish very well, but they can also see you. Every time you think you can catch a fish it is gone before your hand has reached it.

It’s the same with deeper knowledge of the Abhidhamma, just as we think we can grasp it, it slips away. If we think we can actually understand it through solely studying it we just fool ourselves.

Read for inspiration, for guidance during practice, for reassurance or confrontation with one’s own concepts and ideas, perhaps just to form a small hairline crack in your notion of a ‘self’. Don’t read with the intention of gaining wisdom, that only leads to misplaced arrogance.

True wisdom comes only through direct personal experience, through meditation, by practicing every day. Always keep that in mind.

With that note we’re going to venture into some books.

With these 16 recommended books on buddhism and meditation we hope to show a (in our experience) reasonably safe path in the swamp of choices. Of course the list is not a definitive work. It is just an advice from someone who has read a lot.

This is also just a start, if you want more advice (or personal advice) afterwards you can always contact us.

Please note that there is an order to the list. We start with more accessible works and gradually move to works that may offer more depth to the experienced student. If the book exists as a pdf we will place a link.

There are almost only Theravāda Buddhist books on this list because that is where buddho meditation comes from. That said, we consider this list a nice starting point for practitioners of other traditions as well.

When it comes to books from other lineages, for example, we can warmly recommend the Venerable Shunryu Suzuki (not to be confused DT. Suzuki) for Zen and the Venerable Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche for Tibetan Buddhism.

Have fun reading!

1. Happiness – Matthieu Ricard


What is happiness? And how can you develop happiness? The title might give the impression that it’s a somewhat woolly, superficial work, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Matthieu Ricard, a monk in the Tibetan tradition for many years and long-time translator to the Dalai Lama, was a scientist before he became a monk and that clearly shows in this book. He writes in a very clear and accessible way about one of the most important but also complex subjects possible.

It could be that some readers might find that the book uses too many quotes from other scientists and philosophers, but as far as we are concerned this is one of the best books to get a feeling for the essence of Buddhism.

2. A Stil Forest Pool – Ajahn Chah


Ajahn Chah is one of the greatest Buddhist meditation teachers of the last century. We heartily recommend all the books with his teachings.

His way of teaching actually resembles the way Ahba teaches.

With simple, loving, humorous, often surreptitiously confronting examples and lessons, he always makes you think. Just like Ahba, he emphasizes time and again that it is really you who, through your own desire, causes all your problems.

At the same time he knows how to convey the feeling of true freedom and inner peace, based on his own experience.

We have placed this specific collection of his teachings in this guide because it is a very nice introduction to the way of a contemporary master teaches, as a counterpart to other more ‘theoretical’ works in this list.

– This specific book is not available online, but you could for example read Stillness Flowing to get a better picture of Ajahn Chah.

3. The Word of the Buddha – Nyanatiloka Mahathera



Nyanatiloka Mahathera was a predecessor of Bhikkhu Bodhi in Sri Lanka and one of the first Western monks of modern times.

His book The Word of the Buddha is exactly what it claims, a small, skillfully chosen collection of quotations from the Buddha’s own teachings (sutta’s), with some explanation here and there.

Here you can read the Dhamma in the words of the Buddha himself, and we think that after the above mentioned books now might be a good time to start with that.

– Read The Word of the Buddha online

4. The Noble Eightfold Path – Bhikkhu Bodhi



Bhikkhu Bodhi is one of our favorite authors, and actually we can recommend all of his books. He is also one of the few authors that Ahba has approved as being trustworthy. Still, many of his writings are very detailed and more suited for the more advanced reader.

This work is an exception in that it contains relevant content for the beginner and the most advanced practitioner alike. As the title suggests, it describes the Noble Eightfold Path, the path to liberation as taught by the Buddha.

But, as already mentioned, do not think that accessible means superficial, because Bhikkhu Bodhi knows how to weave his profound knowledge and experience into his writing.

– Read The Noble Eightfold Path online

5. Dependent Origination I t/m III – Ron Wijewantha



This book, or rather this series of three books, is one of the lesser-known gems of the BPS (Buddhist Publishing Society). In this series, Ron Wijewantha writes about Paṭiccasamuppāda, dependend arising, one of the cornerstones of Buddha’s teaching.

Although it appears to be a theoretical book, this is not the case. The book is written from the practitioner’s point of view and emphasizes useful knowledge for daily practice.

The author knows how to mold this very complicated subject into a useful framework for everyday life.


6. Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization – Bhikkhu Analayo



We could undoubtedly have included this sharp analysis of Satipaṭṭhāna, the foundation of mindfulness, later in this list. Indeed, it is a profound and detailed exposition of a single teaching, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta.

