"The Homecoming" and "August: Osage County"

What is it about family dysfunction that makes it the obsession of our best playwrights?  Not that it’s a bad thing, since it makes for some great literature (“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” etc.).

“August:  Osage County” is great, well worthy of its Pulitzer Prize.  I’d agree with those who say it’s the great American play of the last twenty years.  As I’ve said many times, “Death of A Salesman” is the best American play ever birthed, but “August” is in the discussion, and that’s high praise indeed.

But I always wonder what to do with a story that has (almost) no characters to cheer for, no one to like, no one to connect to.  No protagonists whatsoever.  It leaves you feeling a little bleak and empty, though it’s always great art.  I’ve felt this “hating every character” most acutely in the movie Election.  No characters to cheer for but a great movie for that very reason.

Something similar happens with my students; they’ll come into class and say they hated the story they read the previous night.  And after some prodding, I realize what they mean is that they hated one of the characters, a character so fully-realized that hatred was a possible reaction.  Which means the students are actually saying “I read a story in which a character became so human that I had feelings of resentment which I usually reserve for real people.  Thusly, it was a pretty amazing work of art to provoke such a response, and I can now consider said response more thoughtfully and then grow as a person.  Thank you, dear English teacher, for all that you give us to read and for all that you do.”

You’re welcome students.

"Eat and Run" by Scott Jurek

Since I was looking for a little inspiration for my triathlon coming up this August, I picked up Eat and Run by ultramarathoner Scott Jurek.  What’s an ultramarathoner you ask?  Someone who runs races longer than a marathon.  As in 50 miles.  Or 100 miles.  Or 150.  Or 165.

Yes, there’s a small group of athletes who run races that can last 24 hours.  People actually do this.  Ever get a second wind when running?  These guys get fifth and sixth winds.  Ever get bored running?  These guys get bored and then they hallucinate and then they return to sanity and then they find transcendence and then they swing back to boredom.  At that’s just the first 50 miles.

But the message you get in the book, over and over again, is this:  you are physically capable of far, far more than you think.

Last summer signed up for a long wilderness trip with NOLS.  It was a 100 mile trek in 14 days (twice as fast other trips) through the Wind River Range in Wyoming.  On day 3 I got sick.  Really sick.  Diarrhea, chills, aches, the whole bit.  That feeling where you just want to crawl under the covers, curl up in the fetal position, and moan yourself to sleep.  But I couldn’t because I HAD to hike up mountains and ford rivers and cross sheets of ice with 30 plus pounds on my back.

It sure seemed inconceivable when I got sick on day 3.  But it was entirely possible. 

I hiked all the miles, I finished the trip, finally got better on day 13, and if I had needed to, I could have gone further.  It was only a mental block that made me think I couldn’t.  It is only a metal block that makes you curl up in your bed when you’re sick, thinking you couldn’t move for anything.

I’d always heard that marathoners “hit the wall” at about 20 miles.  That means their body becomes overly fatigued, their legs turn into rubber, and their final 6 miles seem all but impossible.  I THOUGHT it was a scientific phenomenon—something that would happen to anyone if they pushed their bodies that far.  But these ultramarathoners blow that notion out of the water.  They run 6 or 7 marathons in a row.  Hitting the marathon wall is just a state of mind everyone has come to believe in—a mental limit but not a physical one.

Here’s the quote from William James that starts Eat and Run: 

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”   

  

Truth.  Like Robert Frost wrote, “The best way out is always through.”

How often do we come up to an obstruction and back off?  I worry that it's more and more tempting to bail these days.  I'm pretty sure my high school students back off all the time.  A challenging reading assignment?  Back off and check Facebook.  Complicated calculus problem?  Back off and see if you have any text messages.  Difficulty organizing your history paper?  Back off because YouTube is calling again.

Every year I tell them I have a great concern about their young lives: that they'll  never feel the rich pleasures of reading and writing because they never worked through the difficulties to get to what’s on the other side.

But back to my triathlon.  I’ve been logging two, three hours of workouts lately.  And if you do that five days in a row, you really start to wear down.  Now when I start my swim/bike/run, I’m already spent.  But that’s what’s supposed to happen—that means I’m getting into shape because I’ve brought the obstruction closer . . . I’ve got some of that going through to go through.   

(But it better happen within the hour ‘cause a new episode of “Louie” is on.)