Preface

xxiii

SHIRLEY ABBOTT

1 The Importance of Dissimulation "Being a belle has its risks, the worst of which is that she may be permanently seduced by her own propaganda."

(9)

DIANE ACKERMAN

2 The Importance of Touch "Mammals prefer to use odors when they can, spinning scent songs as complex and unique as bird songs, which also travel on the air."

(9)

HENRY ADAMS

3 Winter and Summer "Winter and Summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license."

(6)

MAYA ANGELOU

4 Mr. Red Leg "So during the age when Mother was exposing us to certain facts of life, like personal hygiene, proper posture, table manners, good restaurants and tipping practices, Daddy Clidell taught me to play poker, blackjack, tonk and high, low, Jick, Jack and the Game."

(6)

MARGARET ATWOOD

5 Pornography "In a society that advertises and glorifies rape or even implicitly condones it, more women get raped. It becomes socially acceptable."

(7)

MARGARET ATWOOD

6 Alien Territory "Every morning I get down on my knees and thank God for not creating me a man."

(6)

W. H. AUDEN

7 As I walked out one Evening "I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

(3)

WENDELL BERRY

8 A Native Hill "The pristine America that the first white men saw is a lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea. ...I walk knee-deep in its absence."

(11)

AMBROSE BIERCE

9 Some Devil's Definitions "Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."

(4)

CAROLINE BIRD

10 Where College Fails Us "Too many young people are in college reluctantly, because everyone told them they ought to go, and there didn't seem to be anything better to do."

(9)

SVEN BIRKERTS

11 Objections Noted: Word Processing "Writing on the word processor: It's like eating those force-fed new chickens that have never seen sunlight. Like eating fish bred in indoor pools."

(5)

CAROL BLY

12 Getting Tired "It is the true feminine touch to brush a crumb off pants that are encrusted with Minnesota Profile A heavy loam..."

(5)

LOUISE BOGAN

13 Miss Cooper and Me "Sometimes I think that, between us, my mother and I must have invented Miss Cooper; this is impossible, however, because of our splendid ignorance of the materials of which Miss Cooper was composed."

(5)

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

14 The Pseudo-Event "If we test Presidential candidates by their talents on TV quiz performances, we will, of course, choose presidents for precisely these qualifications."

(7)

MICHAEL BOOTH

15 Watch out for Traffic Jams on the Information Highway "No doubt any hope for a massive popular resistance to all the new information technology is fleeting."

(5)

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

16 The Bean Eaters "Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away."

(1)

MICHELLE CLIFF

17 If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire "Were the other women unable to touch this girl because of her darkness? I think that now."

(15)

FRANK CONROY

18 A Yo-Yo Going Down "The witty nonsense of Eating Spaghetti, the surprise of The Twirl, the complex neatness of Cannonball, Backwards Round the World, or Halfway Round the World--I could do them all...."

114

(8)

CHARLES DICKENS

19 Concluding Remarks "But the foul growth of America has a more entangled root than this; and it strikes its fibers, deep in its licentious Press."

122

(8)

EMILY DICKINSON

20 "He Preached Upon `Breadth'..." "And of `Truth' until it proclaimed him a Liar--"

130

(1)

JOAN DIDION

21 On Keeping a Notebook "It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about."

131

(7)

ANNIE DILLARD

22 Sojourner "The planet itself is a sojourner in airless space, a wet ball flung across nowhere. The few objects in the universe scatter."

138

(4)

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

23 Plantation Life "As I received my first impressions of slavery on this plantation, I will give some description of it, and of slavery as it there existed."

142

(5)

GRETEL EHRLICH

24 About Men "Instead of the macho, trigger-happy man our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cowboy is more apt to be convivial, quirky, and soft-hearted."

147

(4)

RALPH ELLISON

25 On Becoming a Writer "Like Huck, we observed, we judged, we imitated and evaded as we could the dullness, corruption, and blindness of `civilization.'"