However, because the practice of sati (conscious attention or mindfulness) is of great importance for the development of concentration and understanding, and because there are unfortunately many erroneous views on this subject among practitioners, we have chosen to advise this book in this place, in the hope that the reader will be able to develop a clear theoretical understanding of mindfulness early on the path and apply it in practice.

– Read Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization online

7. Meditation – Ajahn Chah



This gem of collected teachings of Ajahn Chah is again a beautiful complement to the previous theoretical works.

It is listed here because it is especially nice to read when you have already meditated a bit more and maybe even participated in a retreat. In that case, the content will connect even more to your experience.

As far as we are concerned, this is a book with insights from which you can benefit in many meditations and retreats afterwards.

Highly recommended!

– Read Meditation oniline

8. Mind Overcoming its Cankers – Acharya Buddhrakkhita



This book is another possibly slightly lesser-known jewel of the BPS. Acharya Buddharakkhita highlights the unwholesome states of mind in which we almost continuously find ourselves from different angles and provides concrete pointers to deal with them.

It is a book to read and reread again and again.

– Read Mind Overcoming its Cankers online

9. In the Buddha’s Words – Bhikkhu Bodhi



Now we have arrived at the second work by Bhikkhu Bodhi. He is known for his very good translations from Pali, the language in which the original texts have been preserved. This is a collection of sutta’s arranged in ten thematic chapters.

In this work Bhikkhu Bodhi does not just give quotes, but always includes the entire sutta with explanations.

The work gives a nice overview of the scope of the sutta’s and thus offers even more insight into how the words of the Buddha have been passed down through the centuries.

10. The Life of the Buddha – Bhikkhu Nanamoli



This work is a ‘Biography’ about the Buddha written by Bhikkhu Nanamoli. Bhikkhu Nanamoli only uses original texts from the Pali Canon to describe the life of the Buddha.

The book does not describe the usual legend, but only that which is actually preserved in the sutta’s and the Vinaya (the collection of monk rules and stories about these rules).

With this work the reader can also become acquainted with the great disciples of the Buddha and the time and environment in which he lived. As far as we are concerned the best ‘biography’.

– Read The Life of the Buddha online


11. Just Seeing – Cynthia Thatcher



This book is an introduction to the thoery, or rather the way of thinking, of the Abhidhamma, the teaching about the ultimate reality. Cynthia Thatcher, a meditation teacher herself and pupil of the renowned Mahasi Sayadaw, uses this book to explain the way the Abhidhamma looks at the process of consciousness.

It is a nice stepping stone for those who want to learn more about the Abhidhamma later on in this list because a feeling of how the process works breathes more life into the dry theoretical framework of the Abhidhamma.

– Read Just Seeing online


12. Abhidhamma in Daily Life – Nina van Gorkum



This is a real Abhidhamma textbook, complete with questions at the end of each chapter to test whether you understood the content.

Yet it is not an exasperatingly dry reading. Nina van Gorkum knows how to keep the content accessible and still deep enough.

The art of reading this book, as with most theoretical works, is to test and validate the information you read with your daily experiences, both during meditation and in regular life.

– Read Abhidhamma in Daily Life online

13. Abhidhamma studies – Nyanaponika Mahathera



Nyanaponika Mahathera is the direct predecessor of Bhikkhu Bodhi and is equal to the latter when it comes to understanding the deep layers of the Pali Canon.

This is a truly phenomenal work in which the first wholesome citta (moment of consciousness) from the first book of the Abhidhamma is explained.

For those who already have some knowledge and experiencewith Pali texts, it can be humbling to see how much more wisdom can be extracted from the Pali Canon than initially seems possible. We advise you to read the book if you already have some knowledge about Buddhism, especially the Abhidhamma, so that you can enjoy it to the fullest.

For those who can’t wait and want to read it sooner, please do so and then just read it again a few years later! It will be worth your while. The introduction alone is worth reading repeatedly.

– Read Abhidhamma Studies online

14. The Requisites of Enlightenment – Ledi Sayadaw



Ledi Sayadaw is one of the greatest Theravāda monks of the last century, praised for both his enormous knowledge and insight. He was one of the first Burmese monks who was convinced that attaining enlightenment was still possible today and stands at the foot of modern vipassanā meditation method for both lay practitioners and monks.

but be warned, this work is not suitable for the fainthearted. This work requires courage. Not so much because of the enormous information density that can certainly be found in this relatively short work, but mainly because of the rock-solid style of Ledi Sayadaw from which an enormous energy emanates and no escape is possible.

Even more than the content, it is this energy that gives the work a place in this list. There really is no escape from it, the time for practice is now, the time to liberate is now, no excuses. Period.

