AGENDA:
Prayer for the Dying Quiz:
Write a one page, single space essay answering one of the Prayer for the Dying questions. Be sure to use 3 quotes from the text and MLA citation!
OPEN BOOK!
2nd person short story:
You can turn in a hard copy to me today or tomorrow (preferably). If you still need time over the weekend for a work-in-progress, post your request and your work on Google Classroom. Requests will be honored if you have written 4-5 pages already or have spoken to me and shown me your work.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Prayer for the Dying/Essay Test Thursday
Prayer for the Dying Essay Test
Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form. Develop your response using specific examples from the book. You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format
These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!). How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...
Link to blog:
http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.
Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”
In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.
Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–
5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.
Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
Which do you think it is, if either?
—–
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—–
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”
Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–
5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”Which do you think it is, if either?
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
—–
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—–
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
Prayer for the Dying Essay Test
Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form. Develop your response using specific examples from the book. You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format
These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!). How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...
Link to blog:
http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.
Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”
In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.
Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–
5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.
Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
Which do you think it is, if either?
—–
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—–
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”
Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–
5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”Which do you think it is, if either?
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
—–
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—–
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
Prayer for the Dying Essay Test
Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form. Develop your response using specific examples from the book. You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format
These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!). How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...
Link to blog:
http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–
5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”Which do you think it is, if either?
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
—–
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—–
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
Friday, December 13, 2019
Stewart O'Nan/Prayer for the Dying
AGENDA:
Writing in Second Person:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7IOepne8A
VIDEO: O'Nan interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9bovLnB5EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR_ez9q8Se0
Stewart O'Nan website: https://stewart-onan.com/
Be sure to post answers to questions on previous blog posts.
Work on your second person short story.
Writing in Second Person:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7IOepne8A
VIDEO: O'Nan interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9bovLnB5EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR_ez9q8Se0
Stewart O'Nan website: https://stewart-onan.com/
Be sure to post answers to questions on previous blog posts.
Work on your second person short story.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Book of Job/2nd person stories
AGENDA:
The Hebrew Book of Job is part of Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Jewish Bible. Not much is known about Job based on the Masoretic text of the Jewish Bible.
The characters in the Book of Job consist of Job, his wife, his three friends (Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar), a man named Elihu, God, and angels (one of whom is named Satan).
It begins with an introduction to Job's character—he is described as a blessed man who lives righteously in the Land of Uz. The Lord's praise of Job prompts an angel with the title of "satan" ("accuser") to suggest that Job served God simply because God protected him. God removes Job's protection, and gives permission to the angel to take his wealth, his children, and his physical health (but not his life). Despite his difficult circumstances, he does not curse God, but rather curses the day of his birth. And although he anguishes over his plight, he stops short of accusing God of injustice. Job's miserable earthly condition is simply God's will.
In the following, Job debates three friends concerning Job's condition. They argue whether it was justified, and they debate solutions to his problems. Job ultimately condemns all their counsel, beliefs, and critiques of him as false. God then appears to Job and his friends out of a whirlwind, not answering Job's central questions. Job, by staying silent before God, stresses the point that he understands that his affliction is God's will even though he despairs at not knowing why. Job appears faithful without direct knowledge of God and without demands for special attention from God, even for a cause that all others would declare to be just. And the text gives an allusion to Job 28:28: "And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding".
Prayer for the Dying Questions (POST comments):
4. What role does religious faith play in the story? How does it influence Jacob, Chase, and other citizens of Friendship? Is their faith rewarded?
5. Jacob is a veteran of the Civil War. How does his experience there affect the way he behaves in the crisis in Friendship? How did the war change him?
6. How would you describe the relationship between Jacob and Doc? How do their different ideas about the world lead to different strategies for handling the outbreak in Friendship?
7. How does Jacob’s relationship with Marta affect his behavior in the outbreak? How do his priorities as a father and husband conflict with his responsibility to the town?
WRITING: work on 2nd person short stories
Monday, December 9, 2019
Prayer for the Dying
AGENDA:
Poetry cycles DUE today.
Please be sure to read to pg. 72 in Prayer for the Dying.
Diphtheria is an infection caused by the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Diphtheria causes a thick covering in the back of the throat. It can lead to difficulty breathing, heart failure, paralysis, and even death. CDC recommends vaccines for infants, children, teens and adults to prevent diphtheria.
Wisconsin Death Trip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip
THINK, PAIR, SHARE:
Discuss the following questions and post a response.
