Read Online The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders - Free Book Online
Authors: George Saunders
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(between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other—perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.
Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
THANK YOU, ESTHER FORBES
It began, like so many things in those days, with a nun. Unlike the other nuns at St. Damian School, who, it seemed, had been born nuns, Sister Lynette seemed to have been born an adorable, sun-dappled Kansas girl with an Audrey Hepburn smile, who was then kidnapped by a band of older, plumper, meaner nuns who were trying to break her. I was a little in love with Sister Lynette, with her dry wit and good-heartedness and the wisp of hair that snuck out from under her wimple. I thought of a convent as a place of terrific rigor, where prospective nuns were given access to esoteric knowledge, which they were then to secretly disseminate among select students in Middle America, to save the culture. Hoping to be so identified, I would linger in Sister Lynette’s classroom after school (both of us covered in chalk dust, my wool pants smelling like Distressed Sheep) as she told me stories about her Kansas girlhood. I entertained rescue fantasies, in which Sister realized that the best way for her to serve God was to quit the nuns, marry me, and start wearing jeans as we traveled around the country making antiwar speeches. Since I was only in third grade, these fantasies required a pre-fantasy, in which pacifist aliens placed me in a sort of Aging Apparatus.
One afternoon, Sister Lynette handed me a book: Johnny Tremain , by Esther Forbes. This is the story of an arrogant apprentice silversmith in Boston during the Revolutionary War, whose prospects are cut short by a tragic accident until he finds a new sense of purpose in the war. The cover was a picture of a young Johnny, looking a bit like Twiggy. On it there was a shiny gold medallion: the Newbery Medal.
It was an award-winner.
Sister Lynette had given me an award-winner.
I was soon carrying it around twenty-four hours a day, the Newbery Medal facing out, as if I, and not Esther Forbes, had written Johnny Tremain.
“I think you can handle this,” Sister had said as she handed me the book (she’d checked it out of the library), but what I heard was: “Only you, George, in this entire moronic class, can handle this. There is a spark in you, and it is that spark that keeps me from fleeing back to Kansas.”
I imagined the scene at the convent—everyone in nun gear, sitting around a TV that was somehow always tuned to The Flying Nun. And then Sister Lynette makes her announcement:
“I’m thinking of giving Saunders Johnny Tremain. ”
A tense silence.
“Isn’t that…,” asks Sister Humiline, the principal, “an award-winner?”
“It is,” says Sister Lynette. “But I think he’s ready.”
“Well, then…,” says Sister Humiline. Clearly this is important. Denied this, Sister Lynette might make her break for Kansas. “Let him give it a try, then. But, truly, I wonder if he’s got it in him. That book is hard, and he is only a third-grader.”
“Even I had trouble with it,” pipes up a junior nun.
“I think he can handle it,” says Sister Lynette.
And the wonderful thing was: I could. I
Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
THANK YOU, ESTHER FORBES
It began, like so many things in those days, with a nun. Unlike the other nuns at St. Damian School, who, it seemed, had been born nuns, Sister Lynette seemed to have been born an adorable, sun-dappled Kansas girl with an Audrey Hepburn smile, who was then kidnapped by a band of older, plumper, meaner nuns who were trying to break her. I was a little in love with Sister Lynette, with her dry wit and good-heartedness and the wisp of hair that snuck out from under her wimple. I thought of a convent as a place of terrific rigor, where prospective nuns were given access to esoteric knowledge, which they were then to secretly disseminate among select students in Middle America, to save the culture. Hoping to be so identified, I would linger in Sister Lynette’s classroom after school (both of us covered in chalk dust, my wool pants smelling like Distressed Sheep) as she told me stories about her Kansas girlhood. I entertained rescue fantasies, in which Sister realized that the best way for her to serve God was to quit the nuns, marry me, and start wearing jeans as we traveled around the country making antiwar speeches. Since I was only in third grade, these fantasies required a pre-fantasy, in which pacifist aliens placed me in a sort of Aging Apparatus.
One afternoon, Sister Lynette handed me a book: Johnny Tremain , by Esther Forbes. This is the story of an arrogant apprentice silversmith in Boston during the Revolutionary War, whose prospects are cut short by a tragic accident until he finds a new sense of purpose in the war. The cover was a picture of a young Johnny, looking a bit like Twiggy. On it there was a shiny gold medallion: the Newbery Medal.
It was an award-winner.
Sister Lynette had given me an award-winner.
I was soon carrying it around twenty-four hours a day, the Newbery Medal facing out, as if I, and not Esther Forbes, had written Johnny Tremain.
“I think you can handle this,” Sister had said as she handed me the book (she’d checked it out of the library), but what I heard was: “Only you, George, in this entire moronic class, can handle this. There is a spark in you, and it is that spark that keeps me from fleeing back to Kansas.”
I imagined the scene at the convent—everyone in nun gear, sitting around a TV that was somehow always tuned to The Flying Nun. And then Sister Lynette makes her announcement:
“I’m thinking of giving Saunders Johnny Tremain. ”
A tense silence.
“Isn’t that…,” asks Sister Humiline, the principal, “an award-winner?”
“It is,” says Sister Lynette. “But I think he’s ready.”
“Well, then…,” says Sister Humiline. Clearly this is important. Denied this, Sister Lynette might make her break for Kansas. “Let him give it a try, then. But, truly, I wonder if he’s got it in him. That book is hard, and he is only a third-grader.”
“Even I had trouble with it,” pipes up a junior nun.
“I think he can handle it,” says Sister Lynette.
And the wonderful thing was: I could. I
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