"The question then comes down to What are you willing to give up to do something that you really want? I never stay up past 9 pm. Because I did the math and there is no way that I could write if I stayed up past 9 pm. And a great deal of cheer and humanity, all of that socializing is lost on me. Because I know what I truly want is to be a writer. What are you willing to give up to do something you really want?"

A Story About Perseverance

Several years ago, my Uncle Nick went to see the great American author Richard Ford give a talk at a bookstore. After the reading, a middle-aged man in the audience stood up during a Q&A, and said this: 

"Mr. Ford, you and I have something in common. Just like you, I have been writing short stories and novels my entire life. You and I are about the same age, from the same background, and we write about the same themes. The only difference is that you have become a celebrated great man of letters, and I — despite decades of effort — have still never been published. This is heartbreaking to me. I have dedicated my life to writing, but with no reward. My spirit has been crushed by all the rejection and disappointment. I wonder if you have any advice for me — but please, sir, whatever you do, don't just dismissively tell me to persevere, because that's the only thing people ever tell me to do, and hearing that only makes things worse."

According to my uncle, Richard Ford said in reply, "Sir, I am so sorry for your disappointment. And please believe me, I would never insult you by telling you to simply persevere. I can't even imagine how discouraging that would be for you to hear after all these years of rejection. In fact, I will tell you something else — something that may surprise you. I'm going to tell you that you need to give up. You need to quit writing."

The audience froze. What the hell kind of encouragement was this?

But Richard Ford went on: "I say this to you only because clearly this work is bringing you no pleasure and no satisfaction. Our time on earth short, and it should be enjoyed. I give you permission to leave this dream behind and go find something else to do with your life. Go find something to do that you love, something that brings you reward and peace. Go see the world, take up new hobbies, spend time with your family and friends, fall in love, RELAX. But don't write anymore, because it seems to be killing you."

There was a long silence, and then Mr. Ford smiled kindly, and added, almost as an afterthought: "However, I will say this. If you should happen to discover, after a few years away from writing, that there is nothing you have found in the world that takes the place of writing in your life — nothing that elevates you or inspires you or moves you to the same degree that writing did….well, then, sir, I'm terribly afraid you will have no choice but to return to your labors…and to persevere."

The end.

Use this story however you need it today, guys.

ONWARD,
Liz

Bali

My trip to Bali was like stepping into a portal to a different universe, one inhabited by people whom I reckoned were so different from me--almost constitutionally different--both on the inside and out, that I wondered whether any discerning charts would have classified us into different species. They were simpletons, and I do not mean this in anyway pejoratively: they lived day in and day out as if their lives were composed of todays and tomorrows--and nothing beyond that--the past either forgotten or forgiven, either way they lived each day unencumbered by any part thereof.

The Balinese had the complexion of the sunset, that moment where the horizon had swallowed the sun just past its halfway mark, right before the skies dimmed to blue and dark blue. They were the people who had soaked in the sun for generations, darkened and browned, but nonetheless incandescent in their personality like smoldering charcoal. They were warm when I got near them: each word they said was followed with occasional nodding and a smile--almost apologetically, as if their need to verbally explain themselves was a mark of an offense having been committed on their part, and they were trying to mitigate the harm with each placating gesture.

Foreigners walked left right centre in Bali (or at least in Kuta, Seminyak and Legian) and their towering presence was so palpable, it felt almost intrusive. Most tried to soaked in the sun like the Balinese had--they flaunted their skin like they wanted to devour the sun, giving little thought or regard of how conservative or otherwise the places they were at (perhaps Bali was to them this monolithic wash of beach and babes, and all vices in between)--however, alas they were merely charred to pink: their skin blushing on the face of its defeat, accentuating its unnaturalness and the admonition by the Balinese sun. The color of the people of the sun was the Balinese's birthright, their birthmark.

The ubiquity of foreigners had over time woven its foreignness into the local fabric once upon a time displaying complete picture of traditions. By now parts of the old had been taken out--labelled as outdated, backward, or obsolete, while those which had been judged as still in line with the new norms (in other words, those that appeared 'exotic' to the foreign eyes) were kept for their redeeming commercial viability. This was the front advertised to the world. It was uncanny--to me at least--to find many Balinese who spoke English (or even Chinese, for that matter) sculpted by punctuating Balinese accent, the product of which while not altogether grammatical and complete was spoken with confidence and fluency that would put more than few of the English-speaking population to shame. I couldn't understand about one third of what was said (notwithstanding my familiarity with the English and Indonesian language), but I could tell that the Balinese knew perfectly well what they were saying, and apparently, so did the foreigners. It was like a secret club with a secret handshake. I just didn't get the memo.

The word "dodgy" would be modest to describe some of the parts in Kuta and Legian that I passed by. And while at first I wondered why they didn't better the infrastructure of these busy spots (for example, the lanes along these areas were one-way lanes, which forced you to make a long--well, longer than was necessary---detour whenever you missed a place and wanted to go back), but I now begin to think that perhaps this was so 'poorly' maintained on purpose. This had nothing to do with paying heed to traditions (I don't think prostitution and magic mushrooms were ever considered to be a part thereof); it was more about creating the ambience of disorder: hedonistic, rowdy, alive, yet a safe haven for tourists to indulge in the local vices. An order of disorder. Maybe this was why my driver could easily say that in spite of the loud music, the semi-nakedness, the overcrowding of the pubs and clubs, these places were safe and that I had nothing to worry about walking about at night. I had to take his word with a pinch of salt because he did ask me whether I would be interested to drive around the red light district to cuci mata (transliteration: wash eyes), which of course I politely declined. (My parents were sitting in the backseats.)