– Read The Requisites of Enlightenment online

15. A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma – Bhikkhu Bodhi



We have arrived at the first Buddhist standard work in this list, a translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi with short explanations of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Achariya Anuruddha.

It is a summary of the seven books of the Abhidhamma written around the 11th to 12th century. Today this is the standard text when beginning to study the Abhidhamma.

This is a translation approved by Ahba and, according to him, embodies just the right amount of knowledge to be useful for meditation without being overly overwelming.

– Read A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma online


16. Visuddhimagga: The Path of Purification – transl. Bhikkhu Nanamoli



The second standard work in this list and also the last book we will recommend is Bhikkhu Nanamoli’s translation of Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga.

The Visuddhimagga is an epic summary of the entire Buddhist teaching in three chapters, namely morality, concentration and wisdom. Ahba has sometimes said that reading the Visuddhimagga is very, very good.

This is because the essence of the Pali Canon is explained in (sometimes agonizing) detail. It is a largely dry work, so we do not advise to read this book before going to sleep, unless you have trouble falling asleep.

But if you put in the effort, in the end it will be worth your while.

– Read Visuddhimagga: The Path of Purification online


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You yourselves must strive, the Buddhas only point the wayBUDDHA, DHP 276
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Book Review: ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,’ by George Saunders - The New York Times


Book Review: ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,’ by George Saunders - The New York Times

George Saunders Conducts a Cheery Class on Fiction’s Possibilities


By Parul Sehgal
Published Jan. 12, 2021Updated Jan. 19, 2021
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For all their fondness for pronouncing in public (a dangerous vocation), critics seldom admit to worrying about being wrong — in print, that is. The poetry critic Randall Jarrell was a rare exception. He was tormented by the example of “Moby-Dick.” Imagine being one of the reviewers who overlooked it, or, horrors, panned it. “What’s our own ‘Moby-Dick’?” he wrote. “What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked? What do we say then?”


The anxiety about a classic can persist through ages. How easy it is to be blind to “Moby-Dick” even today. The novel is barnacled with praise, glory; how can we see it clearly, how do we dodge the twin temptations of dull reverence and crabby contrarianism?

That obscuring fog gathers around the contemporary masters, too. Take George Saunders. In recent years, the writer has become regarded as a secular saint of American literature, with his Buddhist-inflected beliefs in fiction’s moral, purifying mission. He made his name with his antic short stories — fables, really — thronged with suicides, amputations, broken men: “the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business.” In 2017, he published his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” set during the Civil War and narrated by a chorus of restless ghosts. They’re stranded in the bardo — Tibetan purgatory — and loafing around a graveyard when they’re interrupted by Abraham Lincoln. He has broken into the tomb of his 11-year-old son, frantic to hold him once more.

The desperate, botched rescue operation is a common feature in Saunders’s work, and his fiction itself has the feeling of a rescue operation — on us, the reader. He’s moved by an evangelical ardor where fiction is concerned, intent on how it can help us “become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional,” as he put it in a viral commencement speech. These particular hopes have never been more precisely, joyfully or worryingly articulated than in his new book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” an analysis of seven classic Russian short stories.


If there are few more treacherous places to turn up than as a character in a George Saunders story — he might have you slapping yourself in the face with your own amputated hand, as he condemns one miserable case — there might be no cushier place than to be a student in his classroom.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of January. See the full list. ]

The new book emerges from his longtime course on the 19th-century Russian short story — on Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol. He dedicates it to his students, “some of the best young writers in America,” he describes them. “They arrive already wonderful.”

“I’m not a critic or a literary historian or an expert on Russian literature or any of that. The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish,” Saunders writes. “The aim of this book is mainly diagnostic: If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that?”


Image
George Saunders, whose new book is “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.”Credit...Zach Krahmer


We read Chekhov’s “In the Cart” with him, line by line. He follows each page with his notes, marveling at every effect, tweezing out each piece of punctuation for our inspection, in some cases exploring different translations of the same story. He writes in praise of “the physics of the form”: efficiency, velocity, specificity and, above all, escalation. “That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation,” he explains. “A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.”


I’m making the book sound revoltingly technical. It isn’t. Saunders lives in the synapses — he looks at all the minute and meaningful decisions that produce a sentence, a paragraph, a convincing character. He offers one of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of the writer that I’ve ever read — that state of heightened alertness, lightning-quick decisions.

The book might provoke comparisons to Nabokov’s classic lectures on Russian literature, first delivered at Cornell. But where Nabokov is all high-plumed prose and remove, presiding at his lectern, Saunders is at your elbow, ladling praise — “my good-hearted trooper,” he addresses us.

