Scott Russell Sanders's Blog: Life Notes

I grew up in a house where the only books were a dictionary, a Bible, and a motley assortment of Reader’s Digest condensed novels picked up at yard sales by my mother, who didn’t believe in spending a dollar when she could spend a dime. I rarely saw books in the homes of my friends. Their parents, like my mother and father, had come of age during the Great Depression and World War II, hard times that taught them to distinguish between necessities and luxuries. Until I was in high school, I never met a person who considered the buying of books a necessity, like the buying of groceries or gasoline.

Fortunately, in 1915 a group of civic-minded women in Ravenna, Ohio, decided their town needed a library, not the kind that charged a fee but a public library where anybody, even a backroads kid without a penny in his pocket, could browse the shelves and borrow armloads of books for free. I began visiting that library before I started first grade, a country kid but already an avid reader thanks to lessons from my older sister, and I continued visiting until the summer after I graduated from high school, when my family moved to Louisiana. Over those dozen years, I often checked out particular books multiple times, returning to them for the stories or knowledge or sheer delight they gave me. If the book I was hungry for happened to be missing from the shelf because someone else had borrowed it, I would go away disappointed, as if a friend I had hoped to see was not at home.

Until I was sixteen, it did not occur to me that one might create a personal library, a collection of favorite books kept close at hand, always available to provide inspiration, ideas, entertainment, or simple good company. Then at the end of my junior year in high school, my English teacher invited his students to come for tea at his home. It was a revelation to meet his wife and young daughter, to think of our teacher as having a life outside of school; it was a revelation to sip hot tea from a cup rather than slurp iced tea from a glass, and to eat a jam-smeared pancake called a crumpet instead of a cookie; but the greatest revelation was to see one entire wall of the living room lined with shelves full of books. When my teacher noticed me gawking, he told me I was welcome to go have a look.

There were volumes in German and French as well as English, a mix of paperbacks and cloth editions, mostly literature and philosophy, all arranged alphabetically by the authors’ surnames. The names I recall now are those of writers whose work I had begun to read at the urging of my teacher—James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Gustav Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf, among others. What I remember most vividly, decades after surveying those crowded shelves, is the thrill of imagining I might one day gather my own collection of books, reliable companions, like friends who always answer a knock at their door.

The summer following that afternoon tea, I earned money as an apprentice carpenter for a local builder. As soon as I had saved up a few dollars, I bought cheap paperback editions of The Sound and the Fury, Notes of a Native Son, and The Brothers Karamazov, the beginnings of what I hoped would become my private library. Those books rest beside me now as I write, their spines broken and mended with tape, their pages yellowed and marked in pencil with comments and underlining. At the bottom of the last page in each book I recorded the date and location of my first reading, and then all the subsequent readings, as I returned to them repeatedly over the years.

Most books don’t reward a second reading, let alone a third or fourth. They deliver all their secrets and pleasures the first time through. That’s no argument against reading them once, of course, for the entertainment or information they provide, and I still borrow armloads of one-time-through books from the public library. But some books are inexhaustible, yielding new discoveries every time they’re opened. Which books those might be will differ from reader to reader. The ones I have found worth revisiting most often are a treasured minority among the two thousand or so volumes that now line the walls of my house.

I’m in the midst of rereading one of those inexhaustible books, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. It’s a cloth edition, the first hardcover I ever bought. I laid out the $4.25, more than a week’s spending money in my freshman year of college, after hearing a recording of the Welsh poet’s rhapsodic chanting of his work. The book lies open before me now to a poem that begins with these haunting lines:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

When I first encountered that poem, I was in my own green age, just eighteen, full of desire, youth’s energy rising in me like maple sap in spring. I return to it now in my gray age, still charged with curiosity and yearning, but with joints aching and energy waning.

In those few lines, Dylan Thomas found a fresh way of expressing a familiar truth. The power that gives rise to us eventually reclaims us, as it does the flower and tree, the starfish and stars, the clouds and constellations. Whether we call it nature or Tao or God, or by any other name, this power is Destroyer as well as Creator. Long after the poet’s death, his words remain fresh, preserved as ink marks on paper. What a marvelous invention, this storehouse of surprises we call a book. It requires no electricity, never runs down, and freely offers its gifts to anyone who looks inside.

