Here is the talk from Elder Maxwell that I reference in the Thursday Easter lesson.
1- https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1976/04/jesus-of-nazareth-savior-and-king?lang=eng
Magnificent!
2- I saw this video this morning and brought the reality of the Resurrection deep in my heart even more. HE IS RISEN! Click on the link and then push play on the movie. It's wonderful.
He is Still Risen
Wishing you all a WONDERFUL, HOPEFUL HOLIDAY!
Friday, March 25, 2016
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Prodigal Son Part II
Here are the quote sources from the lesson that Laura was nice enough to share with all of us. I hope you find them as enriching as I did!
AND THANK YOU AGAIN LAURA!
Robert Millet’s book “Lost & Found: Reflections on the Prodigal Son”
Kenneth Bailey’s “Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15"
Bruce Satterfield online Meridian Magazine NT Gospel Doctrine lesson 20
Here is the link to the article that I read from at the beginning of class about training our minds and avoiding negative self-talk. M. Catherine Thomas is one of my favorite female LDS writers and scholars.
Friday, March 11, 2016
The Good Samaritan
1--Here is the text from John Welch
https://byustudies.byu.edu/system/files/PDFs/38.2WelchGoodSamaritan-e0cc9efe-bc32-471b-8b73-baeb31bb121f.pdf
(The table on page 86 is particularly instructive).
2-Breughel's "Landscape of Icarus Falling."
4-- How Everything Turns Away
Lois Lowry
University of Richmond
March 2005
(I had to include the whole text because there is no link ANYWHERE to be found. Tedious, but worth it!)
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY
How do we know what questions to ask? This is such
a different assignment from the kind I am accustomed to. It’s a
sort of reversal, for me, because each day, as I answer the
cascade of e-mails that come in through my website, or the
letters that publishers forward, I find myself again and again
trying to answer questions. Some of them silly, like “What is
your favorite color?” (which seems to be a favorite of 10-yearold
girls) and some of them irritating, like “How many books
have you written?” – irritating because you want to say, “Don’t
you know how to look things up? Don’t they teach “library
skills” any more, for god’s sake?”
Nobody suggests that I ask questions.…or even to
think about the asking of questions.…and yet I think it is the
task of the writer of fiction, always, to ask. But you did. Thank
you for that.
**
I began preparing this speech when I was on vacation
recently. I actually took my laptop with me to a Caribbean
beach where I was sharing a rented house with a group of close
friends. In fact, though they needled me about the fact that I
was holed up with my computer while they were out snorkeling
and kayaking, the question put to me by the University of
Richmond – “How do we know what questions to ask?” –
provided a lot of dinner table conversation each evening, as
eight people from eight different professions—a Unitarian
minister, a sculptor, a scientist, a restaurant owner, a composer,
among others—argued and debated “how do we know what
questions to ask” and okay, I confess, ate too much and drank a
substantial amount of wine.
I listened to, and participated in, all of those
conversations and I suppose I took bits and pieces of those
opinions each time I went (reluctantly) back to my computer,
and maybe I incorporated them into my own thoughts as I
worked.
Then I came home, back to snowy Boston, back to
reality, with my tan fading even as I got off the plane. I dumped
leftover sand out of my sandals and Windexed the spit out of my
snorkeling goggles and put them away, and weighed myself and
decided to go on a diet, and I went back to real life and back to
my computer.
Then I was blindsided. This was about two weeks ago.
The phone started to ring and the e-mails came non-stop.
(Some of them were because I had been a clue….54
across, to be precise….in the New York Times crossword puzzle
the week that I was away. It was amazing how many people do
that puzzle, and of that number, how many of them got in touch
with me. It included a man in Texas whom I last saw when he
was a boy, 50+ years ago, in high school.)
But the thing that whacked me upside the head, as it
were, was something else. There were newspapers and radio
stations calling, asking for a statement, because in two separate
places in the United States…Florida and Missouri, as it
happened…books of mine had incited controversies. People were
taking sides. Hearings were being held. In one case (Lake Wales,
Florida) the book in question, (a light-hearted novel published
way back in 1982) the school board actually voted to ban the
book, to remove it from the school libraries.
In Kansas City, a hearing was scheduled for this week
to decide the fate of The Giver. Someone e-mailed me, and I
quote: “The forces of evil are coalescing” (and he was on the
side wanting to retain the book!) Emotions were very high.
So I answered questions, made statements, did
telephone interviews, wrote letters, and for a period of several
days was completely distracted and did not go back to the
speech I’d begun writing.
One morning I checked the Kansas City newspaper to
see what frenzied outbursts had newly appeared, and I read
this, from a woman who wanted to ban The Giver: “The lady
(that would be me) writes well, but when it comes to the ideas
in that book, they have no place in my kid’s head.”
And from another: “Everything presented to kids
should be positive and uplifting...”
And you know the phrase that came to my mind, as I
read those? The phrase I had given the University of Richmond
as a title for this speech:
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
Let me explain that.
I was asked, probably six weeks or so ago, to provide
a title for this talk, and it was much too soon…I had not yet
thought about what I would say. I knew, of course, because it
has been provided to me, what the theme of this series was to
be: “How do we know what questions to ask?”
Thinking about that question, (hastily, because I had
to provide a title), I thought: We don’t. We don’t have a clue.
Then I thought: Why don’t we?
And the answer that came to me was: Because we
turn away. A phrase from an Auden poem came to my mind.
(I happen to be a great fan of W. H. Auden. Once, in
fact, at a dinner party, the talk turned to poetry, and a man
sitting on my left—a complete stranger, someone I had never
met before that night—asked me what my favorite line from all
of poetry was. I replied, “Lay your sleeping head, my love,
human on my faithless arm” and he looked absolutely terrified
and quickly turned to the person on his other side).
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
It’s true, I think, that we turn away from things.
