We Are All Anthologies

I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.

That's never their only story.

We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.

The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.

Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

"But I don't want to go to Paris. It's full of foreigners."

"Actually, in Paris, we'll be the foreigners."

"Englishmen can't be foreigners, Christopher."

The Assassin's Curse by Kevin Sands

It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us--at least partly--as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen."

― Matthew Polly, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China

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Curiosity and What Equality Really Means

 . . . Insisting that people are equally worthy of respect is an especially challenging idea today. . . . You don’t have to like or trust everyone to believe their lives are worth preserving.

We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people . . . To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.

We are in a dangerous moment because every kind of curiosity is under attack—scientific curiosity, journalistic curiosity, artistic curiosity, cultural curiosity. This is what happens when the abiding emotions have become anger and fear. Underneath that anger and fear are often legitimate feelings of being ignored and unheard—a sense, for many, that others don’t care what it’s like in their shoes. So why offer curiosity to anyone else?

Once we lose the desire to understand—to be surprised, to listen and bear witness—we lose our humanity. Among the most important capacities that you take with you today is your curiosity. You must guard it, for curiosity is the beginning of empathy. When others say that someone is evil or crazy, or even a hero or an angel, they are usually trying to shut off curiosity. Don’t let them. We are all capable of heroic and of evil things. No one and nothing that you encounter in your life and career will be simply heroic or evil. Virtue is a capacity. It can always be lost or gained. That potential is why all of our lives are of equal worth. . . .

Education in Prison: Defying the Odds

 . . . How did Anthony defy the more common fate of returning to prison within three to five years after release? The answer is simple: he went to college in prison, earning both an Associate’s and a Bachelor’s degree, in the process developing the discipline and self-confidence that has enabled him to become a savvy and successful professional. . . .

The roughly 2.2 million men and women now languishing in American prisons are among the least educated people in the country. Students entering BPI have weak language and mathematical skills, and many did not complete high school before their convictions. Despite that, their motivation, combined with the faculty’s belief in their ability and commitment to determined, excellent teaching, quickly enables them to rise up to college levels of academic performance. . . .

As that happens, more formerly incarcerated men and women—97% of whom will someday be released—will be able to find employment. This will help them contribute to the support of their families, thereby serving to interrupt the intergenerational cycles of imprisonment that accompany mass incarceration. Lowering rates of return to prison will lower the costs of corrections and free up scarce resources for other urgent needs such as health and education. With strong evidence that college programs reduce violence in prisons, the further spread of college offerings is also likely to improve life inside. It is for this reason so many prison superintendents favor college programs. The improved atmosphere college programs help to create benefits both people in custody and correctional officers. . . .

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time.

― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 6

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Both empathy and creativity spring from the same source: diversity. Empathy, after all, is a fundamentally creative act by which we connect previously unimagined lives to our own. The path to embracing other cultures has to traverse the imagination. That’s why studies have shown that a high need for closure hurts creativity. And it’s why reading fiction—which puts us in other people’s shoes—can both lower our need for closure and make us more empathetic. Spending time among diverse social groups has the same effect.

― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

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It's extremely easy to be mean to people you don't really know.

― Jason Carter Eaton, The Facttracker

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People almost never change without first feeling understood.

― Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

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It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed when in reality you're all tiresomely similar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstances.

― Jasper Fforde, The Eye of Zoltar

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What she needed was just one person, one wise and sympathetic grown-up who could help her.

― Roald Dahl, Matilda

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"Why do you help these strangers?" she asked Tiffany now. "They are not of your clan. You owe them nothing."

"Well," said Tiffany, "although they are strangers, I simply think of them as people. All of them. And you help other people--that's how we do it."

"Does every person do it?" said Nightshade.

"No," said Tiffany. "Sadly, that is true. But many people will help other people, just because, well, because they are other people. That's how it goes."

― Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown

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It’s in those moments of admitting and accepting your own terribleness that you realize other people can be terrible too. And if they can be terrible too, then maybe they can be vulnerable too, caring too, and all the things that you are and hope to be.

― Aaron Starmer, Spontaneous

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It's a problem, wanting to be seen. That's got to be why ghosts haunt. You spend all day with living, breathing people, but no one notices you. Maybe if you're a ghost you try to whisper first. Or sit on the edge of someone's bed. But after a while, you'd have to scream. Throw things around. I think you'd be willing to scare the living shit out of someone just so they'd finally see you.

― J.C. Geiger, Wildman

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The true value of communication is often not so much what you say to each other but the simple, powerful fact that you care enough to say something to each other so often.

― Johan Bruyneel, We Might As Well Win

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The single most important thing [you can do] is to shift [your] internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand." Everything else follows from that. . . .