When alien archeologists dig through the rubble of our cities and survey our planet’s ravaged lands and waters, searching for clues to the global catastrophe that wiped out half the species on Earth, what will they notice? The carbon-charged atmosphere, the layer of radioactive debris, a worldwide taint of manufactured poisons, vast middens of rubbish marking abandoned settlements, a scum of plastic on the oceans, bleached corals, oil-saturated wetlands, drained aquifers, silted reservoirs, craters from exhausted mines, and forests reduced to cemeteries of stumps. What a waste, the aliens will think, to ransack a planet so well-suited for life. Belonging to a species wise enough to avoid trashing their own home, they will sift through the ruins to puzzle out what might have given rise to all these disorders, and they will find the answer in troves of printed matter—contracts, invoices, spreadsheets, blueprints, military budgets, chemical formulas, stock market reports, advertising flyers, shopping lists, medical prescriptions, and real estate maps—in short, what they will discover at the root of this global havoc, the technology that made it all possible, is writing.

As you might guess, I summoned these alien archeologists from a distant galaxy, speeding them through a handy wormhole in space, in order to express my worst fears about the human impact on Earth. Since I have devoted my life to reading and teaching literature, and adding my own minor works to the world’s library, I wish I could have blamed the ravaging of our planet on some other technology, such as money, gunpowder, the internal combustion engine, nuclear reactors, antibiotics, or the internet. But when I considered how humans have managed to spread our population into every habitat around the globe, alter the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, pillage and poison its oceans, squander its arable soils, and exterminate incalculable numbers of our fellow creatures, I realized that none of these upheavals could have occurred had our ancestors not invented writing.

By writing, I refer to visible marks that convey meaning, not only for the person making the marks but also for those who view them. Such marks began to appear as pictures carved or painted on the walls of caves and the faces of cliffs as early as 30,000 years ago; then around 5,500 years ago they appeared as wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets, and later on as scratches incised into ivory and turtle shells and bone, as inky scrawls on papyrus and vellum, as print on paper in scriptures and dictionaries and laws, eventually as words displayed on every surface from billboards to smartphone screens, and most recently as ghostly zeroes and ones inscribed on magnetic disks.

According to scholars, the practice of writing emerged independently in at least four locations—ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica—in each place amid increasing social complexity brought on by the rise of cities and empires. In light of these multiple origins, it would appear that the making of durable marks to signify objects, ideas, and the sounds of speech was a natural, perhaps inevitable, next step in the evolution of human language.

What uses did the earliest writing serve? To keep track of trade goods (sheep, barley, and beer were major items); to proclaim the exploits of tyrants (lands conquered, slaves captured); to record taxes and tributes (paid chiefly to potentates and priests); to relate stories about capricious and often violent gods (and methods for divining their purposes); to chart the movement of sun, moon, planets, and stars (in order to align planting, hunting, ritual sacrifice, and other activities with the wheeling cosmos). All these millennia later, writing serves us in countless additional ways, from crossword puzzles to musical notation, love letters to recipes; but the earliest uses of writing persist today, vastly expanded, in business, government, religion, and science—the realms of human endeavor that have enabled us to dominate and devastate the planet.

Without the invention of writing, our species might well have survived into the twenty-first century, as we had survived for tens of thousands of years with only spoken language; we might still be making tools out of wood and stone and bone, baskets out of reeds and bark, canoes and snowshoes and any number of other useful objects; we might be foraging and farming, studying the stars, and telling stories around the fire. But we would not be making nuclear weapons, computers, or plastic. We would not be spraying herbicides on 5,000-acre fields of genetically modified soybeans while riding in satellite-guided tractors weighing 15,000 pounds. We would not be flying across oceans in air-conditioned aluminum tubes, spewing soot, metal particles, and planet-heating carbon compounds in our wake. We would not be clear-cutting the Amazon rainforest, nor blasting the tops off mountains in search of cheap coal, nor drilling for oil in the oceans. We might still be fighting religious wars, but they would not be justified by quoting passages of scripture recorded thousands of years ago. Lacking antibiotics, antiseptics, vaccines, laser surgery, and the whole toolkit of modern medicine, our population would more likely be numbered in the millions than in the billions, but countless other creatures, now endangered or extinct, would be flourishing.