We turn away sometimes because it is too painful,
and we don’t want to face it (I have a close friend, a dear and
honorable man, who cannot go to the Holocaust Museum); and
sometimes we turn away simply because it is too hard, and asks
more of us than we have to give.
And sometimes we are simply not paying attention.
The poem by Auden from which the line comes is
called “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the final stanza speaks of an
actual painting that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in
Brussels.
….In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have
seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I had quoted it back in 1990, in accepting the
Newbery Medal for Number the Stars a book set in Europe in
1943, a time when too many people turned away.
Suddenly, thinking of that poem, and reading the
words of the frightened people in Kansas City, it all began to
come together in my mind.
I wanted to call up my friends from the preceding
week in the Bahamas—who had all, after our vacation together,
gone their separate ways—and tell them. I didn’t, though. I am
telling you, instead.
**
First, because we don’t have the painting in front of
us, let me describe the scene: It is actually called “Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus” and it’s a complex landscape. A farmer
wearing a bright crimson shirt is guiding a plough behind a
horse in the foreground, and beyond him, past a border of
shrubbery, another man, a shepherd, stands beside his dog
while his sheep graze nearby. Behind him, across a vast bay, a
great city rises, and surrounding the bay, jagged cliffs and
mountains emerge. Several sailing vessels are moving through
the turquoise water; and all of it is bathed in a golden light from
the low sun beyond.
In the lower right hand corner of the painting, in a
place where the sea is dark, shadowed by one of the ships, two
bare legs are visible in the water. You can almost hear the
thrashing sounds and feel the anguish of the drowning boy.
And it’s not just a drowning boy; it’s a colossal
tragedy. He has flown! Up to the sun! His attempt is amazing,
and his failure is monumental; he has flown higher and he has
fallen farther than any human ever has.
And no one is noticing.
They’re too busy, maybe. They’re in a hurry, perhaps.
They have somewhere to get to. Or perhaps it is just too
demanding, too scary, too sad.
And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
How everything turns away.
**
Thirty-three years ago my son Ben, then eight years old, took
his pet rabbit, Barney, out of his cage and let him nibble and
scamper in the lawn of our front yard. He had done it many
times before. But on this particular summer day, a neighbor’s
German Shepherd came bounding out of his own yard nearby
and grabbed Barney Bunny by the neck.
Somehow Ben rescued Barney and came into the
house holding him, and I examined the mortally injured rabbit—
its eyes glazing, a bit of blood leaking from his mouth—and had
to tell Ben that his pet was probably not going to survive. We
talked sadly about it, Ben and I, and the he left the kitchen, still
cradling his dying pet in his arms.
After a while I went to see how and where he was, and
from the upstairs hallway I could see that he had taken Barney
into his bedroom and placed him in his bed. The bedcovers were
drawn up to the rabbit’s chin, the long ears were neatly spread
on the pillow. Ben was lying beside him. I tiptoed away, not
wanted to intrude.
Some time later Ben came to me and told me that
Barney had died. Together we planned a funeral.
And Ben explained what he had been thinking about
as he lay there beside Barney. He was remembering, he told me,
the saddest sentence he had ever read. Page 171 of Charlotte’s
Web.
“No one was with her when she died,” was the
sentence.
**
“Everything presented in a book for a child should be
positive and uplifting,” the woman in Kansas City said last week.
There is nothing “positive or uplifting” about a
solitary death.
But there is something profoundly moving about a
man, a gifted writer, E.B. White, who was able to put down on a
page eight words…”No one was with her when she died”… that
went to the heart of a little boy and taught him something about
loneliness and loss.
How everything turns away? That writer didn’t avert
his eyes from something painful. I wish I had known him. I hope
I’ve learned from him. He knew what questions to ask.
**
In 1992 I sat down to wrote the book that ultimately would be
titled THE GIVER. Probably THE GIVER is the main reason that
I have been invited to speak to you here tonght, because it is the
best-known (and most controversial) of my so-far 32 books.
There is always a period of time, after I have written
a book, before it is published, when I begin to worry that my
brain has simply run out and become empty, the way a cookie
jar does, and all the good stuff is good; only a stiff raisin and
some stale crumbs left. I worry then that I will never be able to
write the next one.
I was in that period...that frightening “Oh my God, I
will never have another idea. My career is over” phase in the fall
of 1992 when I took a trip to Virginia.
It was something I did very frequently then, flying
from Boston, where I lived, to Charlottesvile, renting a car,
driving west to Staunton. My brother was a doctor there. My
parents, in 1992, were 86 and 87 years old, and they were
failing. A few months before, Jon and I moved both of them to a
nursing home not far from his office. He was able to see them all
the time. I flew down whenever I could.
During that visit in 1992, I went, as I always did, first
to see my mother in the medical section of the nursing home,
the secotion where she lay bedridden, fragile and blind, attached
to an oxygen hose. She would die within a few months, and I
think both of us, she and I, knew that that was coming. Perhaps
we were both in an odd way welcoming the idea of it; I know that
on her 86th birthday, not long before, when I had read her the
cards that had come, she chuckled and said, “Well, at least no
one wished me happy returns!”
She was quite ready to leave life behind.
But she did not want to leave her memories untold.
Her mind was quite intact, her memories quite clear, and during
my visit she simpy wanted to tell me the stories from her past.
Inconsequential, some of them: a dog she had had as a child; a
naughty escapade of her little brother; a summer evening walk
with her father. But she went on as well to reminisce about her
high school and college years, her meeting my father. Their
marriage. The birth of her first child, my sister; and that
memory diverted her to another, some years later, to the
December morning when her first child, my sister Helen, died.
I knew that had been the saddest day of her life—it
had been mine, as well, to that point (now, having lost a child of
my own, I can no longer say that)—and I tried, sitting there by
her bed, to move away from it, to direct her to other topics,
other memories. But she lingered there, telling the details of it,
neeeding to remember the anguish of it, for a long time.
