I'll be down in North Philadelphia today with the children of Centro Nueva, taking photographs as the children take photographs—as they document their world. We'll be inside a neo-natal ward, down on the courts of SquashSmarts, at dinner with those families temporarily living inside a Ronald McDonald House. Children (my son included) have always taught me the most important things about how to see and what to think, which conclusions not to draw.
The world is a slippery place, and these days we're all sliding. We're watching the green and mostly red arrows on Wall Street, the confidence polls, the housing starts. We're studying the houses themselves—the seemingly permanent posting of For Sale signs, the half-built homes that now stand naked and incomplete in roaring weather. We're waking up to the news that Doubleday has laid off 10% of its staff, that publishing houses can't much afford to invest in new books, that Barnes and Noble, which fought so hard to dominate the bookselling market, is once more clamping down, so thoroughly diminishing its orders of new books that many titles are guaranteed oblivion right directly out of the gates. Monopolizing bookselling was never—but we all knew this—a good idea.
We writers understand that our futures, like all futures, have changed. That it's going to be a whole lot harder to sell the books we love—to editors, to the book-buying public. The choice I'm making, in these difficult times, is to keep working. To read better. To think harder. To go out into the world with children, for example, and see the world as children see it.
We cannot control the forces about us. We can control how we live through this, who we are through this, how we emerge. I need the wisdom of children more than ever. I need that kind of courage.
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I've seen it in the children with whom I've talked stories, words, and writing. I saw it among the young photographers of Centro Nueva, who joined me not long ago for an afternoon of seeing, recording, bearing witness. I see it every time I talk with my son, who is home with us now, an entire month between college semesters (he talks logic, he talks hymns that become rock anthems, he talks libertarian media and its counterpoints, he talks about yielding to a truer self). What knowledge does. What learning makes one hungry for. How learning begets wanting begets needing begets passion.
