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Authors: Scott Turow
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of a problem with us: the generation who won't throw out their bell-bottoms. Whenever something by the Beatles comes on the car radio, my son begins to moan for fear I'm going to sing along. 'But look,' I sometimes want to say, 'all these people said they were going to change things, and things changed: The war. The cruel formalities that disadvantaged minorities or women. People stopped behaving like they'd all been knocked out of the same stamping plant.' These days I say I'm going to stop dropping my underwear on the bathroom floor, and I can't even change that. So naturally I think something special happened in the sixties. Didn't it? Or was it just because I was at that age, between things, when everything was still possible, that time, which in retrospect, doesn't seem to last long?
- MICHAEL FRAIN
'The Survivor's Guide,' September 4, 1992
MANY YEARS AGO, I LIVED WITH A WOMAN WHO LEFT graduate school in Philosophy right after she read a remark of Nietzsche's. He'd said: 'Every great philosophy [is] the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs.' In light of that observation, I guess my friend decided she was, literally, in the wrong department.
Nietzsche - and, as ever, the woman - were brought to mind recently when I went to a gathering in Washington in which some of the DC smarty-pants types, the pundits and pols, were analyzing the primaries and repeating as gospel, the adage Tip O 'Neill used to like to repeat, 'All politics are local.' But to me that saying has always seemed to be off by an order of magnitude. It's Nietzsche who was on the button. I suspect he'd say, 'All politics are personal.'
- "The Survivor's Guide, March 20, 1992
DECEMBER 4, 1995
Sonny
My mother was a revolutionary. At least that's what she called herself, although 'visionary' was probably a better word. Guns and bombs and political maneuvering, the cruel mechanics of the war for power, had little hold on her imagination. It was the Utopia beyond that inspired her, the promised land where humankind was free of the maiming effects of a hard, material fate. I stood in awe of her whirlwind energies and, in an act of faith of my own, have always kept her soaring hopes at heart. But she and I were never wholly at peace with one another. She was impulsive, a little bit off-kilter - beyond me, in all senses.
With Zora and our differences in mind, I have arrived at the courthouse late. It has been one of those mornings. Nikki would not dress. She lay down when I said stand up, took off her blouse as soon as I had it buttoned, demanded, for no reason detectable to rational inquiry, to wear blue. And when I finally resorted to
scolding, she wept, naturally, clutched my hem, and delivered her familiar entreaty: She does not want to go to school. Not today. She wants to stay home. With me. Oh, the agony of Mondays, of parting, of asking Nikki to believe, against the evidence, that she remains for me the center of the world. Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks. I'll call Marietta with orders to continue every case. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty and compulsion. Nile Eddgar's trial starts. I must go off to my other world, play dress-up and make-believe. And so I begin the week in familiar torment, telling myself I am not my mother, that I am somehow on the road to conquering what remains of her in me.
For both our sakes, I allowed Nikki to skip the car pool and dropped her at school myself. That left me twenty minutes behind our frantic morning schedule. 'Great thing about this job,' one of the old-timers told me when I was sworn in. 'They can't start without you.' Yet I have always regarded a full courtroom waiting for a missing judge as a token of arrogance. I rush through the back door of the courtroom onto the bench, not quite prepared for the scene
- MICHAEL FRAIN
'The Survivor's Guide,' September 4, 1992
MANY YEARS AGO, I LIVED WITH A WOMAN WHO LEFT graduate school in Philosophy right after she read a remark of Nietzsche's. He'd said: 'Every great philosophy [is] the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs.' In light of that observation, I guess my friend decided she was, literally, in the wrong department.
Nietzsche - and, as ever, the woman - were brought to mind recently when I went to a gathering in Washington in which some of the DC smarty-pants types, the pundits and pols, were analyzing the primaries and repeating as gospel, the adage Tip O 'Neill used to like to repeat, 'All politics are local.' But to me that saying has always seemed to be off by an order of magnitude. It's Nietzsche who was on the button. I suspect he'd say, 'All politics are personal.'
- "The Survivor's Guide, March 20, 1992
DECEMBER 4, 1995
Sonny
My mother was a revolutionary. At least that's what she called herself, although 'visionary' was probably a better word. Guns and bombs and political maneuvering, the cruel mechanics of the war for power, had little hold on her imagination. It was the Utopia beyond that inspired her, the promised land where humankind was free of the maiming effects of a hard, material fate. I stood in awe of her whirlwind energies and, in an act of faith of my own, have always kept her soaring hopes at heart. But she and I were never wholly at peace with one another. She was impulsive, a little bit off-kilter - beyond me, in all senses.
With Zora and our differences in mind, I have arrived at the courthouse late. It has been one of those mornings. Nikki would not dress. She lay down when I said stand up, took off her blouse as soon as I had it buttoned, demanded, for no reason detectable to rational inquiry, to wear blue. And when I finally resorted to
scolding, she wept, naturally, clutched my hem, and delivered her familiar entreaty: She does not want to go to school. Not today. She wants to stay home. With me. Oh, the agony of Mondays, of parting, of asking Nikki to believe, against the evidence, that she remains for me the center of the world. Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks. I'll call Marietta with orders to continue every case. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty and compulsion. Nile Eddgar's trial starts. I must go off to my other world, play dress-up and make-believe. And so I begin the week in familiar torment, telling myself I am not my mother, that I am somehow on the road to conquering what remains of her in me.
For both our sakes, I allowed Nikki to skip the car pool and dropped her at school myself. That left me twenty minutes behind our frantic morning schedule. 'Great thing about this job,' one of the old-timers told me when I was sworn in. 'They can't start without you.' Yet I have always regarded a full courtroom waiting for a missing judge as a token of arrogance. I rush through the back door of the courtroom onto the bench, not quite prepared for the scene
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