I don’t think I’ve ever been called a trooper before. I’m not sure I like it.

Here’s where I must admit that I can find myself in an occasional bardo of sorts about Saunders, torn between admiration and wariness. The breadth of his belief in fiction is inspiring — and suspiciously flattering to the reader. “There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world,” he writes. “A web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people.”

Now, I’m as self-interested a champion of fiction as anyone, but such overstatement does the form no favors — at best it feels naïve, at worst, deeply solipsistic. Is the invasion of Iraq best understood as a “literary failure,” as Saunders has written? Can racism be described as an “antiliterary impulse”?

I suspect Saunders is too spiritually advanced to read his reviews. If he did, however, I imagine he might be beaming. “Good little trooper,” he might say.

There’s no charge I’ve made here that Saunders hasn’t made himself. “I’m kind of a knee-jerk Pollyanna-ish person,” he has said. “I like to find hope, sometimes irritatingly: ‘Oh, there’s a nail in my head. It’s great, I’ll hang a coat on it, that’ll be good.’”

And it’s this very sort of ambiguity in thinking that he reifies, and that fiction, he tells us, makes possible.

In the section on Chekhov’s “The Darling,” Saunders writes that the story seems to ask us to sit in judgment of the character, to ask, “Is this trait of hers good or bad?” Chekhov, he tells us, answers: “Yes.”



Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
By George Saunders
410 pages. Random House. $28.
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Book Review: ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,’ by George Saunders - The New York Times

Book Review: ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,’ by George Saunders - The New York Times
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George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year - The New York Times

George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year - The New York Times

George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year

George SaundersCredit...Damon Winter/The New York Times


By Joel Lovell
Jan. 3, 2013
See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com.


In a little sushi restaurant in Syracuse, George Saunders conceded that, sure, one reality was that he and I were a couple guys talking fiction and eating avocado salad and listening to Alanis Morissette coming from the speaker above our heads. Another was that we were walking corpses. We’d been on the subject of death for a while. A friend I loved very much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed — and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much. I was having some trouble articulating it, but Saunders was right there, leaning in and encouraging. He has a bushy blond mustache and goatee going gray, and sometimes, when he’s listening intently, he can look a little stern, as if he just stepped out of a tent at Antietam. But then he starts talking and the eyebrows go up and it’s all Chicago vowels and twinkly Doug Henning eyes, and if you didn’t know that he was more or less universally regarded as a genius, you might peg him as the superfriendly host of a woodworking show on daytime public access.

“It would be so interesting if we could stay like that,” Saunders said, meaning: if we could conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes with proximity to death. He described a flight from Chicago to Syracuse that he was on a little over 10 years ago. “We were flying along, and I’ve got a guilty pleasure — I’m reading Vanity Fair — and I’m on my way home. And suddenly there’s this crazy sound, like a minivan hit the side of the plane. And I thought, Uh, oh, I’m not even gonna look up. If I don’t look up from the magazine, it’s not happening. And then it happened again.”

Everyone starts screaming, the plane is making terrible metal-in-distress sounds. Black smoke — “black like in a Batman movie” — starts streaming out of the fresh-air nozzles overhead. They turn back toward O’Hare, “and there’s that grid of Chicago, and I’m seeing it coming up really fast.” The lights flicker, and the pilot comes on and tells everyone, with panic in his voice, to stay buckled. “And there’s this little 14-year-old boy next to me. He turns to me and says, ‘Sir, is this supposed to be happening?’

“And I remember thinking, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just that one syllable, over and over. And also thinking, You could actually piss yourself. And the strongest thing was the sense of that seat right there.” He pointed toward the imaginary seat back in front of him. “I thought, Oh, yeah, this body. I’ve had it all this time, and that’s what’s going to do it. That right there.” He had assumed that if he was ever faced with death, he would “handle it with aplomb,” he would be present in the moment, he would make peace in the time he had left. “But I couldn’t even remember my own name,” he said. “I was so completely not present. I was just the word no.”


Eventually he managed to turn to the kid next to him and say that it was going to be O.K., “though I didn’t think so. And there was a woman across the aisle. And finally — it was like coming out of a deep freeze — I could just reach over, and I took her hand.” That’s how they remained for the next several minutes, waiting to die.

In the end, they didn’t crash into the Chicago streets or plunge into the freezing lake but made it safely to the runway, where all the emergency-response equipment was in place but not needed. It turned out, in a detail that could have been lifted from a George Saunders story, they all nearly died because the plane had flown into a flock of geese.

