"Helping people should be nothing special..."

This morning I stole some time with the June 24 issue of The New Yorker. Readers of this blog know how much I feel I gain each time I open the pages of this magazine, how much sustenance it brings.

Several stories were of interest. Three I've clipped and filed. But for today, here, these are the lines I wish to share. I excerpt them from Larissa MacFarquhar's sympathetic profile of Ittetsu Nemoto, a Buddhist monk who has committed his life to helping the suicidal people of Japan. The piece, "Last Call," explores Japan's suicide culture and landscapes. It shares some of the letters Nemoto has received during his years of listening—and helping. And then it builds to a final, surprising page detailing the years during which Nemoto himself grew ill with five blocked arteries; his life was made even darker by the death of his father.

Through all of this, the suicidal people of Japan continued to call and e-mail Nemoto, continued to ask for his help. At one point, Nemoto grew too unwell to answer. When he could finally explain his silence to his correspondents, this man who had given everything to others was not met with sympathy.

MacFarquhar explains:

When he checked back to see how they'd responded to his announcement, he was shocked. They didn't care that he was sick: they were sick, too, they said; they were in pain, and he had to take care of them.

Lying in the hospital, he spent a week crying. He had spent seven years sacrificing himself, driving himself to the point of a breakdown, nearly to death, trying to help these people, and they didn't care about him at all. What was the point? He knew that if you were suicidal it was difficult to understand other people's problems, but still—he had been talking to some of these people for years, and now here he was dying, and nobody cared.

Ultimately, we learn, Nemoto chooses to help these people anyway. He recognizes the need to "stop thinking of this work as something morally obligatory and freighted with significance. Helping people should be nothing special, like eating, he thought—just something that he did in the course of his life."

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Larissa MacFarquhar on writing historical fiction

Larissa MacFarquhar writes pieces for The New Yorker that anyone seriously engaged with literature must read.  This is the case again with her October 15 profile of Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, which begins with these reflections on the writing of historical fiction.  I share the opening, urging you to find the magazine and read the essential whole. 

What sort of person writes fiction about the past?  It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent.  It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same people now.  It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living.  It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.

The writer's relationship with a historical character is in some was less intimate than with a fictional one: the historical character is elusive and far away, so there is more distance between them.  But there is also more equality between them, and more longing; when he dies, real mourning is possible.

Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction.  It is a pioneer country, without fixed laws.....

 On another topic altogether, I'll be posting some of the questions and answers from yesterday's Push to Publish YA panel on this blog later today.  (I promise.)

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