Without writing, it is unlikely that the ancient Greek word anthropos would have survived into the twentieth century to prompt a scientist (there is disagreement about precisely which scientist) to coin the term Anthropocene as a name for the geological era succeeding the Holocene. Some critics of the term regard it as a form of bragging, exalting the importance of our lone species. But rather than seeing the label as a boast, I take it as an acknowledgment of culpability. Unlike the phenomena that brought about earlier mass extinctions—asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere by cyanobacteria, and extreme shifts in global temperatures and sea levels—humans are conscious creatures, with the capacity to understand the dire effects of our actions and, in light of this knowledge, to change our ways. The alien archeologists have investigated disasters on many other planets, but never one brought about by a single species so amply warned of its folly.

In spite of my fears, I recall that those warnings come to us chiefly through writing. They come to us in scientific reports, editorials, journal articles, petitions, essays, poems, novels, graphs, and written messages on all our screens. So the invention that has enabled us to hurtle toward global catastrophe might also inspire us to avoid it. If I did not believe in that possibility, I would not have written this little fable to share.

Birds don’t heed the headlines, and thus avoid the onslaught of troubling news. When I need a break from that onslaught, instead of reading the news, I watch birds.

It’s mid-April, a time when birds flock to our feeders here in southern Indiana. This morning at breakfast, my wife, Ruth, and I were gazing out the window at the white blossoms on our pie-cherry tree, when a woodpecker glided in and settled on the trunk. Not one of the regular visitors, it was a yellow-bellied sapsucker, a bird that nests in forests rather than city backyards. So here was a traveler, stopping over on the way from southern wintering grounds to breeding grounds up north.

When I was a boy, too young and churchy to swear, this bird’s name came in handy for taunting friends, as in, “You’re a yellow-bellied sapsucker!” The name sounds comical, but the bird is dignified and handsome: an inch or two shorter than a robin, slenderly built, with black wings and white shoulder patches, a black-and-white streaked face, a yellowish belly, and a red cap. The males, like the one in our cherry tree, are distinguished by a rosy red throat.

Our migrant gripped the trunk and made no move to probe for insects or hammer the bark in search of sap. He lifted his bill a couple of times, exposing his colorful bib—a display he will use on the breeding grounds to court females—and then he grew still, oblivious to the dozen or so other birds that swirled around him as they nibbled suet and sunflower seeds. Even the blustery gang of starlings and grackles, swooping in like pirates, didn’t faze him. He ignored the feeders and water cups. Gusts of wind set the branches swaying and ruffled the feathers on his back, yet he did not stir.

“Do you think he’s sick?” Ruth asked.

“I think he’s tired,” I said.

“But why would he be tired so early in the day?”

“If he flew up here from the South last night, he must have skirted tornadoes and fought headwinds the whole way.”

The bird seemed bone-weary to me. Of course, I might have been projecting. In recent weeks, while every flower and bush and tree surged with spring, I had been spending most afternoons working in the yard, mulching and weeding, caging plants with wire fencing to protect them from rabbits and deer, forking up the soil in our garden, turning the compost. All my joints ached.

Every other bird near the feeders was jittery, watchful, head swiveling to scan for danger. Any slight movement or noise sent them flying. After a brief spell, they would return to the feeders, only to whirl away at the next hint of trouble. But through all the ruckus, the sapsucker never shifted position on the cherry tree, never glanced around, never so much as widened his half-shut eye. Whatever the cause of his stillness, it was strange behavior for a creature that might fall prey to our local Cooper’s hawk or the neighbors’ prowling cats.

