WHAT THE MAN IS
a painting is more than just a vase of flowers. it is art that may or may not contain a vase of flowers.
a novel is more than just a story. it is art that may or may not contain a story.
a painting is made of marks that make shapes and colors. they must be beautiful marks even in the making of an ugly painting.
a novel is made of words that make ideas into sentences. they must be beautiful sentences even in the making of an ugly novel.
My sister judy and I shared a quality more or less identically, even though she was a shy quiet ‘good girl’ and I was an outspoken somewhat arrogant loner. (we were both ‘nice’ in our different ways.) we both suffered increasingly into adolescence with Intermittent Explosive Disorder. This in spite of the fact that she was shy and quiet and obedient in church, in school, in the family, and as far as I know among her friends, and I was challenging and rebellious everywhere.
And when both of us became teenage parents in emotionally difficult circumstances this disorder was exacerbated and became very hard on our spouses and especially our children.
Neither my dad, who was mr. steady, nor my mom, who was shy and somewhat emotional and, I think, chronically slightly depressed, ever showed any signs of this disorder — neither did my shy older brother or my rather vivacious and talkative younger sister. Why, with all the genes we shared from a common gene pool, this should have so equally afflicted my sister and me and no others I have thought hard and long to understand. But still I do not.
I do think that in some ways we haven’t developed in molecular genetics well enough, that the answer to this behavior still lies there, rather than in birth order or any other situational explanation.
there is a little bit of sink or swim in every aspect of the human world. at the risk of veering toward the fran liebowitz model, as harsh as it may seem, in the end it’s hard to be honest about the prospects of real people without admitting that some of them, through no fault of their own, are going to fail. they are going to fail in the usual (and unusual) ways that people do, in mundane (and spectacular) ways, and no amount of well-intentioned intervention is going to save them.
