Final Passages

Word limit: 600 words.

Passage 1: From Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamont

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reasons they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy—finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they’ve longed to do since childhood. But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith. Their sense of self and story shatters and crumbles to the ground. Historically they show up for the first day of the workshop looking like bright goofy ducklings who will follow me anywhere, but by the time the second class rolls around, they look at me as if the engagement is definitely off.

Passage 2: Paul Kalanithi, from When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

Webster* was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breathless creatures underground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

--T.S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”

I flipped through the Ct scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated. I was a neurosurgical resident entering my final year of training. Over the last six years, I’d examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own.

I wasn’t in the radiology suite, wearing my scrubs and white coat. I was dressed in a patient’s gown, tethered to an IV pole, using the computer the nurse had left in my hospital room, with my wife, Lucy, an internist, at my side….

*Webster here means Webster, the Early Modern playwright--famous for plays that pushed boundaries of ordinary life into the macabre and transgressive. These lines by poet T.S. Eliot quote one of his most famous lines: "the skull beneath the skin."

Passage 3: Ta Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me (2016)

[Note: Coates’ text is conceived of as a “letter” to his son (it runs 150 pages, so more of an extended essay than a “letter”!), explaining, as it were, the facts of life that all young black men should understand. It is also an extended reflection on how the world of black lives works, and an effort to explain how it has come to be this way, how much the way things now are is often no more than a continuation of the way things used to be.]

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse to stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes our body breakable.

Passage 4: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

"I do refuse it," [Dr. Frankenstein replied] "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another [monster] like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world? Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent."

"You are in the wrong," replied the fiend; "and instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it nurder if you could precipitate me into [a field of ice] and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance...."