Remind yourself that if you think you already understand how someone feels or what they are trying to say, it is a delusion. Remember a time when you were sure you were right and then discovered one little fact that changed everything. There is always more to learn.

― Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

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You'll never understand the way the worlds really work until you surround yourself with people from all sorts of weird backgrounds.

― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 6

Boys are idiots.

Girls are idiots, too, of course, but boys are a special kind of idiot.

A girl, for instance, will vote for a boy in an election, or go to a movie that's about a boy, or buy a book that features a boy hero (or villain). Boys are much less likely to return the favor. They can't wrap their feeble minds around the idea that this girl might have anything in common with them. It's like they can't recognize girls as human beings.

― Josh Lieb, I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President

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An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

A clear 5 stars for characters, worldbuilding, and social commentary. I would go with 4 stars for plotting and pacing. Though it certainly doesn't lack for excitement and intrigue, it reads a bit episodically, with an underlying emphasis on each episode illustrating an experience more than carefully crafting a narrative. But what they illustrate is powerful and significant.

"This isn't about how I feel, officer, and this isn't a personal matter. It's a Matildan matter. Our social order depends on our ethical order, and our ethical order depends on acknowledging and rectifying moral wrongs. So yes, an apology would be appreciated, but not for my benefit, but the benefit of the society in which we all live."

Matilda is a huge interstellar vessel that has been voyaging for generations--over 300 years. The society of survivors it ferries relies on a rigid social order maintained by strict adherence to rules. And it's a familiar order: lighter skin with all of the wealth and privilege in the upper decks descending to darker skin and more menial labor below. The decks have been so divided that over the years they have each developed their own dialects and languages and subcultures. Access to location, food, medicine, and knowledge is carefully controlled by guards who are free to beat and abuse anyone they like. Everyone's identities and roles are narrowly defined.

[Aster] agreed that she wasn't special, not in the colloquial sense that implied one's difference was praiseworthy. Rather, she was plain-old strange. Always had been.

Aster has never fit any of the definitions. She is an orphan from the lower decks with a personal connection to someone with the highest privilege. She has a brilliant mind even though she is not allowed education. She has never had a servile moment in her life. She doesn't meet standard definitions of beauty. Or sexual orientation. Or gender. And she doesn't relate to language, feelings, and interpersonal interactions the ways others do.

"You're a little off, aren't you?" The woman grabbed Aster's chin, turning her face so they were forced eye to eye. "You're one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning."

Aster just wants to be herself, but her world cannot allow that. Her very existence undermines the social order. So the more Aster tries to pursue her interests and talents, the more she risks mockery, imprisonment, beatings, rapings, and worse. Her passions include medicine--providing care to the lower decks that might otherwise be denied--and solving the puzzle of her long-dead mother, an astrophysicist mechanic who might just have discovered lost secrets about Matilda that could change everything. She pursues them with the help of her loved ones, her Aint Melusine, best friend Giselle, mentor and fellow misfit Surgeon General Theo, and a complex web of others throughout the giant ship.

Aster's story is just as layered and complex as she is. Just as real and personal and nuanced. As eloquent, expressive, and heartfelt. And, though often painful and not exactly enjoyable, important and rewarding.

I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?

The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater

What labels define you? Which boxes contain you? No middle ground. No grey. Keep it simple. Describe yourself with categories. Binaries. Either-ors. Extremes.

Once you tell me, do I know you?

Or do you want to say, "Wait, that's not really me. I'm much more complicated and nuanced than that. Those are mere ideas. I'm a person."?

This is the story of two teens who didn't fit nicely into categories. For a short while in 2013-4, they were media sensations. The media loves extremes. All the outsiders kept their definitions of the two simple, imposed their preferred categories, saw only ideas and symbols. Stripped these two people of their humanity. This book gives it back.

The 57 Bus is a marvelous work of investigative storytelling. Through extensive interviews, documents, and fact gathering, Slater has found the people behind the headlines. Sasha, who fell asleep on a bus to wake up on fire. Richard, who made an impulsive decision in an attempt to be silly. The family, friends, mentors, and teachers who loved them both, who shaped them before the incident and supported them after through burn trauma on the one hand and prosecution on the other. All are depicted with compassion, as complicated and nuanced people. Slater uses a variety of styles to accomplish her task, a collection of short chapters that both express and explore.

Express and explore humanity.

It is a thoughtful, compelling, and moving book.

Binary

There are two kinds of people in the world.
Male and Female.
Gay and Straight.
Black and White.
Normal and Weird.
Cis and Trans.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Saints and Sinners.
Victims and Villains.
Cruel and Kind.
Guilty and Innocent.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Just two.
Just two.
Only two.