“For three or four days after that,” he said, “it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”

You could call this desire — to really have that awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace — the George Saunders Experiment. It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

This week, Saunders’s fourth book of stories, “Tenth of December,” will be published by Random House. He is 54 years old and published his first book, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” in 1996, when he was 37. Since then there have been two other collections, “Pastoralia” and “In Persuasion Nation”; a novella, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil”; a children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip”; and a collection of reported nonfiction, essays and short humor pieces called “The Braindead Megaphone.”

When “CivilWarLand” first came out, there was a lot of talk about Saunders as a new, savage, satirical voice bursting onto the scene, though he’d been publishing the stories one at a time over eight years, writing them while making a living at a day job preparing technical reports for a company called the Radian Corporation, in Rochester. His stories are set in what might be described as a just slightly futuristic America or, maybe better, present-day America, where, because of the exigencies of capitalism, things have gotten a little weird. These initial stories often take place in theme parks gone to seed or soul-withering exurban office strips, but the stories themselves are overflowing with vitality; they are sometimes very dark but they are also very, very funny. The characters speak in a strange new language — a kind of heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular that is built around self-improvement clichés (“It made me livid and twice that night I had to step into a closet and perform my Hatred Abatement Breathing”) — and this lends them the feeling of allegory, though they are something else too, that’s harder to place. The book was published right around the same time as David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and it felt back then as if those two writers (and a handful of others) were busy establishing the new terms for contemporary American fiction.

I remember Wallace coming into the offices of Harper’s Magazine, where I worked at the time, just before or after the book party for “Infinite Jest” (which has maybe gotten more attention than any book party in memory, with the descriptions of Wallace hiding in an upstairs room, away from the hundreds of people there to celebrate or be close to his genius). It’s hard to know now if Wallace actually looked spooked or if I’m projecting that look back onto him, but I do clearly recall him standing in the hall in his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer in America.

That kind of thing has been said a lot about Saunders since then. For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero. His stories now appear regularly in The New Yorker, he has been anthologized all over the place, and he has won a bunch of awards, among them a “genius grant” in 2006 from the MacArthur Foundation, which described him as a “highly imaginative author [who] continues to influence a generation of young writers and brings to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own.” As Joshua Ferris recently wrote in an introduction for the reissue last fall, in e-book form, of “CivilWarLand”: “Part of the reason it’s so hard to talk about him is the shared acknowledgment among writers that Saunders is somehow a little more than just a writer. . . . [He] writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being.”

It is true that if there exists a “writer’s writer,” Saunders is the guy. “There is really no one like him,” Lorrie Moore wrote. “He is an original — but everyone knows that.” Tobias Wolff, who taught Saunders when he was in the graduate writing program at Syracuse in the mid-’80s, said, “He’s been one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years,” and then added what may be the most elegant compliment I’ve ever heard paid to another person: “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” And Mary Karr, who has been a colleague of Saunders’s at Syracuse since he joined the faculty in the mid-’90s (and who also, incidentally, is a practicing Catholic with a wonderful singing voice and a spectacularly inventive foul mouth), told me, “I think he’s the best short-story writer in English alive.”

Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.

Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”

And “Tenth of December” is more moving and emotionally accessible than anything that has come before. “I want to be more expansive,” Saunders said. “If there are 10 readers out there, let’s assume I’m never going to reach two of them. They’ll never be interested. And let’s say I’ve already got three of them, maybe four. If there’s something in my work that’s making numbers five, six and seven turn off to it, I’d like to figure out what that is. I can’t change who I am and what I do, but maybe there’s a way to reach those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might not have appealed to. I’d like to make a basket big enough that it included them.”


There are stories in this new book that are recognizably Saundersian: one that’s largely told in fake chivalric speech, for example, and another, the most purely satirical in the book, in the form of a memorandum from “Todd Birnie, Divisional Director” RE: “March Performance Stats.” (What Todd is the divisional director of is never explicitly stated, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the euphemisms his memo is constructed of mask something horribly dark.) But several of the new stories stake out emotional territory Saunders has never quite ventured into before, at least not this deeply. The title story, for instance, is about the intersecting, on a winter day, of the lives of a boy whose physical description says everything about his social status — “a pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms” — and a man dying of cancer, who has decided to kill himself by going to the park and taking off his clothes and freezing to death, thus sparing his family the suffering and raging and degradation that’s sure to come.

“If death is in the room, it’s pretty interesting,” Saunders said, meaning that any story circling around the idea of death is going to be charged. “But I would also say that I’m interested in getting myself to believe that it’s going to happen to me. I’m interested in it, because if you’re not, you’re nuts. It’s really de facto what we’re here to find out about. I hate the thought of messing around and then being like, ‘Oh, I’ve got pancreatic cancer.’ It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to even think of. But to me, it’s what you should be thinking about all the time. As a fiction writer, the trick is how to be thinking about it in a way that makes it substantial. You want it to matter when you do induce it.”