When she tired and drifted off to sleep, I went to the
other section of the nursing home, the assisted living wing
where my father was. He was up and about, shuffling a bit,
leaning on a cane, but still teasing the nurses aides—one of them
was named Patsy and he always called her Patsy Cline and sang
a few phrases —“Crazy, Crazy fer feelin’ so loneleee”—to her,
making her giggle. He always remembered me when I came. He
showed me off: “This is my daughter, she writes books, she lives
in Boston.” to people who could not have cared less.
But he had lost his own past. He didn’t remember his
own childhood, his career, the places we had lived, the cars he
had loved—he was a car guy—the travels, the war, any of it.
And he didn’t remember my sister. “What was her
name?” he asked, when I mentioned her. “Helen,” I told him, and
showed him a picture of the two little girls. He frowned at it and
shook his head. “And you say she died? How did that happen?”
Driving my rental car back to the airport I began to
think about all of that. What if there were a medication, maybe a
shot, they could give Dad, and he would remember Helen?
But how sad that would be, for him. He was there, too,
with her when she died. Why make him remember that day?
Well, then, I thought, not wanting to let go of the
“what if” that makes a writer’s imagination ease into high gear:
What if there were a shot to give Mother? It wouldn’t take away
all those happy memories she enjoys so much...but if it could
just obliterate the day her daughter died?
For a writer, the question is most often “what if...?”
And so, from the ”what if” of my father’s failing
memory, and from my own musing about the compromises we
make, I created a world—not a large one; a small
community—set in the future, in a time when technology had
advanced in ways that would make human existence
comfortable and safe through the manipulation of memory.
But for me, because I write for a young audience, the
questions that incite and inspire a book must always be
presented through the consciousness of a young person. And so
I created a boy, and I named him Jonas.
Here is how I create a character. He (or in many
cases, she) appears, fully-formed, in my mind. I have a very
visual imagination. I can see the character. Most often he or she
tells me his or her name. That was true in this case.
I saw a boy, young, barely adolescent, ordinary in
appearance. His name was Jonas.
I moved into him and looked out through his eyes. His
world was pleasant and well-organized. He had family, friends,
things to do.
But there was also a feeling (for me, the writer) of
something amiss. I wasn’t certain, myself, what it was. It was
like being six, examining the drawing labeled “What’s wrong wih
this picture?” on the back of the cereal box. Everything looks
right. But then you find the little things: the shoe that has no
laces, the cat with only one ear.
I knew something was wrong. I did not know yet,
myself, what is was, when I began the book with this sentence:
“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be
frightened.”
Then I forced myself to look very, very closely at the
world this boy lived in. It was like picking up a rock in a swamp
and seeing the toxic filth underneath, the oozing, slimy,
squirming things that hide out of the daylight. The things that
we don’t want to see. The things we would like to turn away
from.
“Everything we present to kids should be positive...”
the woman in Kansas City said.
I got an email this morning (Wednesday morning,
March 9th, is when I am writing this part) from a 26-year-old
woman who wrote:
I read
the book The Giver when I was about 18 years old
and I really identified with the message of
how … when we become so afraid of experiencing pain
and difficulty,we become afraid of life itself.
She went on to tell me things about her experiences
and about decisions she had made based on what she had
learned from reading that book years before. Her decisions had
to do with facing pain. She had, in essence, chosen not to turn
away.
**
Sixty eight years ago this month, in March of 1937, I was born
in Honolulu. My father, though he was an oral surgeon by
profession, was also a very fine photographer, a collector of
cameras. My mother always compained that evry time we
moved (and we moved often, he being a career Army officer) he
would stake out a place for his darkroom before she had figured
out where she could set up her sewing machine.
My first photograph…or the first photograph of
me…was taken, by my father, when I was 36 hours old. My
name was different then. They had named me Sena, for my
Norwegian grandmother, and that was my name until she was
notified; then she sent a telegram insisting that they give me an
American name, and so I was renamed Lois Ann for my father’s
two sisters.
And there were countless photographs thereafter.
Movies, too. In the same years that Gone with the Wind and The
Wizard of Oz were being filmed, my father was filming …quite
professionally in quality…my sister and me toddling in the
gardens surrounding our home in Wailua, on the island of Oahu.
It seems laughable now, in the world of TV and
computers and VCRs, but throughout my childhood, it was
always an exciting night when we could talk Dad into showing
the home movies. Look: there’s Daddy on a horse! And here’s
mother pouring milk for the two little girls. (We always
wheedled Dad into showing that scene backwards, so that the
milk amazingly jumped back into the pitcher). Look: there’s Lois
on the beach at Waikiki, with a pail and shovel.
I want you to hold this picture in your mind: a small
blonde girl, new to the world, on a tropical beach, laughing as
the breeze blows her sun hat, and she reaches up to hold it on
her own head. Behind her the turquoise water laps gently at the
white sand.
**
Are you able to see the little girl on the beach? Keep
her there, in your mind.
Now turn your visual imagination into a split screen
because I want you to hold onto the image of the little girl but I
want you to see another scene as well.
This is a scene of a town, a fictional town called
“Omelas” from a story by Ursula LeGuin. I can’t do it justice and
I wish I had time to read you her words. She describes a town
beside a bay, and it is vibrant with color: flags on the boats in
the harbor, red roofs on the houses, painted walls, gardens and
parks…and processions on the day of celebration she describes:
people moving, wearing robes; music playing, people with
tambourines and flutes; children calling to one another, birds
flying above; broad green meadows beyond the town, and joyous
clanging of bells. Horses with their manes braided with flowers.
Young people dancing and singing. Prosperity and abundance.