1. The book is narrated in the second person, addressing the main character, Jacob, as “you.” Who is speaking? Why do you think the author chose this mode to tell the story?
2. When Jacob is called to take care of Clytie, he has a very hard time pulling the trigger. Look at the passage (p. 49) in which he has to convince himself to kill her. Why does he agonize when he knows it’s the right thing? What does it mean that he’s “still clinging to some dream of innocence, blamelessness”? Does he continue to cling to that dream later in the story?
3. Why does Jacob elect to bleed and treat the bodies of some victims, even after Doc has told him not to, and even though he knows he’s putting himself in danger? Why is precision and diligence so important to him even when everyone around him is worried only about survival?
Begin working on 2nd person short story.
Some thoughts from enotes:
Poetry cycles DUE today.
Please be sure to read to pg. 72 in Prayer for the Dying.
Diphtheria is an infection caused by the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Diphtheria causes a thick covering in the back of the throat. It can lead to difficulty breathing, heart failure, paralysis, and even death. CDC recommends vaccines for infants, children, teens and adults to prevent diphtheria.
Wisconsin Death Trip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip
THINK, PAIR, SHARE:
Discuss the following questions and post a response.
1. The book is narrated in the second person, addressing the main character, Jacob, as “you.” Who is speaking? Why do you think the author chose this mode to tell the story?
2. When Jacob is called to take care of Clytie, he has a very hard time pulling the trigger. Look at the passage (p. 49) in which he has to convince himself to kill her. Why does he agonize when he knows it’s the right thing? What does it mean that he’s “still clinging to some dream of innocence, blamelessness”? Does he continue to cling to that dream later in the story?
3. Why does Jacob elect to bleed and treat the bodies of some victims, even after Doc has told him not to, and even though he knows he’s putting himself in danger? Why is precision and diligence so important to him even when everyone around him is worried only about survival?
Begin working on 2nd person short story.
Some thoughts from enotes:
The novel opens, innocently enough, with a wide-angle view of a rural American town shortly after the Civil War (1861-1865). The author serves up the scene slowly, allowing the reader to steep gently in the steamy cup of summer. One notices workers in the field, small children and tiny streams giggling their way through a heavy summer day, insects annoying the requisite cows, people moving through their everyday lives. They love, laugh, and argue, kill their kin and tend their tomatoes, perform the pedestrian and not so pedestrian tasks of living and of dying.
Jacob Hansen, Civil War veteran, functions in the tiny community not only as constable and preacher but also as undertaker. He is a person of honor and humility. He is family man, gentle man, model citizen—almost too good to be true. He is devoted to his talented and lovely wife, Marta, and to his young daughter. His life is ordered and controlled, as he takes time for both the pleasures of the flesh and the prayers of faith. He accepts the townsfolk and himself as they are, fully appreciating their good qualities and overlooking their faults. “They’ll all come to you someday,” he remarks to himself, “and they know you’ll do right by them.” Jacob certainly does right for the town. He is the sturdy warp upon which the town weaves its successes and troubles. Its fabric is strong because he is strong; it is orderly and good because he is orderly and good; it keeps the patterns of family and social life intact because he does; it is able to absorb and cope with its problems because in his own psyche he sets the design for how to behave. Friendships are closely woven and richly ornamented; lapses are dealt with in orderly fashion. While readers may not be drawn to like him—a bit too Milquetoast perhaps—they cannot help but admire him.
O’Nan’s plan is to capture interest not so much in the living of the town, but in its dying. The sunny reality of Friendship becomes overcast when a local farmer discovers an itinerant soldier dead beside his campfire, presumably the victim of murder and robbery. As Jacob arrives to claim the body, he marks the physical resemblance of the dead soldier to himself: There is the same battle-worn and dirty uniform, the same tin drinking cup. A shadow from Jacob’s dark history as a soldier in the Civil War passes briefly, but its meaning is made clear to the reader only later in the novel. Jacob’s congruence to the corpse is deeper than physical likeness. The soldier functions as a kind of metaphor for the main character. The corruption of disease in the dead man foreshadows what the author will reveal later about the constable himself. Questions of why Jacob travels by bicycle and not by horse and what really happened in the war linger among the gathering clouds in the reader’s mind.
As constable and undertaker, Jacob has a duty to solve the mystery of the soldier’s death as well as to prepare his corpse for burial. Both tasks are undertaken with equanimity and seriousness. The reader sees...
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Gamzon 2nd person short story
Red Rocks, Green Grapefruits
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
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