I asked him about the occasional dramatization in his stories of the moments after death, the way characters’ lives are sometimes suddenly reframed and redeemed. “In terms of dramatic structure, I don’t really buy the humanist verities anymore,” he said. “I mean, I buy them, they’re a subset of what’s true. But they’re not sufficient. They wouldn’t do much for me on my deathbed. Look at it another way. We’re here. We’re nice guys. We’re doing O.K. But we know that in X number of years, we won’t be here, and between now and then something unpleasant is gonna happen, or at least potentially unpleasant and scary. And when we turn to try and understand that, I don’t really think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. The idea of saying, ‘Well, we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need to see it,’ seems really weird to me.”

Saunders has taught in the graduate writing program at Syracuse for 16 years. I spent a couple of days sitting in on his classes, a small five-student workshop and a “forms” class, which on the day I was there was focused on the nature of revision; specifically, on a handful of Raymond Carver stories and the fraught relationship between Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish. The students seemed really sharp, and Saunders is clearly committed to them. “With this caliber of student, you have to be really honest,” he told me. “It keeps you looking at your own process, so you don’t import any nonsense.” In an interview several years ago with Ben Marcus for The Believer, Saunders defended the time spent in an M.F.A. program by saying, “The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.” But it’s a mistake, he added, to think of writing programs in terms that are “too narrowly careerist. . . . Even for those thousands of young people who don’t get something out there, the process is still a noble one — the process of trying to say something, of working through craft issues and the worldview issues and the ego issues — all of this is character-building, and, God forbid, everything we do should have concrete career results. I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.”

After finishing up with his student conferences, Saunders gave me a quick literary tour of Syracuse — Toni Morrison’s old neighborhood; Tobias Wolff’s house (where Saunders and his wife, Paula, and their daughters lived after Wolff left Syracuse to teach at Stanford); the little place where a sober Raymond Carver made his life with the poet Tess Gallagher. We drove to the end of a block and Saunders pointed out a run-down house with a basement apartment that had a couple of small, dark windows and a broken concrete patio. It was a grim-looking spot. “That’s where Dave wrote ‘Infinite Jest,’ ” he said. “There should be a plaque there.”
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He and Paula now live just outside of Oneonta, N.Y., two hours southeast of Syracuse. Their house sits on 15 acres, up a hill at the end of a rocky drive. It’s a beautiful place. There’s a koi pond and, because they devote a significant part of their lives to the practice of Nyingma Buddhism, there are statues of the Buddha here and there and colored prayer flags strung in the woods.


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George Saunders in Golden, Colo., in 1981.Credit...John Hopkins




Saunders writes in a shed across the driveway from his house, where we sat for a couple hours one morning while his two yellow labs nosed around outside the door. There’s the desk and a sofa and a table stacked with books that he has been researching for his next project. On the shelves there are pictures of him and Paula and the girls and a great one from his jazz-fusion days of him playing a Fender Telecaster, with white-blond Johnny Winter hair to his shoulders. “In our lives, we’re many people,” he said as he lifted the photo off the shelf.


We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, “like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.” He described making trips to New York in the early days and having “three or four really intense afternoons and evenings” with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what “the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.” Saunders added: “The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.”

“Those guys came from a much better trained place,” he said. “They had a very strong and passionate involvement with postmodernism when it was still hot off the griddle.” Whereas, for him the question wasn’t how to move beyond the postmodern fathers who shaped current American literary sensibility; it was how “to mimic the emotional conditions of my actual working life” — how to, as he later put it, arrive at a voice that was informed by “the mild ass-kickings” he suffered or witnessed in his adult life “that had the effect of politicizing and tenderizing me.”

His dad owned a pizza restaurant in Amarillo, Tex., after having run a couple of places in Chicago called Chicken Unlimited. While Saunders was in college, studying geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, the restaurant burned down. Because of a quirk in the insurance coverage, his family lost the restaurant. Soon afterward the family moved from Amarillo to New Mexico, where his father set up a support facility engaged with CO2-recovery stations for oil rigs. “I remember it being 20 below outside, and the pipes in our mobile home froze,” Saunders said, “and my dad was out there in just a Windbreaker with a blow torch, trying to unfreeze them.”

After he graduated from the School of Mines, Saunders went to work for an oil-exploration company in the jungles of Sumatra. “I was trained in seismic prospecting,” he said. “We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.” They worked four weeks on and two weeks off and in the down time would be shuttled in helicopters to the nearest city, 40 minutes away, and then from there fly to Singapore.