**
Split your screen again. Move your mind to a
different place and time. Picture now, as well, an eleven year old
girl on a green bike. She is wearing boys’ high-top sneakers
because she yearns, secretly, to be a boy, and she looks for ways
to make herself seem boyish and brave,
It is 1948. I have just finished sixth grade, and my
father…the career military man…has now moved his family to
post-war Japan. We go by ship from New York, down through
Panama, across the Pacific, a journey of many weeks, and my
father is waiting for us in Japan, and the green bike is waiting
there for me, too.
He moves us into an American style house (to my
disappointment, because I had envisioned a house with sliding
walls and straw-matted floors) surrounded by other Westernstyle
houses and all of it encircled by a wall.
But the bike is my freedom. I ride the green bike
again and again through the gate of the compound’s wall into
the bustling section of Tokyo called Shibuya.
I slow my bike when I discover a school, and I linger
there, watching, when the children in their dark blue uniforms
play in the schoolyard. One boy, just about my age, stares back
at me. We look intently at each other.
Then I mount my bike again and ride away.
**
Now you should have three images. One, a little girl
on a beach in 1940. Second, an amazing place, a place of
vibrant celebration—an imaginary town called Omelas, created
and described by Ursula Le Guin. And finally, a gawky seventhgrader
on a green bike in 1949.
I want to show each of them to you again.
I have the actual film at home, transferred from my
father’s old movie film to a video. It was someone else, watching
the video once in my living room, who pointed out what was in
it, what had always been there. As the child plays blissfully in
that sunshine, with the Pacific lapping against the sand near her
feet, as she laughs and reaches for the bonnet that has been
lifted by the breeze….behind her, small on the horizon, moves
slowly across, blurred in the distance, a battleship. It is the
Arizona, headed into port at Pearl Harbor.
It contains 1,100 men who will be dead soon.
It was a tragedy unfolding, and the three year old
child plays as children will, and how was she to know? But as
an adult, watching the film again and again…I simply focused
only on myself. The blondeness of me. The happiness of me. I
never looked beyond.
“You have the capacity to see beyond, “The Giver tells the boy.
And perhaps we all do. But beyond is where the hard
things are.
How everything turns away.
**
What do we look away from in the second scene? This
time I am going to use Ursula LeGuin’s actual words:
In a basement under one of the beautiful public
buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of
one of its spacious private homes, there is a room.
It has one locked door, and no window. A little
light seeps in dustily between cracks in the
boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window
somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the
little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted,
foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The
floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as
cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three
paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or
disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting.
It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six,
but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded.
Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has
become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and
neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles
vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits
hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and
the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds
them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the
mops are still standing there; and the door is
locked; and nobody will come. The door is always
locked; and nobody ever comes, except that
sometimes--the child has no understanding of time
or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly
and opens, and a person, or several people, are
there. One of them may come in and kick the child
to make it stand up. The others never come close,
but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.
The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled,
the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people
at the door never say anything, but the child, who
has not always lived in the tool room, and can
remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes
speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me
out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child
used to scream for help at night, and cry a good
deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "ehhaa,
eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It
is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its
belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn
meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks
and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits
in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of
Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others
are content merely to know it is there. They all
know that it has to be there. Some of them
understand why, and some do not, but they all
understand that their happiness, the beauty of
their city, the tenderness of their friendships,
the health of their children, the wisdom of their
scholars, the skill of their makers, even the
abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers
of their skies, depend wholly on this child's
abominable misery.
**
They would like to do something for the child. But
there is nothing they can do. If the child were
brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted,
that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and
beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be
destroyed. Those are the terms.
The people view the child, know that it is there ache
for it.
But their comfort depends upon the child’s misery,
and so they find a way to live with that knowledge.
They do so by turning away. To do otherwise would
cost them too much.
**
Finally, there is the girl on the bike. She left Japan when she
was fourteen. She grew up here and there, went to college,
married, had children, eventually grandchildren. She became a
writer.
It’s not true to say that I thought often about the
Japanese boy, the one from whom I had turned away, to whom I
had been afraid to say hello. But from time to time,
remembering my childhood, his face, his solemn look, swam into
my memory.
In 1994, when “The Giver” was awarded the Newbery
Medal, a picture book called “Grandfather’s Journey” was
awarded the Caldecott. Its author/illustrator was Allen Say.
Allen is Japanese, though he has lived in the USA since he was a
young man.
He gave me a copy of “Grandfather’s Journey” and
inscribed it to me. In return, I signed “The Giver” to him, writing
my name in Japanese below my usual signature. He chuckled,
looking at it, and asked me how I happened to be able to do that.
You can picture the ensuing conversation.
“I lived in Japan when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,”
I explain.
“What years?” asks Allen Say.
“1948,49,50. I was born in 1937.”
“Me too. We’re the same age. Where did you live?”
“Tokyo,” I tell him.
“Me too,” he says. “What part?”
“Shibuya.”
“So did I! Where do you go to school?” Allen asks me.
“Meguro. I went by bus each day.”
“I went to school in Shibuya.”
“I remember a school there,” I tell him. “I used to ride
my bike past it.”
Silence. Then: “Were you the girl on the green bike?”
Allen and I are close friends now. But we had lost 57
years of friendship because we had both turned away. To do
otherwise—in that place and that time—would have been too
hard.
**
More and more, in the alienated and frightening world
we live in now, I think it is essential that we enter the dark
places, and to face what is too painful, too hard, what costs too
much. We have to look at what is in the distance, on the
horizon. To listen to the language we don’t understand. And to
face the horrible thing in the locked room..
I think we…and by we I mean you and me, and the
young people whom I address in my books…we must look at and
ask questions about poverty and pain and injustice, about
hunger and genocide and ignorance, about greed and power. It
all, I think, comes down to one question and that is the one that
we should know, always, to ask. We should ask it of the chained
child in the basement, of the young men on the slow-moving
ship, of the one who speaks another language. We should ask,
“In what way are we connected to one another?”
