"Here for It, or How to Save Your Soul in America"

29 June 2020: "And if ever there was a time to play the national anthem, it's then. It's in this place where something new is being built, where people are united in one goal, with one voice, where the future is hard to make out but, yes, it's there. We're there. Better and more complicated. That's the only country I can survive in. I don't live in that country, but every day by existing, by speaking, by loving, by writing, I make a vow to get there, step-by-step." --R. Eric Thomas

I finished Here for It early today--just after midnight--and closed it with that sad satisfaction that comes at the end of every great book. Thomas finished the book before our current moment of dual (linked) crises, but it is amazingly such a gift for this time. It is so hard not to get bogged down in the hopelessness that seems to surround us right now. But Thomas looks at hopelessness and brings in what has always helped us endure in America--love, family, friendship, joy. Those don't erase the bad parts, but they give us a kind of antidote, or at least to kind of squint into the distance to see something better. That is--and has long been--a profoundly moving part of American identity.

Starting another book today that in some ways couldn't be more different: Walking to Listen, by Andrew Forsthoefel, this year's Common Reading at Shepherd. But already, I can see some connections.

And whose voice was in my head as I read the words quoted above--from Thomas's penultimate chapter, about his wedding? Of course, it was Walt. And whose book does Forsthoefel carry with him on his journey across America? Do I even have to write it?

Here For It

26 June 2020: I have been portioning out chapters of R. Eric Thomas's Here For It like delicious treats. It's hard to think of another book in which I've written "ha!" (my annotations are pretty simple) so many times or one that has made me put a star (again, I keep it simple folks) or some double lines for emphasis right after those "ha!" marks. The book is hilarious, smart, moving, and so welcome for times like these. *gestures broadly at everything*

Settled down and made my way through a few more chapters tonight, not long after catching up with some beloved grad school friends on Zoom. This section, where he talks about having brunch with a friend in Spring 2017 (when things were so very bad politically, but wow...we had no idea) and deciding they were going to try to find moments of joy, feels so important to me tonight: "We are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all--it matters."

Genius...

20 February 2020: "Virginia Woolf was like 'Senator Warren said she would decimate the billionaire herself.'” --R. Eric Thomas in his latest masterpiece, this one on last night's debate.