The sapsucker’s lack of caution, in contrast with the vigilance of the other birds, set me thinking about how little wariness I feel in ordinary circumstances, and how much more stressful life must be for those who live with a constant sense of danger. I think of unhoused people, never wholly safe whether sleeping on the street or in a shelter. I think of children in families with an alcoholic father, a drug-addicted mother, or a lecherous uncle. I think of women living with violent men, women pregnant with no one to help them care for a child. I think of men laid off from work and unable to find another job, while bills pile up and rent falls due. I think of civilians trapped in war zones with nowhere to flee, refugees jammed in holding pens at the border. I think of old people living in rough neighborhoods, teenagers menaced by gangs, sick people lacking health insurance, the migrants, the hungry, the poor.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic had given me a taste—and only a taste—of what such lives might feel like. Suddenly, the world was filled with hazards. Any person whom Ruth and I encountered might carry the coronavirus, and so might the newspaper, the mail, or a still-warm loaf of bread wrapped in a dish towel and left on the porch by a friend. In any crowd, the virus might reach us by way of a cough, a sneeze, or a boisterous laugh. A handshake or a hug might prove risky, even fatal. So we kept to the house and yard during the day. In the evenings, wearing masks, we walked in the nearby park or along eerily deserted streets. When other walkers approached, we changed course to keep a safe distance from them, or they steered clear of us, and in passing we nodded across the open space to acknowledge our shared caution.

Such swerving to avoid oncoming strangers was new for me, a straight, white, middle-class male, living in a safe neighborhood in a small midwestern city. It was not new for Ruth, who tells me that when walking alone, especially at night on her way to the car from an errand or rehearsal, she often crosses the street to avoid encountering a lone man. A Black friend tells me he always feels wary in all-white neighborhoods. A lesbian friend tells me she never feels safe except within the gay community.

Although anyone can succumb to a virus, including newborns and teenagers and people in the prime of life, a pandemic does not erase all privilege. My gender, the pale cast of my skin, my education and relative financial security still ease my way in the world. Except for gender, Ruth enjoys the same advantages. Despite our greater vulnerability due to age, we are more secure than most of our fellow Americans. Since we’re retired, we needn’t worry about losing jobs. We can rely on pensions, insurance, Medicare and Social Security benefits, and savings accounts. We own our house and car. Our daughter lives nearby, and she checks in on us, as do neighbors and friends. There is a first-class hospital nearby.

While the spread of Covid-19 placed everyone at risk, those in the U. S. likeliest to die from the coronavirus were residents of nursing homes, Native Americans on reservations, African Americans and other people of color, inmates in jails and prisons, minimum-wage workers, migrant laborers, the homeless, and the uninsured. In short, those most endangered were the people in our society who are most vulnerable in ordinary times. The pandemic simply made these pre-existing inequities glaringly obvious.

The birds at our feeders can swiftly scatter at any sign of threat. For humans it is not so easy to escape the menace of poverty, prejudice, or pollution, of genocide or war, or of drought, floods, wildfire, and other natural disasters intensified by global heating. If no other good emerges from the pandemic, which has given all of us a taste of fear, perhaps it will increase our compassion for people who are trapped in a constant state of danger, and who cannot escape without our help.

After the sapsucker landed in the pie-cherry tree, Ruth and I checked on him occasionally that morning, and he hadn’t budged. Then along in the afternoon, while on my way to heat water for tea, I glanced out the dining room window and saw him perched on the suet feeder, avidly pecking. My approach startled him, and he rocketed away. Evidently, he had recouped enough energy to resume his journey north toward the breeding grounds, where, with luck, he might win a mate by flashing his bright red throat.

On winter walks, bundled up against the cold, knowing I can return to a warm house and a well-stocked pantry, I often think about how other creatures sustain their lives through these hard months. Many of those with wings migrate south to find warmth and food. With luck, the monarch butterflies that began life as minuscule eggs on milkweed in our southern Indiana yard last summer will reach a forested mountainside refuge in Mexico, where they will join with half a million other monarchs to drape the trees in black and gold. Sandhill and whooping cranes leave Indiana wetlands for the Gulf coast, while songbirds and warblers fly to forests and grasslands as far away as the Amazon. Several species of bats—including the one named for our state, the Indiana bat—leave our limestone cave country to hibernate in caves farther south.

But what about the animals that don’t migrate? How do they manage in these frozen, food-scarce months? Some hibernate, like groundhogs and chipmunks, lowering their heart rate, metabolic rate, and body temperature, living off fat accumulated when food was plentiful. Snakes hibernate in burrows, basements, stumps, stacks of firewood, and the dens of other animals. In the coldest regions, skunks also hibernate, but here in the Indiana hill country they do so only temporarily, rousing in warmer spells to go foraging for insects, worms, toads, and almost anything else edible, and then retreating to their den for another snooze. This on-and-off sluggishness is known to biologists as torpor—a pattern familiar to parents of teenagers.