151

(8)

NORA EPHRON

26 A Few Words About Breasts: Shaping Up Absurd "Even though I was outwardly a girl and had many of the trappings generally associated with the field of girldom--a girl's name, for example, and dresses, my own telephone, an autograph book-- I spent the early years of my adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any point gum it up."

159

(8)

LOUISE ERDRICH

27 Skunk Dreams "I tucked the top of my sleeping bag over my head and was just dozing off when the skunk walked onto me with simple authority."

167

(10)

LOUISE ERDRICH

28 Owls "Have you ever seen, at dusk, an owl take flight from the throat of a dead tree?"

177

(2)

LOUISE ERDRICH

29 The Leap "In the final vignette of their act, they actually would kiss in midair, pausing, almost hovering as they swooped past one another."

179

(7)

WILLIAM FAULKNER

30 A Rose for Emily "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house...."

186

(9)

RICHARD FEYNMAN

31 It's as Simple as One, Two, Three... "Well, it all seemed like a lot of baloney to me--there were so many things that could go wrong in his long chain of reasoning."

195

(5)

ROBERT FINCH

32 Very Like a Whale "But as the crowds continued to grow around the whale's body like flies around carrion, the question seemed to me, and still seems, not so much why did the whale die, as why had we come to see it?"

200

(6)

M. F. K. FISHER

33 One Way to Give Thanks "I wanted to roast our dainty birds as they would never have been roasted before, and still keep them simple and succulent...."

206

(6)

ROBERT FROST

34 The Gift Outright "The land was ours before we were the land's."

212

(1)

MARTIN GANSBERG

35 38 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police "For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."

213

(4)

STEPHEN JAY GOULD

36 The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone "Almost all the authors treat the same topics, usually in the same sequence, and often with illustrations changed only enough to avoid suits for plagiarism."

217

(11)

HARVEY GREEN

37 The Radio Age 1915-1945 "The radio brought a new style of singing, termed 'crooning,' to Americans, in addition to comic songs, ditties, and country music."

228

(9)

DONALD HALL

38 Keeping Things "Once my wife heard her name called repeatedly in the barn when no one was there to say it."

237

(10)

PATRICIA HAMPL

39 Holding Old Negatives Up to the Light "...In the act of remembering, the personal environment expands, resonates beyond itself, beyond its 'subject,' into the endless and tragic recollection that is history."

247

(6)

JEAN HEGLAND

40 The Fourth Month "I wish I could be a twin in your womb, to know what it is you know. I wish I could hear the sounds and silences that your ears have just begun to hear, could feel the currents of amniotic fluid on your raw skin, and the elastic give of the walls that contain you."

253

(3)

LILLIAN HELLMAN

41 Runaway "I had four dollars and two bits, but that wasn't much when you meant it to last forever and when you knew it would not be easy for a fourteen-year-old girl to find work in a city where too many people knew her."

256

(7)

EDWARD HOAGLAND

42 The Urge for an End "I don't dare keep ammunition in my country house for a small rifle I bought secondhand two decades ago."

263

(12)

ANDREW HOLLERAN

43 Bedside Manners "And just as the hospital visitor is absorbing the shock of these livid eyes, the sick man says in a furious whisper, "Why did you bring me that dreadful magazine?"

275

(5)

JAMES D. HOUSTON

44 Sand, Tattoo, and the Golden Gate "This was the Sunday we received the news that Japanese aircraft had bombed Pearl Harbor and crippled America's Pacific Fleet."

280

(7)

LANGSTON HUGHES

45 Salvation "God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved."

287

(3)

MOLLY IVINS

46 As Thousands Cheer "That Baptists see nothing wrong with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, who are indisputably openair coochie girls, is one of those anomalies we all live with here."

290

(3)

THOMAS JEFFERSON

47 The Declarations of Jefferson and of the Congress "I will state the form of the declaration as originally reported. The parts struck out by Congress shall be distinguished by a black line drawn under them; & those inserted by them shall be placed in the margin or in a concurrent column."

