Atwood's Brilliance Continues...

I just liked that title because it's all A-B-C.

Today, on the subway en route to an interview, I started Margaret Atwood's The Tent, which was a late birthday present from a fellow Atwood-lovin' friend. I'm still working on The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (which is HUGE and NEVER-ENDING), but I thought reading Atwood would look more intellectual, in case anyone at the job interview judged me on my reading material.

Of course, no one did.

Most of my experience with Atwood has been her novels. This is a book of short essays, illustrated by Atwood herself. I don't know how it's possible to fill so few pages with such substance, with such beautiful phrasing that it seems almost like poetry. I'm including one essay here, entitled "Encouraging the Young", that I found absolutely chilling. If you want to read more of the essays (and you SHOULD) go out and buy them or borrow them. Here goes:

I have decided to encourage the youth. Once I wouldn't have done this, but now I have nothing to lose. The young are not rivals. Fish are not the rivals of stones.

So I will encourage them open-handedly. I will encourage them en masse. I'll fling encouragement over them like rice at a wedding. They are the young, a collective noun, like the electorate. I'll encourage them indiscriminately, whether they deserve it or not. Anyway, I can't tell them apart.

So I will stand cheering generally, like a blind person at a football game: noise is what is required, waves of it, invigorating yelps to inspire them to greater efforts, and who cares on what side and to what ends?

I don't mean the very young, those who can still display their midriffs without attracting derision. Boredom's their armour: to them I'm a voice balloon with nothing in it.

No. It's the newly conscious young I mean, the ones with ambition and fresh diffidence, those who've learned the hard way that reach exceeds grasp nine times out of ten. How disappointed they are! And if and when they succeed for the first time, how anxious it makes them! They develop insomnia, or claustrophobia, or bulimia, or fear of heights. Now they will have to live up to themselves. Bummer.

Here I am, happy to help! I'll pass round the encouragement, a cookie's worth for each. There you are, young! What is a big, stupid, clumsy mess like the one you just made- let me rephrase that- what is an understandable human error, but a learning experience? Try again! Follow your dream! You can do it!

What a fine, shining person I am, so much kinder than when I'd just finished being young myself. I was severe then; my standards were exacting. The young- I felt- were allowed to get away with far too much, as I had been. But now I'm generosity itself. Affably I smile and dole.

On second thought, my motives are less pure than they appear. They are murkier. They are lurkier. I catch sight of myself, in that inward eye that is not always the bliss of solitude, and I see that I am dubious. I scuttle from bush to bush, at the edge of the dark woods, peering out. Yoo hoo! Young! Over here! I call, beckoning with my increasingly knobbly forefinger. That's it! Now, here's a lavish gingerbread house, decorated with your name in lights. Wouldn't you like to walk into it, claim it as your own, stuff your face on sugary fame? Of course you would!

I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.

Margaret Atwood. The Tent. Doubleday. 2006.