“I’d been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that,” he said. “And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and genuinely suffering and hadn’t gotten there by whining.” While on a break in Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by an excavation site and “saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And then I realized the shadows were old women, working the night shift. Oh, I thought, Ayn Rand doesn’t quite account for this.”

Whenever he was on leave, he would stock up on weeks worth of books to read. “This was serious business,” he wrote in an essay called “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,” which appears in “The Braindead Megaphone.” “If the books ran out before the four weeks did, I would be reduced to reading the same 1979 Playboy over and over, and/or watching hours of wayang theater on the bunkhouse television.”


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On one of those trips, Saunders picked up “Slaughterhouse-Five,” though at that point in his life he had “read virtually nothing” and didn’t really know what to make of it, as it didn’t conform to his sense at the time that “great writing was hard reading.”

Eventually he got sick from swimming in a river infested with monkey feces and came home. He spent the next two years, as he put it, “trying to be ecstatic like Kerouac and ‘understand America.’ ” There was a woman in Chicago he had been crazy about but always felt was out of his reach, but now, having traveled in Asia and returned and being on the verge of living the life of the writer, “whatever my immature and arrogant idea of that was, I went to her and said, ‘Stick with me.’ ” They moved to L.A., “me and this girl I was supposed to be showing the world to, and I couldn’t find work,” Saunders said. “We were at the bottom.” So they fled Los Angeles and went back to Chicago, where Saunders lived in his aunt’s basement and got a job working as a roofer. He wrote a remarkable essay about that time and the end of that relationship, “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” years ago for The New Yorker. “Finally, in terms of money, I got it,” he wrote. “Money forestalled disgrace.”

In 1985, Saunders was accepted into the graduate writing program at Syracuse based on a story of his called “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room.” “It was wild, it was funny,” he said. “But I repented of it. It was modern, and I wanted to be in 1932. I wanted to be Hemingway.” In his author’s note for the reissue of “CivilWarLand,” he writes: “If I got tired of [Hemingway], I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel lived in Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which, to me, sounded like Carver.”

He met Paula, who was also in the writing program, shortly after he arrived in Syracuse. They were engaged after three weeks and Paula became pregnant seven months later, on their honeymoon. “We went from being young Carver-acolyte beatniks to Ozzie and Harriet in what felt like a week,” he said. “Well, Ozzie and Harriet if they were broke.” In 1989, when their daughter Caitlin was 1, they moved to Rochester so Saunders could work as a technical writer for the Radian Corporation. Their second daughter, Alena, was born a year later. With both daughters, Paula went into labor at five months and had to go on complete bed rest. At one point their car broke down, and Saunders biked back and forth to work along the Erie Canal in a cold-weather moon suit cobbled together from “a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that I seem to remember had little spacemen on them.”

If it’s possible to locate the exact moment when George Saunders became George Saunders, it’s right around here. “I was so terrified by that L.A. experience,” he said, “I couldn’t imagine getting to that place with Paula and the girls. So I took the Radian job, and it was a very liberating thing. If I can provide for them, then in my writing time I can be as wild as I want. Having felt that abyss, I basically said, ‘O.K., capitalism, I have seen your gaping maw, and I want no trouble with you.’ ”

For the last couple of years he’d been working on what he described as a “disastrous novel” — “La Boda de Eduardo” — but he realized, with the force of epiphany, that the attempts to graft his life experience onto a Hemingway-Carver framework were foolish. There was an experience he was living that hadn’t adequately been represented in fiction yet. Not a Kafkaesque existential deadness, but something else, something that captured “not the endless cycle of meaningless activity but the endless cycle of meaningful activity.”

“I saw the peculiar way America creeps up on you if you don’t have anything,” he told me. “It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored. Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.”


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The lesson he learned was the thing he sensed all those years ago in Sumatra, reading but not fully grasping Vonnegut. “I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters,” Saunders wrote in an essay on Vonnegut. “He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’ — he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. . . . In fact, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it.”

There’s a story in the new book called “The Semplica Girl Diaries” that took him more than a dozen years to write. It’s narrated in a series of journal entries by a man who has just turned 40 and is struggling to erect what paltry defenses he can against the shame of not providing more for his family. (From one entry, which struck me, caught as I tend to be in a web of financial neuroses and class anxiety, as chest-achingly true: “Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad. . . . Have to do better! Be kinder. Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory of you is testy stressed guy in bad car.”) The Semplica Girls of the title are women from various third-world countries (Moldova, Somalia, Laos, etc.) who have applied to come to America and get paid to decorate the lawns of the wealthy, by being strung aloft, in flowing white gowns, on a microline that runs through their brains. Through them — through the acquisition of them — the narrator hopes to elevate his family’s status and bring his kids joy.

