(part 4 of 4) 1994: THE GIVER by Lois Lowry
Their attention would turn to the overwhelming task of bearing the memories themselves. The Giver would help them.
“Like I used to think we’d go out in a nuclear war/
Don’t know much has changed, but I don’t think that no more/
I’m not trying to say we won’t see the day/
There’s a genocide of the poor/
It just might come in a heatwave/
And that’s something no one’s trying to hear/
You wash it down with liquor and beer/
And spend the night with someone who’s near.”
-Bad Moves,
”Party With the Kids Who Wanna Party With You”
When our second daughter was born, I got a card from a family member that included a quote from Thoreau's Walden: "Every child begins the world again". That quote cuts off Thoreau mid-sentence, since the full sentence is slightly less inspiring: "Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold." The first part of the sentence does sound very inspiring, though. I liked the idea that the world was going to begin again with the birth of our daughter, because we really need to get a better world than this.
There are scary problems in the world, that's not new. I've written about it before in this newsletter. A lot of those problems are versions of problems we've had before; I've written about that too. Some of those problems are going to get way worse if we don't act quickly; I've written about that too. And while we have the potential to address these problems by acting collectively and with concern and compassion for each other, we just don't seem to want to do that right now. A global pandemic broke out in 2020, a scary thing that affected every single one of us. We had to act collectively to protect each other, but we liked going to restaurants and getting haircuts more than we liked doing that. We had a test to see if we could, as a national and global community, act with concern and compassion for each other, and we failed in basically every possible way. We were too comfortable and too self-interested, so now we're here, still basically in a pandemic that happens to be making all of our other problems worse, facing down other problems which promise to be way, way worse. So when I read "every child begins the world again," I really hope it's true. I really hope that the children being born right now will have a chance to begin this world again and make it something better. Because the people running the place now had the chance to do it and failed, and now we live in a world where we struggle to process that failure and think about what it means for the challenges to come.
In The Giver, we saw an attempt to build a world that would be better than the one we have right now. We saw what the community sacrificed to get that world, and how destructive that world actually was. We saw Jonas and Gabriel, fearing for their lives, escape that community, with the Giver himself staying behind to shepherd the community into a new era. In Lowry's three companion novels written years after The Giver, we found out more about what happened to Jonas and Gabriel, where they ended up, what sorts of communities they were trying to build in the new era.
But we never, in any of Lowry's writings, learn what happens to Jonas' old community after he leaves them with their memories. We never learn if they pulled it together, if they used the memories of the past to build something better, or if they destroyed themselves, or if they ended up somewhere in between.
As Lowry explained in her Newbery acceptance speech, the inspiration for The Giver came from a few different places, including her book tour for her first Newbery medalist, Number The Stars. That book will get its own entry on here someday; all you need to know for this story is that it's a work of historical fiction set in Copenhagen during the Holocaust. During a Q&A session, a woman stood up and asked Lowry “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?” I'm not really sure why that woman thought it was a good idea to ask that question out loud in front of a bunch of people, but Lowry answered it as best she could on the spot, and then she got to thinking:
"Wouldn’t it, I think, playing devil’s advocate to myself, make for a more comfortable world to forget the Holocaust? And I remember once again how comfortable, familiar, and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood by shielding me from Elsewhere. But I remember, too, that my response had been to open the gate again and again. My instinct had been a child’s attempt to see for myself what lay beyond the wall."
You can see the line of thinking pretty easily here - yeah, what would happen if we stopped remembering all of the terrible things that happened in the world? Would that make us better? Could we build a world without pain or suffering or inequality or difference or choice? Would that be worth it?
It would certainly be attractive; if we all collectively forgot about an atrocity like the Holocaust, we could forget the vast scale of torture and pain and misery of death that we were able to cause, that so many powerful people ignored or enabled for too long. We wouldn't feel guilty about what ordinary human beings did, and we wouldn't have to think about the suffering, or what it would feel like if we suffered like that, or had someone we loved suffer like that. We wouldn't have to be scared about warning signs of something similar happening, and we wouldn't have to expend any effort to try and stop it from happening again.
At the beginning of this year, Nathan J. Robinson wrote a piece in his socialist magazine Current Affairs titled "The Holocaust and Cary Grant," which was kind of sort of about the human tendency to ignore atrocities and suffering right in front of us, in favor of distraction and entertainment. For the first part of the piece, Robinson talks about films from the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood entertaining American audiences at the same time that millions of human beings were being exterminated, why audiences and studios may have been content to make and watch fun Cary Grant films than to ask too many questions about what was going on with that war in Europe.
