hearsthestory
Margo 
To: Employer
Cc: Tammy
From: Exemplary Employee
Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 8:10 AM
Re: Vacation week
I’d like the week of August 3rd off.
Thank you.
(e-signature)
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To: Exemplary Employee
cc: Tammy
From: Employer
Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 8:30 AM
Re: Re: vacation week
Should be fine.
Check status of my
April conference reimbursement.
(small first initial signature)
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Mom’s tired eyes in my mirror.
What happened to mine!
The scientist, astronomer, and author, Carl Sagan, on the magic of books:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
The wonderful thing about fiction: the meaning of a story is contained in the way it unscrolls, in the experience the reader has, phrase by phrase. Everything else—the analysis we tend to feel the need to do—is reductive (fun, but reductive). The reading experience, when you think about it, is so complex and lovely and hard to describe: ideas come up and are complicated and refined by the next beat; moral notions arise and are challenged; the language surprises; parallel images from our own life are continually invoked; questions that, in our everyday mode, we’d be more simply opinionated about are endorsed and negated and complicated. All this happens at once, and in a granulated way that’s impossible to describe. I think it’s important to be respectful of how mysterious the whole deal is: a person being moved by a story another person made up. It’s weird but it happens and it can really change people’s lives. I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky. ~ George Saunders
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
~ George Elliot