It’s one of a handful of Saunders’s stories that originated in a dream. “I went to a window that didn’t exist in our house, and I looked into the yard, and I saw a row of what I understood in the dream logic to be third-world women who had a wire through their heads,” he said. “Instead of horror, my reaction was like, ‘Yeah, we did it.’ Just like if you’d gotten a new car or a kid into school or something, that feeling of, I’ve come such a long way, I’m able to give these things to my family. And there was a sense that there was an alleviated shame.”

“Semplica Girls” is a perfect illustration of the point where Saunders the technically experimental wizard and Saunders the guy whose heart exists outside of his body converge. It’s science fiction of the highest order. The unreality has been rendered on the page in completely convincing and compelling detail, but it’s also a story about domestic yearning, and a story about oppression and injustice and the complicated ripple effects of global capitalism. In an interview on The New Yorker’s Web site with Deborah Treisman, his editor there, Saunders explained the challenge of the story this way: “Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it — and so things have to be ramped up. . . . These sorts of thematic challenges are, for me, anyway, only answerable via the line-by-line progress through the story. Trying to figure out what happens next, and in what language. So, in this case, I just started out by trying to get the guy to that window, in his underwear, having that same feeling.”

In another story “Escape From Spiderhead,” the narrator is being held in a prison-research facility where he and the other inmates are being used as human guinea pigs to test the effects of new drugs. The pharmaceutical names are pure Saunders: Verbaluce, for eloquence of thought and speech; Vivistif, for what you would imagine; and Darkenfloxx. “Imagine the worst you have ever felt, times 10. That does not even come close to how bad you feel on Darkenfloxx.”

The story is concerned with the question of suicide and the struggle to get free of your own mind. I mentioned to Saunders that it reminded me of David Foster Wallace, and he said that he wasn’t consciously writing about Wallace, but he was thinking about him a lot during the writing of that story and others in the new book. “ ‘Tenth of December’ has the same overtones,” he said. “But if you notice it” — meaning, if you find yourself making a comment about suicide — “you run away from it and just focus on inhabiting the story and the character as intensely as you can.

“I admired him so much,” he said about Wallace. “His on-the-spot capabilities were just incredible. And I thought, Yeah, we’re a lot alike. We’re similar, nervous guys. And then when he died, I thought [of myself], Wait a minute, you’re not like that. You don’t have chronic, killing depression. I’m sad sometimes, but I’m not depressed. And I also have a mawkish, natural enthusiasm for things. I like being alive in a way that’s a little bit cheerleaderish, and I always felt that around Dave. When he died, I saw how unnegotiable it was, that kind of depression. And it led to my being a little more honest about one’s natural disposition. If you have a negative tendency and you deny it, then you’ve doubled it. If you have a negative tendency and you look at it” — which is, in part, what the process of writing allows — “then the possibility exists that you can convert it.”


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The last time we met, Saunders waited in the cold with me until the bus for New York came along. We were talking about the idea of abiding, of the way that you can help people flourish just by withholding judgment, if you open yourself up to their possibilities, as Saunders put it, just as you would open yourself up to a story’s possibilities. We said goodbye, and I got on the bus. It was dark now, and you couldn’t really see the other passengers. I had “The Braindead Megaphone” with me, and I turned on my little light and reread a story he did several years ago for GQ, about traveling to Dubai. “In all things,” he wrote, “we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. . . . The universal human laws — need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of fear/hunger/pain — are constant, predictable. . . . What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers.”

At the risk of hyperbole at the end of a story that began in a state of fairly high exaltation, I would say that this is precisely the effect that Saunders’s fiction has on you. It “softens the borders,” as he put it in one of our conversations. “Between you and me, between me and me, between the reader and the writer.” It makes you wiser, better, more disciplined in your openness to the experience of other people. The guy talking on the bus about how his girlfriend doesn’t appreciate his music and why couldn’t she just cut him that much slack, seeing how he just did all that time? The couple in the basement of the Port Authority, the wife helping her husband get into his Grover costume before he stepped out onto 42nd Street. The woman, one recent morning, who screamed at panhandlers on the subway that it was the day after Christmas and why couldn’t they just give us all some peace? “Peace on Earth,” she hollered. “Is that so much to ask for? Get off the train.” She went on for a while, and some other passengers started to turn on her. “I’m right!” she yelled. “I’m right.” And then her face took on the saddest expression.

It’s hard to maintain, the softness. It’s an effort. That Dubai story ends with these lines, wisdom imparted from Saunders to himself: “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”


Joel Lovell is a deputy editor of the magazine.

Editor: Adam Sternbergh
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 2013, Page 23 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts'. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe






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