Howard Freeman > Recent Status Updates

Picador edition, page 270, first full paragraph: the section beginning “I’ve read that...” should have been subject to the famous writer advice that we sometimes must “murder your darlings” [of sentences].

Rare to find a Heat-Moon clunker. This was one of them.

Although there’s a new book called “Debunking Howard Zinn” (the author), I have also seen in my short time no indication of bias. Apparently the debunker challenges the historicity of Zinn’s scholarship, so I’ll read it next.

Zinn doesn’t make me feel less good about America. We all kind of know about our dark past. Rather I wanted to acquire greater empathy.

Heat Moon walks into a “cathouse” in Nevada for a beer and encounters a woman trying to sell her services.

He writes, “Tiffany, with all due respect, was one of the most facially unfavored women I’d ever seen. Her features would have been woeful on a man, but on a woman who earned her way by sexual attraction they were calamitous. She was a good dose of salt peter.”

Hopi Indian to the author, “Maybe you know that Congress didn’t even admit Indians to citizenship until about nineteen twenty. Incredible — live someplace a thousand years and then find out you’re a foreigner.”

He’s just passing through Ninety Six, SC, where he meets a National Parks Service employee named Rocky Durham at the old Loyalist fort. Rocky says that the feds will soon put pavement where dirt trails — 1,000 years old — are, so that “ladies in high heels and overweight men” can walk in, take a photo of themselves in front of something they don’t understand, and leave.

Re-reading this for the 3rd or 4th time. I always find something new, because I am different each time I come to its timeless lessons. It’s “that” kind of book.

He has been discussing how meditating on someone else’s happiness closes the gap between us. “There is really no difference between our wellbeing and theirs.”

“...[T]he meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

“Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.” (page 94)

Note to self: see quote starting bottom page 90 and continuing through first partial paragraph top page 91, on suffering proudly.

Fifty percent of the way through — having read this first in 1994 — it is refreshingly vital. Twenty-five years as an adult gives one a lot of life to bring back to a work like this.