Most native bees and wasps hibernate in the soil, in nests made by their mothers, in tree cavities, or under mulch piles and fallen leaves (a good excuse not to rake your yard too thoroughly). Honeybees survive the cold, blossomless months by clustering in their hives around the queen bee, shivering to generate warmth, and feeding on stored honey. Some butterflies overwinter as eggs laid on twigs and leaves, some as caterpillars sheltering in the leaf litter surrounding their host plants, some as chrysalises, and a few species, such as the handsome Mourning Cloak, as adults, hidden in tree crevices or woodpiles; in all of these stages, they avoid freezing by pumping a natural antifreeze into their body fluids.

Squirrels curl up in their leafy nests, high in the bare branches, or in the cavities of trees, dozing much of the time, venturing out now and again to retrieve acorns and other nuts they buried during the summer. Raccoons sleep in the hardest weather, but the rest of the time they go about their sly ways, snug in fur coats, alert for any chance of a meal. Beavers hunker down in their lodges, feeding on branches they stored under the ice. Frogs and turtles burrow into the mud of ponds, lakes, and rivers. A few species of fish, such as carp, also burrow into the mud, but most fish idle near the bottom, slowing their bodily processes to conserve energy.

On my winter walks I am also mindful of how my own species, lacking those clever adaptations, makes it through the hard months. We cannot hibernate, cannot grow thicker fur or denser feathers, cannot fashion nests out of leaves or burrow underground. Some of us migrate from northern states to winter in Florida, Arizona, and other warmer destinations. But most of us stay put in our year-round homes, tethered by jobs, children in school, elders to care for, or lack of funds. So we put on another layer of clothes and turn up the thermostat. Instead of living off accumulated fat, we keep eating, foraging in grocery stores, restaurants, and takeout places.

Alas, a dismaying number of our fellow humans cannot afford the cost of food and warm clothing, let alone the rent or mortgage notes in our high-priced housing markets. Within a ten-minute walk of where I am writing these lines on an icy morning, homeless people recently filled a park with tents. Last month, a man sleeping in one of those tents died from the cold. So local officials no longer allow overnight camping; instead, the tent-dwellers are transported or directed to overnight shelters provided by churches, nonprofits, and local agencies. No one imagines that shelters are a solution to poverty; they are a temporary stay against misery. Our neighbors who are currently experiencing homelessness need permanent, affordable housing if they are to live securely, and with the dignity due to all human beings, in winter and in all seasons of the year.

When I speak with audiences about our responsibility to bear in mind the needs of the generations that will come after us, a century and more in the future, I am often asked why we should care about people who do not even exist.

The first time I encountered this question, I had to puzzle before answering. Assuming that those unborn future generations bear no genetic link to ourselves—as the vast majority of them will not, even if we happen to have children—there is no biological reason for caring whether they flourish or suffer. Nor is there any practical reason to care for them, since the quality of their lives can have no direct effect on our own well-being.

What I realized, as I pondered this challenge from the audience, is that the impulse to care about the fate of unborn generations arises from my sense of taking part in the human lineage. We are born into a world filled with blessings as well as curses inherited from previous generations—mathematics and nuclear weapons, antibiotics and racism, art and war; and when we die we pass on a world either enriched or diminished by our having lived. Our big brains enable us to remember and learn about the past, and to imagine the future consequences of our actions. A failure to recognize our participation in this human lineage is to waste our distinctive gifts.

I feel deep gratitude for the goods we’ve received from previous generations, including the bounty and resilience of nature they have taken pains to preserve. Likewise, I feel deep regret over the legacy of damage those generations have passed on to us—from slavery, sexism, genocide, pollution, and the like. The regret prompts me to reduce the damage I might cause by my own way of life, and to resist the most damaging aspects of my society. The gratitude prompts me to help preserve the sources of our well-being—clean water and air, biodiversity, public lands, knowledge, art, democracy, among many other gifts—and to add whatever new goods I can fashion with my limited time and talents.

Caring about the fate of unborn generations—strangers who exist, as of now, only in our imagination—is an essential part of what it means to be human.