293

(7)

DORIS KEARNS

48 Angles of Vision "I have found myself reacting to Washington as I did to Lyndon Johnson, with alternating awe, admiration, fascination, fear, and disdain."

300

(10)

JANE KENYON

49 Gettysburg: July 1, 1863 "Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard."

310

(2)

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

50 Facing It "My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: no tears."

312

(2)

MAXINE KUMIN

51 Building Fence "Because this is New England, the fence travels uphill and down; only little bits of it are on the level. Although string lightheartedly imitates the contours of the land, boards have to be held in place, the angle of cut defined by pencil."

314

(4)

PHILLIP LOPATE

52 On Shaving a Beard "As I cut away the clumps of darkness, a moon rises out of my face."

318

(3)

THOMAS LYNCH

53 Burying "Every year I bury one hundred and fifty of my townspeople. Another dozen or two I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission."

321

(9)

WILLIAM S. McFEELEY

54 U. S. Grant, Writer "How was it that this unexceptional small man was, by 1864, the general commanding all the armies on one side of a vast and fierce civil war?"

330

(6)

JOHN McPHEE

55 The Search for Marvin Gardens "I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances for I already own Kentucky and Indiana."

336

(11)

NANCY MAIRS

56 The Unmaking of a Scientist "For weeks I explored the interior of my rat, which I had opened neatly, like the shutters over a window. He was a homely thing, stiff, his fur yellow and matted from formaldehyde, and because he was male, not very interesting."

347

(5)

PETER MARIN

57 Helping and Hating the Homeless "Daily the city eddies around the homeless. The crowds flowing past leave a few feet, a gap. We do not touch the homeless world."

352

(16)

EDWIN MUIR

58 The Horses (1952) "Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came."

368

(2)

JOYCE CAROL OATES

59 On Boxing "The boxing ring comes to seem an altar of sorts, one of those legendary magical spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended: Inside the ropes, during an officially regulated three-minute round, a man may be killed at his opponent's hands but he cannot be legally murdered."

370

(5)

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

60 From Flannery O'Connor's Letters "The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be."

375

(9)

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

61 A Good Man Is Hard to Find "...it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,' he said...."

384

(14)

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

62 The Total Effect and the Eighth Grade "Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday...."

398

(4)

FRANK O'CONNOR

63 Christmas "But when I woke on Christmas Morning, I felt the season of imagination slipping away from me and the world of reality breaking in. If all Santa Claus could bring me from the North Pole was something I could have bought in Myles's Toy Shop for a couple of pence, he seemed to me to be wasting his time."

402

(6)

TILLIE OLSEN

64 I Stand Here Ironing "After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was better."

408

(8)

GEORGE ORWELL

65 A Hanging "It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man."

416

(6)

GEORGE ORWELL

66 Politics and the English Language "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."

422

(13)

GEORGE ORWELL

67 Shooting an Elephant "And suddenly I realized I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it...."

435

(7)

NOEL PERRIN

68 A Book That Could Cure Suicide "At barely seventeen, Bruce Cummings left school forever, and reluctantly signed what he called his Death Warrant...."

442

(4)

ISHMAEL REED

69 America: The Multinational Society "One of the artists told me that his paintings, which included African and Afro-American mythological symbols and imagery, were hanging in the local McDonald's restaurant."

446

(5)

BERTRAND RUSSELL

70 Individual Liberty and Public Control "We may now arrive at certain principles in regard to individual liberty and public control."

451

(5)

EDITH RYLANDER

71 Picking Rock "No matter how many are picked each year, there always seems to be more next year."

456

(2)

Lambing "It's 4:20, and we have eleven ewes to go."

458

(3)

DON SHARP

72 Under the Hood "To be wrong about inflation or the political aspirations of the Albanians doesn't cost anybody anything, but to claim to know why the car won't start and then be proved wrong is both embarrassing and costly."

461

(8)

CHARLES SIMIC

73 On Food and Happiness "Honestly, what could you rather have? The description of a first kiss, or of stuffed cabbage done to perfection?"