One of the reasons they have been debating The Giver
in Kansas City (where, incidentally, the school board finally
voted unanimously to retain the book in the schools) is because
of what it says about the story on the inside of the book jacket:
In the telling it questions every value we have taken
for granted and reexamines our most deeply held beliefs.
Why, I wonder, are people so afraid to do that?
I feel very strongly that we should question our own
beliefs and rethink our values every single day, with open minds
and open hearts.
We should ask ourselves again and again how we are
connected to each other.
And we should teach our children to do so, and not to
turn away.
Thank you.
https://byustudies.byu.edu/system/files/PDFs/38.2WelchGoodSamaritan-e0cc9efe-bc32-471b-8b73-baeb31bb121f.pdf
(The table on page 86 is particularly instructive).
2-Breughel's "Landscape of Icarus Falling."
4-- How Everything Turns Away
Lois Lowry
University of Richmond
March 2005
(I had to include the whole text because there is no link ANYWHERE to be found. Tedious, but worth it!)
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY
How do we know what questions to ask? This is such
a different assignment from the kind I am accustomed to. It’s a
sort of reversal, for me, because each day, as I answer the
cascade of e-mails that come in through my website, or the
letters that publishers forward, I find myself again and again
trying to answer questions. Some of them silly, like “What is
your favorite color?” (which seems to be a favorite of 10-yearold
girls) and some of them irritating, like “How many books
have you written?” – irritating because you want to say, “Don’t
you know how to look things up? Don’t they teach “library
skills” any more, for god’s sake?”
Nobody suggests that I ask questions.…or even to
think about the asking of questions.…and yet I think it is the
task of the writer of fiction, always, to ask. But you did. Thank
you for that.
**
I began preparing this speech when I was on vacation
recently. I actually took my laptop with me to a Caribbean
beach where I was sharing a rented house with a group of close
friends. In fact, though they needled me about the fact that I
was holed up with my computer while they were out snorkeling
and kayaking, the question put to me by the University of
Richmond – “How do we know what questions to ask?” –
provided a lot of dinner table conversation each evening, as
eight people from eight different professions—a Unitarian
minister, a sculptor, a scientist, a restaurant owner, a composer,
among others—argued and debated “how do we know what
questions to ask” and okay, I confess, ate too much and drank a
substantial amount of wine.
I listened to, and participated in, all of those
conversations and I suppose I took bits and pieces of those
opinions each time I went (reluctantly) back to my computer,
and maybe I incorporated them into my own thoughts as I
worked.
Then I came home, back to snowy Boston, back to
reality, with my tan fading even as I got off the plane. I dumped
leftover sand out of my sandals and Windexed the spit out of my
snorkeling goggles and put them away, and weighed myself and
decided to go on a diet, and I went back to real life and back to
my computer.
Then I was blindsided. This was about two weeks ago.
The phone started to ring and the e-mails came non-stop.
(Some of them were because I had been a clue….54
across, to be precise….in the New York Times crossword puzzle
the week that I was away. It was amazing how many people do
that puzzle, and of that number, how many of them got in touch
with me. It included a man in Texas whom I last saw when he
was a boy, 50+ years ago, in high school.)
But the thing that whacked me upside the head, as it
were, was something else. There were newspapers and radio
stations calling, asking for a statement, because in two separate
places in the United States…Florida and Missouri, as it
happened…books of mine had incited controversies. People were
taking sides. Hearings were being held. In one case (Lake Wales,
Florida) the book in question, (a light-hearted novel published
way back in 1982) the school board actually voted to ban the
book, to remove it from the school libraries.
In Kansas City, a hearing was scheduled for this week
to decide the fate of The Giver. Someone e-mailed me, and I
quote: “The forces of evil are coalescing” (and he was on the
side wanting to retain the book!) Emotions were very high.
So I answered questions, made statements, did
telephone interviews, wrote letters, and for a period of several
days was completely distracted and did not go back to the
speech I’d begun writing.
One morning I checked the Kansas City newspaper to
see what frenzied outbursts had newly appeared, and I read
this, from a woman who wanted to ban The Giver: “The lady
(that would be me) writes well, but when it comes to the ideas
in that book, they have no place in my kid’s head.”
And from another: “Everything presented to kids
should be positive and uplifting...”
And you know the phrase that came to my mind, as I
read those? The phrase I had given the University of Richmond
as a title for this speech:
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
Let me explain that.
I was asked, probably six weeks or so ago, to provide
a title for this talk, and it was much too soon…I had not yet
thought about what I would say. I knew, of course, because it
has been provided to me, what the theme of this series was to
be: “How do we know what questions to ask?”
Thinking about that question, (hastily, because I had
to provide a title), I thought: We don’t. We don’t have a clue.
Then I thought: Why don’t we?
And the answer that came to me was: Because we
turn away. A phrase from an Auden poem came to my mind.
(I happen to be a great fan of W. H. Auden. Once, in
fact, at a dinner party, the talk turned to poetry, and a man
sitting on my left—a complete stranger, someone I had never
met before that night—asked me what my favorite line from all
of poetry was. I replied, “Lay your sleeping head, my love,
human on my faithless arm” and he looked absolutely terrified
and quickly turned to the person on his other side).
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
It’s true, I think, that we turn away from things.
We turn away sometimes because it is too painful,
and we don’t want to face it (I have a close friend, a dear and
honorable man, who cannot go to the Holocaust Museum); and
sometimes we turn away simply because it is too hard, and asks
more of us than we have to give.
And sometimes we are simply not paying attention.
The poem by Auden from which the line comes is
called “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the final stanza speaks of an
actual painting that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in
Brussels.
….In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have
seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I had quoted it back in 1990, in accepting the
Newbery Medal for Number the Stars a book set in Europe in
1943, a time when too many people turned away.
