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The Monday Morning Memo

“Consider for a moment the lives of Timothy’s heroes. Faulkner had come of age in the Jim Crow South, a time and place with its own idiosyncratic language and an abundance of majestic themes, including Family, Race, and the Land. Hemingway had been a journalist and driven an ambulance in the First World War before hunting lions on the African savannah. And what about Dostoevsky? He had been sent to Siberia for his views. Not metaphorically, you understand. He had been put on a train and shipped to the actual Siberia. The one with the steppes and the snow! At one point, he had even been called before a firing squad, only to receive a last-minute reprieve from the Tsar. How could one expect to craft a novel of grace and significance when one’s greatest inconveniences had included the mowing of lawns in spring, the raking of leaves in autumn, and the shoveling of snow in winter? Why, Timothy’s parents hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.”

“Oh, what crueler irony could there be than for the gods to infuse a young man with dreams of literary fame ad then provide him with no experiences? But as I’ve noted, this was a secret that Timothy kept from everyone, including himself. So, every morning at 10:00, it was off to the library, where he postponed the writing of novels through the study of practices.”

– Amor Towles,
Table for Two, p. 42-43
“The Ballad of Timothy Touchett”

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Random Quote:

“

To My Mother

You were born on July 9, 1964, in Greenwood, Mississippi, delivered into the cradle of white supremacy. Listening to the stories of terror and hope woven into the story of your birth used to frighten me. The year before you entered the world, white supremacists were blocking food aid to Greenwood, trying to starve Black sharecroppers who were demanding their civil rights. You were carried home in the middle of Freedom Summer, right down the street from where Fannie Lou Hamer led a movement that included your neighbors and cousins to demand self-determination. You suckled and wailed, oblivious to your membership in the final group of Black babies born under Jim Crow. There were many such children, born just on the wrong edge of the fight for freedom. But only one of them was my mama.

“

- Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, March 2021

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