469

(6)

GARY SOTO

74 The Grandfather "Five years later, another avocado hung on a branch, larger than the first and edible when crushed with a fork into a heated tortilla."

475

(3)

WILLIAM STAFFORD

75 A Way of Writing "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."

478

(6)

BRENT STAPLES

76 Just Walk On By "At dark, shadowy intersections in Chicago, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver--black, white, male, or female--hammering down the door locks."

484

(5)

SHELBY STEELE

77 I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent? "I think the real trouble between the races in America is that the races are not just races but competing power groups--a fact that is easily minimized perhaps because it is so obvious. What is not so obvious is that this is true quite apart from the issue of class."

489

(14)

WALLACE STEGNER

78 The Sense of Place "No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry."

503

(7)

IGOR STRAVINSKY

79 The Dearest City "The cries of vendors are vivid in my memory, too, especially those of the Tartars--though, in truth, they did not so much cry as cluck."

510

(6)

JONATHAN SWIFT

80 A Modest Proposal "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled...."

516

(8)

STUDS TERKEL

81 Phil Stallings, Spot Welder "When you go into Ford, first thing they try to do is break your spirit.... To me, this is humanely wrong. A job should be a job, not a death sentence."

524

(6)

PAUL THEROUX

82 Burning Grass "Fire in Africa can go out of control, out of reach of any human being, without disturbing much. It can sweep across the long plains and up the mountains and then, after the fire has burned its length, will flicker and go out."

530

(3)

LEWIS THOMAS

83 Ceti "...physicists and astronomers from various countries...are convinced that the odds for the existence of life elsewhere are very high..."

533

(4)

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

84 Civil Disobedience "How does it become a man to behave toward this American Government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

537

(20)

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

85 From the Journals: June 16, 1854 "If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our people, I feel curious to visit it."

557

(2)

From the Journals: November 30, 1858 "How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it!"

559

(3)

JAMES THURBER

86 Which "The relative pronoun 'which' can cause more trouble than any other word, if recklessly used. Foolhardy persons sometimes get lost in which-clauses and are never heard of again."

562

(3)

BARBARA TUCHMAN

87 History as Mirror "Whole families died, leaving empty houses and property a prey to looters. Wolves came down from the mountains to attack plague-stricken villages, crops went unharvested, dikes crumbled, salt water reinvaded and soured the lowland the forest crept back, and second growth, with the awful energy of nature unchecked, reconverted cleared land to waste."

565

(14)

MARK TWAIN

88 Was the World Made for Man? "I seem to be the only scientist and theologian still remaining to be heard from on this important matter of whether the world was made for man or not."

579

(5)

JOHN UPDIKE

89 The Disposable Rocket "From the standpoint of reproduction, the male body is a delivery system, as the female is a mazy device for retention. Once the delivery is made, men feel a faint but distinct falling-off of interest."

584

(4)

GORE VIDAL

90 Drugs "It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost."

588

(3)

ALICE WALKER

91 The Black Writer and the Southern Experience "One reads Faulkner knowing that his 'colored' people had to come through 'Mr. William's back door, and one feels uneasy, and finally enraged that Faulkner did not burn the whole house down."

591

(6)

EUDORA WELTY

92 A Worn Path "Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock."

597

(8)

EUDORA WELTY

93 The Point of the Story "The real dramatic force of a story depends on the strength of the emotion that has set it going."

605

(4)

E. B. WHITE

94 Once More to the Lake "Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end...."

609

(7)

VIRGINIA WOOLF

95 If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister "It is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary [Elizabethan] literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet."

616

(5)

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

96 Obituary "Last week the Marx Brothers buried their mother. On the preceding Friday night, more from gregariousness than from appetite, she had eaten two dinners instead of the conventional one...."

621

(3)

RICHARD WRIGHT

97 The Library Card "Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently."

624

(9)

A Rhetorical Index

633

(10)

A Thematic Index

643