Suddenly, thinking of that poem, and reading the
words of the frightened people in Kansas City, it all began to
come together in my mind.
I wanted to call up my friends from the preceding
week in the Bahamas—who had all, after our vacation together,
gone their separate ways—and tell them. I didn’t, though. I am
telling you, instead.
**
First, because we don’t have the painting in front of
us, let me describe the scene: It is actually called “Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus” and it’s a complex landscape. A farmer
wearing a bright crimson shirt is guiding a plough behind a
horse in the foreground, and beyond him, past a border of
shrubbery, another man, a shepherd, stands beside his dog
while his sheep graze nearby. Behind him, across a vast bay, a
great city rises, and surrounding the bay, jagged cliffs and
mountains emerge. Several sailing vessels are moving through
the turquoise water; and all of it is bathed in a golden light from
the low sun beyond.
In the lower right hand corner of the painting, in a
place where the sea is dark, shadowed by one of the ships, two
bare legs are visible in the water. You can almost hear the
thrashing sounds and feel the anguish of the drowning boy.
And it’s not just a drowning boy; it’s a colossal
tragedy. He has flown! Up to the sun! His attempt is amazing,
and his failure is monumental; he has flown higher and he has
fallen farther than any human ever has.
And no one is noticing.
They’re too busy, maybe. They’re in a hurry, perhaps.
They have somewhere to get to. Or perhaps it is just too
demanding, too scary, too sad.
And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
How everything turns away.
**
Thirty-three years ago my son Ben, then eight years old, took
his pet rabbit, Barney, out of his cage and let him nibble and
scamper in the lawn of our front yard. He had done it many
times before. But on this particular summer day, a neighbor’s
German Shepherd came bounding out of his own yard nearby
and grabbed Barney Bunny by the neck.
Somehow Ben rescued Barney and came into the
house holding him, and I examined the mortally injured rabbit—
its eyes glazing, a bit of blood leaking from his mouth—and had
to tell Ben that his pet was probably not going to survive. We
talked sadly about it, Ben and I, and the he left the kitchen, still
cradling his dying pet in his arms.
After a while I went to see how and where he was, and
from the upstairs hallway I could see that he had taken Barney
into his bedroom and placed him in his bed. The bedcovers were
drawn up to the rabbit’s chin, the long ears were neatly spread
on the pillow. Ben was lying beside him. I tiptoed away, not
wanted to intrude.
Some time later Ben came to me and told me that
Barney had died. Together we planned a funeral.
And Ben explained what he had been thinking about
as he lay there beside Barney. He was remembering, he told me,
the saddest sentence he had ever read. Page 171 of Charlotte’s
Web.
“No one was with her when she died,” was the
sentence.
**
“Everything presented in a book for a child should be
positive and uplifting,” the woman in Kansas City said last week.
There is nothing “positive or uplifting” about a
solitary death.
But there is something profoundly moving about a
man, a gifted writer, E.B. White, who was able to put down on a
page eight words…”No one was with her when she died”… that
went to the heart of a little boy and taught him something about
loneliness and loss.
How everything turns away? That writer didn’t avert
his eyes from something painful. I wish I had known him. I hope
I’ve learned from him. He knew what questions to ask.
**
In 1992 I sat down to wrote the book that ultimately would be
titled THE GIVER. Probably THE GIVER is the main reason that
I have been invited to speak to you here tonght, because it is the
best-known (and most controversial) of my so-far 32 books.
There is always a period of time, after I have written
a book, before it is published, when I begin to worry that my
brain has simply run out and become empty, the way a cookie
jar does, and all the good stuff is good; only a stiff raisin and
some stale crumbs left. I worry then that I will never be able to
write the next one.
I was in that period...that frightening “Oh my God, I
will never have another idea. My career is over” phase in the fall
of 1992 when I took a trip to Virginia.
It was something I did very frequently then, flying
from Boston, where I lived, to Charlottesvile, renting a car,
driving west to Staunton. My brother was a doctor there. My
parents, in 1992, were 86 and 87 years old, and they were
failing. A few months before, Jon and I moved both of them to a
nursing home not far from his office. He was able to see them all
the time. I flew down whenever I could.
During that visit in 1992, I went, as I always did, first
to see my mother in the medical section of the nursing home,
the secotion where she lay bedridden, fragile and blind, attached
to an oxygen hose. She would die within a few months, and I
think both of us, she and I, knew that that was coming. Perhaps
we were both in an odd way welcoming the idea of it; I know that
on her 86th birthday, not long before, when I had read her the
cards that had come, she chuckled and said, “Well, at least no
one wished me happy returns!”
She was quite ready to leave life behind.
But she did not want to leave her memories untold.
Her mind was quite intact, her memories quite clear, and during
my visit she simpy wanted to tell me the stories from her past.
Inconsequential, some of them: a dog she had had as a child; a
naughty escapade of her little brother; a summer evening walk
with her father. But she went on as well to reminisce about her
high school and college years, her meeting my father. Their
marriage. The birth of her first child, my sister; and that
memory diverted her to another, some years later, to the
December morning when her first child, my sister Helen, died.
I knew that had been the saddest day of her life—it
had been mine, as well, to that point (now, having lost a child of
my own, I can no longer say that)—and I tried, sitting there by
her bed, to move away from it, to direct her to other topics,
other memories. But she lingered there, telling the details of it,
neeeding to remember the anguish of it, for a long time.
When she tired and drifted off to sleep, I went to the
other section of the nursing home, the assisted living wing
where my father was. He was up and about, shuffling a bit,
leaning on a cane, but still teasing the nurses aides—one of them
was named Patsy and he always called her Patsy Cline and sang
a few phrases —“Crazy, Crazy fer feelin’ so loneleee”—to her,
making her giggle. He always remembered me when I came. He
showed me off: “This is my daughter, she writes books, she lives
in Boston.” to people who could not have cared less.
