If it’s true — and I think it is — that life always includes a measure of pain, then the past week has shown me two very different responses to that harsh truth.
I’m involved in overlapping projects — finishing a novel and starting on a private memoir for a client. While fact-checking the last draft of the novel, I exchanged e-mails with a representative of a Native American tribe that will remain nameless. The novel’s road trip moves through Indian land, and the narrator uses that opportunity to talk about the wholesale slaughter that took place there in the name of “expansion” or “settlement.” Since it’s a story, in part, about different approaches to spirituality, I wanted to get a handle on the spiritual ideas of two particular tribes.
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Excellent article!
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This is superbly written and expresses values that all of us should try to bring into our hearts. Something that is not addressed but I would love to hear your thoughts on is the place and role of humor. In an email dialogue with an old friend living in Australia, the name Gene Shepard came up andI find him now reappearing as an example of a "humorist" (if that was what he was) who found reason to smile and laugh at our frailties. For most of his life, Mark Twain was another man who found much to laugh about while describing the way we are and the way we live. He became darker, of course, but who are the truly funny people around today. The only one I watch or listen to religiously is Jon Steward, not exactly a Gene Shepard. The one I truly detest is Louis CK for his despicable attack on Sarah Palin. His humor is like Hungry Mungry, ultimately self-devouring.
But I'm Irish and I love a story. If it has a bite, so much the better. Humor is often the response to ethnic or racial pain. Not often enough, perhaps, is it used to help find sympathy for those not actually in on the joke. Perhaps because of my limited knowledge I'm prone to think that the Irish and the Jews are the funniest people around and, on a good night, they (we) can understand others through the things that we laugh at.