Some years ago, after I gave a talk on conservation in Salado, Texas, a retired biochemist told me that Mao Zedong had decided birds were stealing too much grain in China, so he ordered all citizens to go outside and bang pots continuously until the birds, repeatedly flying up in alarm, fell to the ground from exhaustion, whereupon they could be captured, killed, and eaten. Thus was China stripped of nearly all its birds. Whereupon the insect population swelled out of control, spoiling or devouring more crops than the birds had ever consumed. This news helped explain something that the renowned nature essayist Edward Hoagland once told me. Sent to China by a magazine to write about the status of wildlife in that country, worrying that his report would be dismal, Hoagland was relieved to see, on the first day of his visit, a cormorant flying over the Yangtse River. He thought maybe the status of wildlife was not as bleak as he had feared. But the cormorant was the only bird he saw during ten days of travel in China.

Of all my writing, the essay I wrote about my father’s drinking, and its effects on me and the rest of our family, has elicited the most correspondence from readers. Here's an example that arrived today:

Hi Scott,

Hope you are doing well! I'm a high school student, and I read your piece “Under the Influence.” I wanted to let you know that was honestly an amazing piece of work. Like, after I finished, I sent your story to all of my friends.

I also wanted to ask you a quick question about your opening. It reads: "My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food--compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living." That is honestly the best hook I have read in my entire life, and I wanted to ask how you were able to write a hook as good as that.

I don’t think about the opening of a story or essay as a “hook.” The metaphor strikes me as disrespectful of readers, as if they were fish, to be snagged by the first paragraph and then reeled along. If anyone should be intrigued by the opening sentences, it’s the writer; or at least that has been my experience. I must believe in those first sentences, must feel they provide an honest invitation to all that follows, before I can proceed.

In the case of “Under the Influence,” it was liberating for me to set down those initial three words—“My father drank.” They revealed the family secret, which had been shrouded in shame. Then I was able to bear remembering my father—a former Golden Gloves boxer, who prided himself on his toughness—drinking “compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.” I could name his affliction, which was also the family’s affliction, only after he died. While he lived, I kept hoping that he could become sober; but only a heart attack put an end to his drinking.

Through writing “Under the Influence,” I came to realize how deeply his drinking had shaped my character and conscience. In particular, the essay helped me recognize that I had felt guilty, as a child, for failing to heal my father, for failing to bring peace between my parents, for failing to erase this family shame. As an adult, I struggled to let go of that guilt, and simultaneously to let go of my anger toward my father. The anger had always been mixed with a deep love for him, and the writing brought love to the fore.

As I write these lines, Russian bombs, artillery shells, and missiles are pouring down across Ukraine, on factories and hospitals and schools, on shopping centers and train depots, on apartment buildings and houses. The assault has continued for more than three months, sparing no part of the country. Meanwhile, huddling in shelters, children have been drawing pictures.

One can sample the images online, pictures filled with black smoke and orange flames, helicopters looming overhead, tanks in the streets, people firing guns or fleeing. The children use blue and yellow crayons, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, to draw their own nation’s weapons and soldiers, cheering on their side in the war, but they also use these colors to draw symbols of peace, such as a yellow-and-blue dove bearing an olive twig in its beak, or a yellow-and-blue airplane dropping strawberries instead of bombs. One defiant picture shows a pair of girls holding hands, one of them dressed in the colors of Ukraine, the other in the colors of Russia, both of them grinning as they dance on the prostrate body of Vladimir Putin.

Allowing for differences in age and skill, these drawings are as eloquent in their own way as Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, named for a Basque town in northern Spain that was bombed by German and Italian forces in April 1937. Much of the town was reduced to charred rubble. People who fled into nearby fields were machine-gunned by low-flying planes. As in Ukraine today, the attack was ordered by a tyrant, Francisco Franco, and the victims were nearly all civilians, mostly women and children.

This was only one atrocity in a civil war filled, like all wars, with atrocities. We remember this particular horror chiefly because of Picasso’s painting, which expresses the grief and outrage we all feel, not only about the slaughter in Guernica, but about every murder, every rape, every willful act of destruction, whether it occurs on a battlefield, in the supposed safety of a school or synagogue or church, in a movie theater, nightclub, bedroom, or back alley.