But he had lost his own past. He didn’t remember his
own childhood, his career, the places we had lived, the cars he
had loved—he was a car guy—the travels, the war, any of it.
And he didn’t remember my sister. “What was her
name?” he asked, when I mentioned her. “Helen,” I told him, and
showed him a picture of the two little girls. He frowned at it and
shook his head. “And you say she died? How did that happen?”
Driving my rental car back to the airport I began to
think about all of that. What if there were a medication, maybe a
shot, they could give Dad, and he would remember Helen?
But how sad that would be, for him. He was there, too,
with her when she died. Why make him remember that day?
Well, then, I thought, not wanting to let go of the
“what if” that makes a writer’s imagination ease into high gear:
What if there were a shot to give Mother? It wouldn’t take away
all those happy memories she enjoys so much...but if it could
just obliterate the day her daughter died?
For a writer, the question is most often “what if...?”
And so, from the ”what if” of my father’s failing
memory, and from my own musing about the compromises we
make, I created a world—not a large one; a small
community—set in the future, in a time when technology had
advanced in ways that would make human existence
comfortable and safe through the manipulation of memory.
But for me, because I write for a young audience, the
questions that incite and inspire a book must always be
presented through the consciousness of a young person. And so
I created a boy, and I named him Jonas.
Here is how I create a character. He (or in many
cases, she) appears, fully-formed, in my mind. I have a very
visual imagination. I can see the character. Most often he or she
tells me his or her name. That was true in this case.
I saw a boy, young, barely adolescent, ordinary in
appearance. His name was Jonas.
I moved into him and looked out through his eyes. His
world was pleasant and well-organized. He had family, friends,
things to do.
But there was also a feeling (for me, the writer) of
something amiss. I wasn’t certain, myself, what it was. It was
like being six, examining the drawing labeled “What’s wrong wih
this picture?” on the back of the cereal box. Everything looks
right. But then you find the little things: the shoe that has no
laces, the cat with only one ear.
I knew something was wrong. I did not know yet,
myself, what is was, when I began the book with this sentence:
“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be
frightened.”
Then I forced myself to look very, very closely at the
world this boy lived in. It was like picking up a rock in a swamp
and seeing the toxic filth underneath, the oozing, slimy,
squirming things that hide out of the daylight. The things that
we don’t want to see. The things we would like to turn away
from.
“Everything we present to kids should be positive...”
the woman in Kansas City said.
I got an email this morning (Wednesday morning,
March 9th, is when I am writing this part) from a 26-year-old
woman who wrote:
I read
the book The Giver when I was about 18 years old
and I really identified with the message of
how … when we become so afraid of experiencing pain
and difficulty,we become afraid of life itself.
She went on to tell me things about her experiences
and about decisions she had made based on what she had
learned from reading that book years before. Her decisions had
to do with facing pain. She had, in essence, chosen not to turn
away.
**
Sixty eight years ago this month, in March of 1937, I was born
in Honolulu. My father, though he was an oral surgeon by
profession, was also a very fine photographer, a collector of
cameras. My mother always compained that evry time we
moved (and we moved often, he being a career Army officer) he
would stake out a place for his darkroom before she had figured
out where she could set up her sewing machine.
My first photograph…or the first photograph of
me…was taken, by my father, when I was 36 hours old. My
name was different then. They had named me Sena, for my
Norwegian grandmother, and that was my name until she was
notified; then she sent a telegram insisting that they give me an
American name, and so I was renamed Lois Ann for my father’s
two sisters.
And there were countless photographs thereafter.
Movies, too. In the same years that Gone with the Wind and The
Wizard of Oz were being filmed, my father was filming …quite
professionally in quality…my sister and me toddling in the
gardens surrounding our home in Wailua, on the island of Oahu.
It seems laughable now, in the world of TV and
computers and VCRs, but throughout my childhood, it was
always an exciting night when we could talk Dad into showing
the home movies. Look: there’s Daddy on a horse! And here’s
mother pouring milk for the two little girls. (We always
wheedled Dad into showing that scene backwards, so that the
milk amazingly jumped back into the pitcher). Look: there’s Lois
on the beach at Waikiki, with a pail and shovel.
I want you to hold this picture in your mind: a small
blonde girl, new to the world, on a tropical beach, laughing as
the breeze blows her sun hat, and she reaches up to hold it on
her own head. Behind her the turquoise water laps gently at the
white sand.
**
Are you able to see the little girl on the beach? Keep
her there, in your mind.
Now turn your visual imagination into a split screen
because I want you to hold onto the image of the little girl but I
want you to see another scene as well.
This is a scene of a town, a fictional town called
“Omelas” from a story by Ursula LeGuin. I can’t do it justice and
I wish I had time to read you her words. She describes a town
beside a bay, and it is vibrant with color: flags on the boats in
the harbor, red roofs on the houses, painted walls, gardens and
parks…and processions on the day of celebration she describes:
people moving, wearing robes; music playing, people with
tambourines and flutes; children calling to one another, birds
flying above; broad green meadows beyond the town, and joyous
clanging of bells. Horses with their manes braided with flowers.
Young people dancing and singing. Prosperity and abundance.
**
Split your screen again. Move your mind to a
different place and time. Picture now, as well, an eleven year old
girl on a green bike. She is wearing boys’ high-top sneakers
because she yearns, secretly, to be a boy, and she looks for ways
to make herself seem boyish and brave,
It is 1948. I have just finished sixth grade, and my
father…the career military man…has now moved his family to
post-war Japan. We go by ship from New York, down through
Panama, across the Pacific, a journey of many weeks, and my
father is waiting for us in Japan, and the green bike is waiting
there for me, too.
He moves us into an American style house (to my
disappointment, because I had envisioned a house with sliding
walls and straw-matted floors) surrounded by other Westernstyle
houses and all of it encircled by a wall.
