An Interview With Andrei Codrescu
You just can’t see the outside anymore. You can’t see it literally: ecologically, the outside is being destroyed. You can’t see it internally as a sense of freedom. This is the age in which the bad guys won, so you do what you can on the inside of the machine.
When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered: “An explorer!” It was quite the thing for a boy of ten, but imagine being stuck with it. Fashions change but one thing does not: all adults want little boys to be something else besides little boys. Grownups, who are all, with rare exceptions, failures (having never become the things they said they would when they were little boys), ask the little boys that loaded question in order to set the little boys up for failure.
Freeing The Writer Within
Writing is not psychology. We do not talk “about” feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader’s hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.
What is perfect is directly before me. It is my entire life, inasmuch as my entire life can be captured, reviewed, revered, or processed now. And yet, this small room, with its heaving stacks of papers and leaning rows of books; its small daybed, brown with rust-colored and yellow flowers and reeds; its packed and unclosable cupboards — how does this unroomy, untidy room become my life?
There were, Julio thought, two clear advantages to working in the fields rather than in the groves. For one thing, you did not have to climb a ladder to pick tomatoes, and thus there was much less risk of breaking your bones. Besides that, a full basket of tomatoes weighed less than half as much as a boxload of oranges, a difference for which your back was grateful at the end of a day in the fields. Also, he suddenly remembered, there was the matter of snakes. In the fields he had seen only one, a watery green whip said to be harmless unless you were a bug or a mouse; but the groves had been crawling with mean little rattle-tailed vipers.
I knew old Wiggins years before he scandalized the area newspapers, because he was part of my childhood, like the pine tree with the tire swing and the forbidden, ancient barn I explored in secret. Old Wiggins lived in a one-room cabin on a rise of land just down the road from my grandfather’s farm, and I was his friend, he said. Now I think he called anyone who came to see him a friend, for certain reasons of his own.
Her house was torn down seven or eight years ago, after she died. New, expensive homes have grown up in its place. A few such houses had surrounded it when I knew it, giving it some of its mystery as a hidden eddy, a guarded place.
To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going down on one’s knees and thanking him.
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