Where the piece is ultimately heading is towards our own discomfort with looking directly at human suffering, and Robinson's own wondering about how much he should really be encouraging us to do that in the first place:
"Get too close to empathizing fully with suffering, and you may find yourself in terrible agony. The closer I get to understanding the truth of what the Holocaust was for the people who lived it, or what war is for those who see it up close, the more I have to back away and run, for the good of my own peace of mind. Occasionally in reading about war, I will run across some particularly horrible crime mentioned briefly in a list—bayoneting children, for instance. And I will have to not think about what those words really mean. Because if I look at an actual child, and think about what a child is like, and what a parent feels for a child, and the pain of the child and the trauma of witnesses—if I start to penetrate the words to get to the truth—I will hurt myself. I cannot bear it. The nearer you get to seeing what dark things humanity is capable of, and understanding them as real-world happenings rather than words in a newspaper, the more you empathize, the closer you are getting to feeling the worst feelings that can ever be felt, feelings that may make it hard to keep living or to come back to happiness…
I am telling you this because you should know that, as a writer, I am unable to completely tell you the truth about things. Whether writing about factory farming or war, I have to use the terms that convey just as much information as will hopefully stir you without giving you the full picture. I cannot take you across the event horizon, because I need you to have hope and energy to go out and do good in the world, rather than just be despondent and disturbed. But I need you to know and remember that there is much more we are not confronting…I do not mean to be depressing. I really don’t. Yet if we are to mobilize people to stop suffering, perhaps we must take ourselves ever so slightly closer to the edge of the black hole to remember what it is we’re talking about stopping."
I think if you care at all about being a person in the world, you are also trying to navigate this tension between "shielding yourself from suffering so you don't get mired in worry and despondence" and "actually opening your eyes and seeing what's happening in the world so you can respond to it". When Lowry wrote The Giver, she was writing about this very human tension, and highlighting it by creating a community that decided to abandon the second option entirely. Almost everyone in the community is kept safe from any memory of war or thirst or hunger or exposure or disfigurement or abandonment or genocide or nuclear war or anything painful. And Jonas is left to go across the event horizon by himself, and he's horrified by what he sees, but becomes desperate to find something better, even if he has to build it himself with his bare hands.
My oldest daughter turned four recently. For obvious reasons, I haven't had any in-depth discussions with her on the climate crisis. I haven't told her that in her lifetime - it's starting to happen already - she's going to see drought, and famine, and people, entire nations, who don't have enough food and water to survive. I haven't given her detailed descriptions of what it's like to die of thirst, or what I would expect to happen to a civil society if everyone in that society is dying of thirst. I haven't told her that she's going to see terrible storms and homes destroyed, and people displaced, people in her own country, who have to find new homes and are forced to enter places where they won't be particularly welcome or wanted. I haven't told her how Americans tend to treat outsiders in desperate need of shelter and resources, and what impact that has had on our political system in the past twenty or so years. I haven't told her that, while there's a chance we could get through this if we're willing to act with compassion and concern for others, we just had a very big global test of whether we were able to do that in the face of disaster, and we failed it in every conceivable way.
I haven't told her any of this because she's four. But I also haven't told her because it really scares me, too, and I spend large parts of my day trying not to think about it, because if I do think about it too much, I'll lock up and hide under my bed and never leave my home again. And I have no plans to tell her that much horrifying stuff, in that much detail, even when she gets older. Because she's my daughter and I don't want her to lock up and hide under her bed and never leave her home again. I would love for her to grow into a person who cares about the people around her and who works to make the world better, and that would require having some level of awareness of the urgent crises we face, but come on, I can't take her past the event horizon like that, and I can't take myself past the event horizon like that by talking about it so directly. I need to find a way to help this person care about the world so much that she tries to make it better, without horrifying her, and as I do that, I need to make myself care about her and the world so much that I can fight to make it all better, without falling into despair for her future. I need to find a way to thread those multiple needles all at the same time.
So I could, maybe, tell her a story.
As I said in the first installment of Newburied, good fiction shows the reader that the world is bigger than they think, but that they're not alone in it. And on paper, that sounds like a very reassuring message. In many ways it is. But telling someone that the world is bigger than they think also means telling them that there's unimaginable suffering and tremendous evil out there, things that we're scared to look at directly. And telling them that they're not alone in the world also means telling them that the only way for us to save the world from that suffering and evil is to work with each other, and working with each other is hard.
Maybe I won't take my children past the event horizon directly, but they still have the "child's instinct" Lowry described in her speech "to see for myself what lies beyond the wall". They want to know how big the world is. They want to know who else is in it with them and what we can accomplish together. So they want to hear these stories, they want to take on these memories, they want to develop compassion and wisdom, even if there's some pain that comes with that, because that's the instinct every child and every human has as they get to begin the world again.
What a great world we live in, where we can tell each other these stories about how we can build the world we want, where authors can get them printed and share them all over the world, where kids can walk into libraries and pick them up and read them without paying a cent, where we can all share stories about how the world is bigger than we think and they're not alone in it, a message that is a reassurance and an affirmation and a call to arms and so many other things. As Lowry said at the end of her acceptance speech:
"The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom."
A NOTE ON SCHEDULING
The Giver was the twenty-fifth selection for Newburied, which means I'm now a quarter of the way through the project. I am grateful to all of you for reading it, and grateful to the wonderful staff of the Chicago Public Library for not looking at me funny when I was the first guy to check out The Door In The Wall in forty years. I will be taking the rest of December and the first couple weeks of January off before resuming the project on January 17th. I hope your holidays are safe and restful and joyful.
-Tony