I dubbed the Balinese the people of the sun because the sun seemed to play a part in their collective pride as a people (I wanted to say tribal pride, but that doesn't sound just quite right). It was a part of their natural beauty, one that they unabashedly wished to share with the world: they wanted to show you what a sunset looked like, and how one should look like. And indeed they knew how to serve the sunset to their guests: with a pool by the cliff from which one could enjoy an unobstructed view of the beach stretching all the way to infinity where the roundness of the globe swallowed the vast sea, and with a healthy supply of alcoholic concoctions whose names reminded me that I was fairly close to the equator. As the sun made its lyrical descent into the horizon, pushing against blankets of clouds--resulting in a healthy mix of moments of light and shade--its reflection diffused on the surface of the waters turned the latter into silvery splendor. It was blinding, transient, unreachable; to borrow E. Gilbert's phrase: an indefensible amount of beauty. I just sat there, using every bit of my senses to drink it all in. This was the world that the Balinese lived in: an unjustifiable spectacle with which perhaps by now they were already drunk to a point of ignorance. However, I was not so lucky as they, but lucky enough to find the time albeit for a fragment of a moment to simply stop and squint. 

The Look We Wish To Live Under

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. 

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper, he had the feeling that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace the look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate. Then one day he realized that he was constantly being followed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe again! He began making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he had found his lost public. 

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second category. 

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category. 

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He travelled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare. 

Tomas' son belongs in the same category. Let me call him Simon. (He will be glad to have a Biblical name, like his father's.) the eyes he longed for were Tomas'. As a result of his embroilment in the petition campaign, he was expelled from the university. The girl he had been going out with was the niece of a village priest. He married her, became a tractor driver on a collective farm, a practicing catholic, and a father. When he learned that Tomas, too, was living in the country, he was thrilled: fate had made their lives symmetrical. This encouraged him to write Tomas a letter. He did not ask him to write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life. 

-- Milan Kundera

Novel

And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. 

This was the image from which he was born. As I have printed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. 

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? 

Staring importantly across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fists with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones--I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own 'I' ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas.

-- Milan Kundera

Sanity

'We all do it,' Adam was continuing. 'All journalists. We crate stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onward by something, we sit in people's horses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness--the extreme, outermost aspects of that person's personality--the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within DSM as mental disorders. We've dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does that say about our sanity?'

-- J Ronson

Efficient Breach

In contract law, there is a concept called "efficient breach." Most people assume that it is always "bad" to break a contract, because it essentially constitutes breaking a promise. However, there are some ways in which doing so can be good, or in the language of law and economics, efficient. This occurs when complying with the terms of the contract would result in greater economic loss than simply paying the other party's damages that have resulted from your nonperformance. For example, I commit to date someone exclusively. Maybe I even marry him.  If one of us later finds someone we prefer, it may actually be better for both parties if one or both of us break the agreement. If you believe in the value of efficient breaches like I do, then you would never get upset if your partner cheated on you. 

In efficient breaches, it is often the immoral choice that leaves everyone better off. I've lived my entire life this way, since long before I ever learned the term in law school. My child self understood the world in terms of choices and consequences, causes and effects. If I wanted to break a rule and was willing to suffer the consequences, I should be allowed to make that choice unhindered.  

I engage in this kind of self-promoting calculus in almost everything I do, often then the stakes are much higher. When my good friend's father was diagnosed with cancer, I cut off all contact with her. It sounds like a ruthless thing to do, and it was. It wasn't that I didn't love her; in fact, I loved her very much--perhaps too much. But I found I could no longer enjoy any of the benefits she had provided to me--superior advice, interesting conversation--because she was horrible to be around most of the time. I had over invested and was running many months into the red with no improvement. I found that I could not wear the mask of compassion or selflessness indefinitely without acting out in ways that were hurtful to us both. 

And so I cut off all ties and walked away. There were damages on all sides, but I had not other means of mitigating them, so it was an efficient breach. I think she would agree with me, even when I include her hurt and suffering into the equation. That alone would typically make the end of a friendship in this way a net negative. In this situation, though, my abandonment of her was to her benefit, particularly considering that my behavior was only going to get worse--that I was already tapped out in terms of being able to be supportive. I didn't leave her because I stopped caring for her. I left her because I did care for her very much. It was efficient. Still, the first couple of months apart I was just so relieved. If I was reminded of my friend, it was with gratitude that I was no longer in that unsustainable situation. As months went by, however, I began to feel the empty space in my life that she used to occupy. It was unfortunate. But this too is part of the cost-benefit analysis, when I realize that situations can often turn regrettable even though I did not regret any particular decision.  

Of course, there are negative real-world effects of making efficient breaches. In the marketplace, breaking promises decreases confidence and thereby discourages actors from engaging in future contracts. For instance, if you have been divorced too many times, people don't trust you, and so they don't want to play the game with you anymore. It's a problem. No matter how rational I may be in choosing when to follow the rules and when to break obligations, it is often insufficient for the people I am dealing with. They want more: more feeling, more attachment, more commitment, more of what they're used to. At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to emphasize, and I conclude that it doesn't. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries--I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-grounds that I have devised for these things often fail me. 

--  M. E. Thomas