#220 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday December 13)
Good morning,
I recently finished Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. The book is a picaresque romp of four boys along the Lincoln Highway from Nebraska to New York. The boys, and virtually everyone they meet in this early-50s story, are damaged in some way—whether as a result of the war, love unrequited, the passage of time, lost opportunity, momentary success followed by failure, personal weakness or, in the case of the boys, having spent years in a facility for juveniles, each of whom ran afoul of the law.
A passage that is most touching and explains so much about the delicate balance of talent, intelligence, creativity, self-criticism, motivation, and just trying to live life, is uttered by the older sister of one of the boys:
“When we’re young, so much time is spent teaching us the importance of keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit—a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children—and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.”
I have known a few of these people. I miss one in particular beyond words. It is four years today. I suspect there are those whose personalities, sensitivities and goodness transcend the merely corporeal. They continue to live with us and in us.
Have a good day,
Glenn
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