Morning Thoughts: January 16, 2018

Mornings I wander the net, landing on interesting places at times. Today I hit Dick Cavett’s interview of the writer Eudora Welty. One comment that Cavett allowed her to make stuck to me like a snowflake to a leaf. She was talking about being in Paris and he asked if she wrote while she was there (and not in Mississippi). “I didn’t mean to write there, because I was too busy looking,” she said. How illuminating.

Could something a Southerner saw in Paris contribute to Why I Live At The P.0.? (Read it before you do anything else). Maybe, just maybe.

The only thing I see so many people looking at these days is their cell phone. If we lose the eyes of a Eudora Welty, will we lose the voice of a potential William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguroor, or other? Hard as one might look, there is no material, or inspiration, for Snow Falling On Cedars inside the soldered guts of a cell phone.

Perhaps that is why I, personally, find modern fiction so hard to plow through and so tiresome to read. Mostly, they are balls of angst wrapped tightly with the life-strands of weak and helpless characters who are being “borne ceaselessly” into their own Purgatory. Many read like a bad PBS mini-series (not the many excellent ones, but the ones that go from one case of human frailty to another). One will find neither a Barkis who “is willin,’” nor a Peggotty who is amused and amenable, therein.

One thing Welty did, and she did so many things well, is to set the tone for the colorful southern character. I’m not sure Southerners, if we can lump their vast diversity into one definition, are any more colorful than anyone else. But, like the image of the empty-spirited Vietnam Veteran with his broken wings, Southerners are forever stuck in society’s stereotype.

Yes, Eudora Welty helped to form the Southerner’s image. But she did it so well, and without apparent malice aforethought.

Widening our lens, Southerners, as I say, are like everyone else. I used to think they differed in that the white ones hated African-Americans more than their “other-world” counterparts. The presidency of Barrack Obama disabused me of that notion.

Next, I thought that maybe Southerners, who do tend to express themselves well, could articulate their hatred of other races more adroitly than big-city northerners. Then, Donald Trump came along.

I guess the lesson is that each of us mentally, or actually, visits our own personal Paris from time to time. Some look and see. Some don’t. Those who look may see things that, though never outwardly manifested, may inspire and help them gain immortality.

Oh yes, those who don’t look while in their particular Paris may also gain immortality. Too often, though, it results in placing them on the wrong side of history.

Miss Welty: Definitely on the right side of history