Questioning everything

This is the cover of a collection of Eudora Welty's photographs. Isn't it a great picture? She took them during the Great Depression of the 1930s when she was working for the federal government, documenting conditions in rural Mississippi.

As I posted the quote of the week, I started thinking about what Eudora Welty said. You probably read Welty in high school. She is considered the master of the American short story, and one of her most famous stories, "Why I Live at the P.O." is in most high school literature books. One of my goals for the summer was to read, or in many cases, re-read ALL of her collected works. I managed to get through the novels and about one-third of the short stories. And I've read her delightful little memoir about becoming a writer, One Writer's Beginnings, several times. The novels were compelling--in fact, I couldn't really put them down once I got started. But they also left me thinking about them for days. They weren't beach reading, that's for sure. Still, I enjoyed them. (I'd alternate a Welty novel and a history book with some good beach reading, just to keep things from being too heavy!)

Her stories are often very funny, but also occasionally sad or biting. They explore relationships between the quirky characters who inhabited early twentieth century Southern small towns. I wonder if people today have trouble relating to her characters, and I'd love to know what you think. Certainly most people today did not grow up in that rural world she writes about. I did grow up in a small rural community and knew quirky folks like the ones she writes about. (Edna Earle Ponder, from her novel The Ponder Heart, is one of my favorites. Edna is kind of like some of the busy body women I knew growing up--including some from my own family.) She spends hours telling a traveling salesman the story of her crazy Uncle Daniel and the mysterious death of his much younger wife, all the while implying that maybe Uncle Daniel murdered the young woman. But you end up wondering who is really crazy--Edna Earle or Uncle Daniel--and who, if anyone--did any murdering. In this book like in so many of her stories, she explores some big questions (like what does it really mean to be sane?) in the context of small towns and sheltered people.

Which brings me back to the quote. She says she came from a sheltered life and that all "serious daring starts from within." I think that's really true. Living an adventurous life begins with taking some emotional and intellectual risks: exploring ideas that might seem scary or different at first, being friends with new types of people, examining new subject matter and thinking about how you can apply it in your own life.

I remember that my freshman year in college felt like that kind of interior adventure. I had been friends with pretty much the same people since elementary school. I had only met two foreigners in my entire life--exchange students from Peru who lived with two of my classmates for six weeks during eighth grade. I'd only been out of Tennessee about twice--once to the beach in Florida and once to see the Cincinatti Reds play in Ohio. My classes in high school rarely provoked any more daring thought than that it was important to learn to balance my checkbook (economics) or that algebraic equations would be useful in later life (Algebra I--and they were!) Suddenly, in college, I was grappling with questions about what one human being owed to another human being in her community (World Literature) and whether human beings have an obligation to take care of the environment (Science Thought). I went to an on-campus showing of a film about a New Zealand woman doctor who was opposing the production of new nuclear warheads by the U.S. and the USSR, even though critics called that film "un-American." (I still think the critics were wrong.) I sat in the cafeteria and talked to new friends from New England and the Midwest and Japan about these issues. That first year, my sheltered world was expanding from within, all because of the things I was thinking about in the courses I was taking and the new people I was meeting.

Yes, I had moments when I was overwhelmed, and other times when I felt somehow threatened by all the new ideas, but it was still exhilarating. I still remember it as the most exciting year of my life. I hope it's feeling that way for you, too. So here's to your serious daring beginning within--this year.