The Late, Great Stephen Colbert
“I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. ‘Tolkien says, in a letter back: “What punishments of God are not gifts?” ‘ Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. ‘ “What punishments of God are not gifts?” ‘ he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. ‘So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.'”
The Tale of Two Schools
Students from University Heights and Fieldston are just six miles apart, but the students live very different lives from one another. They’ve come together to share their stories with each other:
MARIENELY: “People in my community have welfare and Section 8. My family doesn’t receive that aid anymore, but we once did, so I know how it feels to let people know you receive help from the government. Sometimes I get stressed just seeing my mother working so hard to get me what I want and need. The only thing she asks for is for me to do great in school, but I wish I could get a job to help her out. She’s my motivation in life.”
ASHLEY: “I am a TEAK Fellow at Fieldston. TEAK is an organization that helps low-income students gain admission to prestigious private high schools and colleges. I wish conversations about class and wealth would happen at Fieldston, but socioeconomic status is one of the hardest things to have open conversations about. How do you make people feel safe and included without being too vulnerable?”
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
On the “writer’s writer,” George Saunders:
“We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, ‘like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.’ He described making trips to New York in the early days and having ‘three or four really intense afternoons and evenings’ with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what ‘the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.’ Saunders added: ‘The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.'”
That’s Not Funny, That’s C.K.
He talked for a while about how difficult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. “For one, I couldn’t really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn’t do that at all; I couldn’t talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, ‘Oh, shit, there goes my act.’ ” He didn’t really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn’t been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. “I just sat in my pajamas for like two years,” he said. “And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fuck around like this.’ I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, ‘Everything’s based on them now.’ “