Humans are not the only animals that attack or kill members of their own species, but we alone make art to protest or lament such cruelty. The long agony of slavery, and its bitter legacy of Jim Crow, gave rise to the blues, gospel hymns, and jazz. Lynching inspired the song “Strange Fruit,” best known in the 1939 recording by Billie Holliday, with lyrics by Abel Meeropol, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who would have brought with them from the old country stories about pogroms. Among Meeropol’s students at DeWitt Clinton High School was James Baldwin, who would later write novels and essays denouncing racism, and would open the way for today’s blossoming of gay literature.

One could trace a similar pattern to show how the centuries-long oppression of women gave rise to a wealth of art, from the essays of Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf to the novels of Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. One can see in Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs of sharecroppers a profound sympathy for the poor in a society arranged then, as now, to favor the rich. Art does not merely protest oppression, it demonstrates the worth and dignity of those who have been exploited, abused, or despised.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps wrote and staged plays, composed and performed music. Art did not save them from the gas chambers, but it reminded them of beauty and affirmed their humanity. Primo Levi, one of those millions of prisoners, wrote in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz about reciting for a fellow inmate verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy, including the following passage, here in translation:

Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.

W. H. Auden’s elegy on the death of William Butler Yeats, written in the shadow of World War II, contains the much-debated assertion, “poetry makes nothing happen.” The same might be said of any work of art; but it is only a half truth. Dante’s verses did not free Levi from Auschwitz, but they helped him avoid committing suicide. Songs did not break the shackles of slavery, but they helped Black people preserve their courage and creativity through generations.

Children’s drawings will not stop missiles from falling, but they can say to the world, even to the invaders, “We are not targets, not enemies. We are kids, like those who sit in your lap or play outside your window.” A child’s crayon picture of two grinning girls holding hands and dancing on a dictator can stir the heart of a stranger on the far side of the ocean, a stranger who will use these few words to make his own plea for peace in their land.

Whenever I need a break from the news, with its parade of cruelties, I like to visit a quirky place called Limestone, a city tucked away among the forested hills of southern Indiana. It’s a place where odd things happen, often in the vicinity of a jack-of-all-trades named Gordon Mills. Centaurs and nymphs take shelter in a local cave, alligators lurk in the sewers, warm snow falls on the Fourth of July, cornstalks rise higher than chimneys, crows lay claim to the courthouse square, and the Northern Lights shine down on the municipal dump.

Gordon takes such events in stride, and deals with them as part of his work on the city maintenance crew, earning just enough to support a boisterous family. He lives with his wife, a formidable woman named Mabel, along with their four children, Mabel’s parents, and his widowed mother—nine souls packed into an old house that falls apart as fast as Gordon can fix it. You will not find their hometown on a map, but you may remember visiting the place in dreams—the rare, joyful kind, in which puzzles are solved, kids flourish, hard work pays off, and love endures.

You may also visit this offbeat place by reading Small Marvels (Indiana University Press, June 2022), a novel-in-stories I wrote to express my belief that we humans, despite our flaws, are far better than the showoffs, hatemongers, and crooks who so often grab the headlines. We are more likely to be kind than cruel, more prone to be peaceful than violent, more inclined to tell the truth than to lie.

So if the world seems blighted to you, and hope seems foolish, you might refresh your faith in humankind by taking a break from the news and paying a visit to Limestone, Indiana.

On a recent road trip, I listened to an audio performance of Mark Twain’s scrappy, irreverent, often hilarious Roughing It, an account of his travels in the Wild West during the 1860s. Not having read the book since my college days, I had forgotten how much of its humor derives from ridicule, especially directed toward Indians, former slaves, and Mormons. It is always painful to encounter in the pages of a writer whom one admires contemptuous references to women, Native Americans, Blacks, Jews, immigrants, gays, or any other class or category of people. Though such writers may be merely echoing sentiments common to their era and social situation, as Mark Twain certainly was, we want them to be superior to their age. We want them to be as enlightened in their views as they are talented in their writing.

But are we who grimace at such unconscious prejudice free of it ourselves? For those of us who are writers, toward whom do we show our own ignorance or hostility? If, generations from now, future readers find their way to our books, what crude biases, invisible to us, will be painfully obvious to them?