Essays | Tales from the Odyssey

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The Best American Essays 2024 (edited by Wesley Morris)

 

작년(2025년) 초부터는 작은 글씨의 책 읽기가 눈에 너무 부담을 준다. 그래서 이 책도, 일단, 이미 읽은 에세이 몇 편으로 덮기로 했다. (더 작은 글씨의 New Yorker가 오히려 괜찮은 것은 페이지 디자인과 인쇄의 질이 좋아서 인 듯.) 

 

James McAuley, "Memory's Cellar" (From Liberties)

 

Were it not for a Hebrew plaque on the limestone gate outside that reads Martef HaShoah, or the Holocaust Cellar, next to an arrow pointing in its direction, you would have no idea where you had arrived. Even now, no notice identifies this rough place as the first Holocaust memorial ever built. (p. 245)

 

... and bars of soap made from human body oil, all displayed in a candlelit cave in a prominent glass vitrine with a tattered green velvet lining. The soap bars turn out to be fake; there is no evidence that the Nazis ever made soap out of human flesh. (p. 246)

 

But Sontag was right to see memory as a construction, as something that was not handed down from on high but actively constructed from below -- and sometimes at great personal cost to those who buit it. (p. 249)

 

But it was Elie Wiesel who was most insistent that "holocaust" be used to describe the catastrophe that he had witnessed.... "I call Isaac the first survivor of the Holocaust because he survived the first tragedy," Wiesel said. "Isaac was going to be a burnt offering, a korban olah [a type of sacrifice in the Temple that had to be entirely consumed by the fire on the altar], which is the Holocaust. The word 'holocaust' has a religious connotation. Isaac was meant to be given to God as a sacrifice." (p. 254)

 

Yiyun Li, "If Not Now, Later" (From The New Yorker)

 

    [In September 2017, our older son, Vincent, died by suicide, at sixteen.]

    [On that day, we put down the deposit for the house. Deposit, death, in that order, four hours apart.]

    In a novel, i would never have put the two happenings on the same day. In writing fiction, one avoids coincidences like that, which offer unearned drama, shoddy poigancy, convenient metaphor, predictable spectacle. Life, however, does not follow a novelist's discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is often tamer than life. (p. 168)

 

What if belongs to fiction; what now, to this real life.

    What now, in the last months of 2017: I could not read fiction. It was not a problem of mental focus. I spent hours every day reading Shakespeare's plays and Wallace Stevens's poems -- all of a sudden, those words were the only ones that made sense to me. (p. 169)

 

Once, two women laughed at our garden to my face, dismissing my father as a lazy gardener who grew flowers that were no more than weeds. I was too young and too intimidated to defend him: he was a nuclear physicist, but he also dis all the grocery shopping and most of the housework, cooked three meals a day for the family. and gardened in his spare time. (p. 174)

 

In the Buddhist tradition, one encounters sayings like "A flower is a world, a grass leaf is a paradise." But I, not quite a believer in any kind of religion or metaphor, would rather think that each flower in my garden holds some concrete space, a physical one as well as a temporal one. A flower, like a thought, a sentence, a book, is but a plceholder. (p. 178)

 

James Whorton Jr., "An Upset Place" (From The Gettysburg Review)

 

The people they met in what would later be called "Arkansaw," or "Arkanzas," received them differently from place to place. One town welcomed them with pecans, fish, and persimmons. Another did not welcome them at all -- when the Spaniards tramped into that village, it was empty. (p. 232)

 

All humans are one species. We are an interesting species, but there are many ways in which we are not special. Songbirds are said to have dialects, and otters use tools. Calves cry when they are separated from their mothers.... In 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked Emily Dickinson why she did not get out and mix with people more. The problem with men and women, she wrote back, is that "they talk of Hallowed things, aloud -- and embarrass my dog." Dogs are dishonest sometimes, but they don't preach. (p. 240)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Pope Osborne, "Tales from the Odyssey Part Two" (2003)

 

Hearing even this simple story of her lost husband made Penelope weep. Just as the snows melted by the east wind run down the mountainside, so did the tears run down her lovely cheeks. (p. 216)

 

While they talked, the goddess Athena held back the horses of Dawn -- Firebright and Daybright -- so the joyful couple could spend more time alone. (p. 256)