But the bike is my freedom. I ride the green bike
again and again through the gate of the compound’s wall into
the bustling section of Tokyo called Shibuya.
I slow my bike when I discover a school, and I linger
there, watching, when the children in their dark blue uniforms
play in the schoolyard. One boy, just about my age, stares back
at me. We look intently at each other.
Then I mount my bike again and ride away.
**
Now you should have three images. One, a little girl
on a beach in 1940. Second, an amazing place, a place of
vibrant celebration—an imaginary town called Omelas, created
and described by Ursula Le Guin. And finally, a gawky seventhgrader
on a green bike in 1949.
I want to show each of them to you again.
I have the actual film at home, transferred from my
father’s old movie film to a video. It was someone else, watching
the video once in my living room, who pointed out what was in
it, what had always been there. As the child plays blissfully in
that sunshine, with the Pacific lapping against the sand near her
feet, as she laughs and reaches for the bonnet that has been
lifted by the breeze….behind her, small on the horizon, moves
slowly across, blurred in the distance, a battleship. It is the
Arizona, headed into port at Pearl Harbor.
It contains 1,100 men who will be dead soon.
It was a tragedy unfolding, and the three year old
child plays as children will, and how was she to know? But as
an adult, watching the film again and again…I simply focused
only on myself. The blondeness of me. The happiness of me. I
never looked beyond.
“You have the capacity to see beyond, “The Giver tells the boy.
And perhaps we all do. But beyond is where the hard
things are.
How everything turns away.
**
What do we look away from in the second scene? This
time I am going to use Ursula LeGuin’s actual words:
In a basement under one of the beautiful public
buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of
one of its spacious private homes, there is a room.
It has one locked door, and no window. A little
light seeps in dustily between cracks in the
boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window
somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the
little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted,
foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The
floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as
cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three
paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or
disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting.
It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six,
but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded.
Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has
become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and
neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles
vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits
hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and
the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds
them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the
mops are still standing there; and the door is
locked; and nobody will come. The door is always
locked; and nobody ever comes, except that
sometimes--the child has no understanding of time
or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly
and opens, and a person, or several people, are
there. One of them may come in and kick the child
to make it stand up. The others never come close,
but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.
The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled,
the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people
at the door never say anything, but the child, who
has not always lived in the tool room, and can
remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes
speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me
out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child
used to scream for help at night, and cry a good
deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "ehhaa,
eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It
is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its
belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn
meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks
and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits
in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of
Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others
are content merely to know it is there. They all
know that it has to be there. Some of them
understand why, and some do not, but they all
understand that their happiness, the beauty of
their city, the tenderness of their friendships,
the health of their children, the wisdom of their
scholars, the skill of their makers, even the
abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers
of their skies, depend wholly on this child's
abominable misery.
**
They would like to do something for the child. But
there is nothing they can do. If the child were
brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted,
that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and
beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be
destroyed. Those are the terms.
The people view the child, know that it is there ache
for it.
But their comfort depends upon the child’s misery,
and so they find a way to live with that knowledge.
They do so by turning away. To do otherwise would
cost them too much.
**
Finally, there is the girl on the bike. She left Japan when she
was fourteen. She grew up here and there, went to college,
married, had children, eventually grandchildren. She became a
writer.
It’s not true to say that I thought often about the
Japanese boy, the one from whom I had turned away, to whom I
had been afraid to say hello. But from time to time,
remembering my childhood, his face, his solemn look, swam into
my memory.
In 1994, when “The Giver” was awarded the Newbery
Medal, a picture book called “Grandfather’s Journey” was
awarded the Caldecott. Its author/illustrator was Allen Say.
Allen is Japanese, though he has lived in the USA since he was a
young man.
He gave me a copy of “Grandfather’s Journey” and
inscribed it to me. In return, I signed “The Giver” to him, writing
my name in Japanese below my usual signature. He chuckled,
looking at it, and asked me how I happened to be able to do that.
You can picture the ensuing conversation.
“I lived in Japan when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,”
I explain.
“What years?” asks Allen Say.
“1948,49,50. I was born in 1937.”
“Me too. We’re the same age. Where did you live?”
“Tokyo,” I tell him.
“Me too,” he says. “What part?”
“Shibuya.”
“So did I! Where do you go to school?” Allen asks me.
“Meguro. I went by bus each day.”
“I went to school in Shibuya.”
“I remember a school there,” I tell him. “I used to ride
my bike past it.”
Silence. Then: “Were you the girl on the green bike?”
Allen and I are close friends now. But we had lost 57
years of friendship because we had both turned away. To do
otherwise—in that place and that time—would have been too
hard.
**
More and more, in the alienated and frightening world
we live in now, I think it is essential that we enter the dark
places, and to face what is too painful, too hard, what costs too
much. We have to look at what is in the distance, on the
horizon. To listen to the language we don’t understand. And to
face the horrible thing in the locked room..
I think we…and by we I mean you and me, and the
young people whom I address in my books…we must look at and
ask questions about poverty and pain and injustice, about
hunger and genocide and ignorance, about greed and power. It
all, I think, comes down to one question and that is the one that
we should know, always, to ask. We should ask it of the chained
child in the basement, of the young men on the slow-moving
ship, of the one who speaks another language. We should ask,
“In what way are we connected to one another?”
One of the reasons they have been debating The Giver
in Kansas City (where, incidentally, the school board finally
voted unanimously to retain the book in the schools) is because
of what it says about the story on the inside of the book jacket:
In the telling it questions every value we have taken
for granted and reexamines our most deeply held beliefs.
Why, I wonder, are people so afraid to do that?
I feel very strongly that we should question our own
beliefs and rethink our values every single day, with open minds
and open hearts.
We should ask ourselves again and again how we are
connected to each other.
And we should teach our children to do so, and not to
turn away.
Thank you.
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