If
you have any aspiration to be a successful essayist, or newspaper
columnist, or if you think your writing is good enough that the legacy
media should be begging you to enrich their pages with your prose, read
this excerpt from the master, Margaret Atwood, best known as the author
of The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx & Crake, who many believe is the best writer alive in the world today. They would get no argument from me. Simply awesome.
Encouraging the Young, by Margaret Atwood
I
have decided to encourage the young. Once I wouldn't have done this,
but now I have nothing to lose. The young are not my 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 bulemia, 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 and 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.
This excerpt is from Atwood's new book The Tent, just published this week, and was printed in yesterday's Toronto Star. I'm picking up my copy of the book today. |
9:22:55 AM 
|
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
