These passages:
“The lessons you learn in the sport — discipline, self-awareness, and an understanding of life’s rhythms — can be used to hold off the kinds of demons that tormented my father. I held on tight to running because I came to believe it would both bring me closer to my father and help me avoid becoming him.
I also know that running is not an elixir. My spreadsheets give me an illusion of but not actual control, either of this sport or of life. Running every day creates a small tailwind: pushing forward good habits and helping us clear our minds. The sport helped my father during a dark time in his life, but it couldn’t save him.”
This piece by Lorrie Moore on Miriam Toews.
Kind of what I’m after with the benchmarks I’m asking my kids to write. Yeah, it’s a review, but it’s also an essay that makes you think about the nature of criticism, the nature of trauma, the nature of writing, and the nature of being a human. All sorts of things. And it makes you consider how everything you read (and experience)– my favorite part is the quote below — might be something you could bring into an essay:
I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore—often blindly—the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. (Javier Marias).
