Full draft, later much edited, of an article for The New York Times Magazine — an issue on time capsules. This responds to the question: What would you choose to put inside a time capsule to be opened in the year 3000, beneath the Museum of Natural History?
In the Year 3000, I fear there will be no American Museum of Natural History and no New York City, so I’m afraid, ergo, no New York Times. What will there be? A smoldering plain of ashes, punctuated only by a handful of Dennys’ that, sadly, will not be able to accept Visa. A bleak vision? Perhaps. So let’s revise it. There will, in fact, be an American Museum of Natural History, and a New York City, and a New York Times, and you and I in fact will still be alive, due to medical advances, our existence prolonged indefinitely, far beyond their useful period, much like this introductory paragraph.
So here are my recommendations.
Groucho Marx: Groucho Letters (Letters from and to Grouch Marx)
Include this to show that, though we were a decadent, sloppy society, and used phrases like “in terms of its saleability aspects” and “Super-Size Me!” there were still genuine Wits among us, and that our Wits were at least as good as their Wits, even if their Wits have robotically-enhanced genitalia and computer-chip recipe books implanted in their craniums.
Dr. Seuss: The Sleep Book
Here’s hoping that, in that far distant year, there will still be kids refusing to go to sleep and overworked parents digging through cluttered bookshelves for something that rolls off the palate and is not about Silly Bad Puppies or Uplifting Pink Unicorns.
The ButtBlaster, Instructions for Use
My vision of human beings is this: we are biochemical processes. Our nervous systems propagate the fiction that we exist as individuals apart from the rest of creation. To defend this fiction, we worship at the altar of Self, and do all kinds of energetic but goofy things, like inventing the ButtBlaster. Therefore, I suggest that we include in this monumental and important Time Capsule whatever instructions are provided with the ButtBlaster. If mankind has reached a sort of luminous transcendence by that time, knowledge of the ButtBlaster will fill them with retroactive pity for us. If not, they will have a good chuckle at how crude our butt-altering tools were. That is, they will be amazed at how little we actually knew about the process of altering the size of our butts. Because whatever fabulous new technologies have been discovered, my guess is that humans will still be using them to fine-tune the size of their rears. In fact, by that time, the technology will be so wonderful, humans will even be able to fine-tune the shape of their rears. Conical, wavy, square, all will be options. Then, as now, each human being will harbor painful secret feelings that his or her rear is not as conical/wavy/square as it should be, and will suspect that this failing is attributable to some deeper, more spiritual defect. At parties, people will sneak glances at the rears of their fellows, and finding their own rears sadly lacking, will retreat to the 3-D Holographic Booth, where they will enjoy a 3-D Hologram of themselves walking through the world with the perfect rear, the rear they’ve always wanted.
Victor Klemperer: I Will Bear Witness (A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941)
A day-to-day account of the Holocaust, from the point of view of a German Jew who is spared the camps, barely, because of his conversion to Protestantism and his service in WWI. Shows that, when the Big Evil arrives, it is polite, non-monstrous, and gradual. It builds on existing Little Evils. It is very logical and lacks a sense of humor. The people who enact the Big Evil, most of them, do so with an apologetic smile and a sense that this Big Evil is only temporary, will be laughed at later, need not be opposed at the present time, because opposing it would be rather inconvenient. Useful for our Year 3000 pals for the same reason it is useful to us: The Big Evil is always lurking.
P.S. My Serious Post-1945-Or-So Canonical List would include the following:
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, Beloved)
Michael Herr (Dispatches)
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son)
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
Flannery O’Conner (Collected Stories)
Raymond Carver (Cathedral)
Tony Kushner (Angels in America)
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life)
Alice Munro (Collected Stories)
Grace Paley (Collected Stories)
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The following by George Saunders appeared in Bookforum’s Q/A column (recommended reads):
Michael Herr: Kubrick. Reading Michael Herr is like having a conversation with the most fiercely intelligent, compassionate, well-read, highly experienced genius you’ve ever met. So in Kubrick we have one genius ruminating on another, which, for me anyway, meant neglecting my real life for as long as it took me to read this book twice. I’ve also been re-reading Herr’s 1990 novel Walter Winchell, an intense lightning bolt of a novel which establishes Herr as one of the all-time Great American Dialogue Writers.
Ben Marcus: The Age of Wire and String. A dazzling and wild and seminal collection of short fiction. Marcus invents an alternate world, describes it in invented language, and yet there is no book in recent memory that better articulates the weirdness and beauty of the “actual” world. After reading this book the first time, I dreamed in Marcus’s language for nights afterward. Marcus’s work presages the future of American fiction: using oddness and technical virtuosity to cover edgy and essential moral terrain.
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Brief review by George Saunders of Gig in The Hartford Courant, December 31, 2000.
Gig, Edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter.
This book, a collection 120 interviews of Americans about their jobs, comprises a beautiful and surprising portrait of a nation. It shows contemporary Americans as goodhearted, mired in materialism, hopeful to a fault, wry, weary, heroic, and mostly, overworked. The American Worker is on a train, unsure of where the train is going, unsure of why the train is going, and on a million parallel tracks are a millon parallel Workers, and from those other tracks come complaints, wails of agony, pleas for help, but nobody can ask the conductor to slow down so they can listen or respond, because having had to slow down the train, the conductor might ask them to get off, and they will then become that most shameful thing, Unemployed/Inessential. This book made me look anew at my own life, and at the life of our culture, and reminded me that at present, in that manic work in progress that is America, our daily effort to beat back material paucity is producing a spiritual paucity that is much more dangerous.
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George Saunders recommends three books.The Washington Post, December 3, 2000.
Gig by Bowe, Bowe, and Streeter.
To read this book is to be reminded, with a club, of how complex and wonderful and terrifying and degrading America, and American capitalism, really is. American heroism is seen to be maintaining grace under donkey-levels of meaningless work. American villainy is our chronic failure to engage. The book is a beautifully edited panorama of American happy-face morality, deep cynicism, ambition and the proud occupation of impossibly arcane niches by people hoping for something more, and should be required reading for fiction writers working in first-person narration (each interview is a perfect little character sketch), politicians (who should know what and whom they are governing, and know it via stories, that most precise and non-b.s. medium) and bosses (who, like Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol, will learn that they can lighten terrible burdens with even the most simple acts of kindness).
Dances for Flute and Thunder by Brooks Haxton
Haxton is one of our nation’s finest poets — intelligent and virtuoisic and compassionate. Here he translates poems from the ancient Greek and Roman into contemporary American English, to powerful effect. The poems are moving and intense and sometimes funny and provide a deeply pleasurable, visceral shock of realizing that, clothing and time and cultural surface aside, these people are us. The fundamental human dilemmas are unchanged over the many intervening years. I have found these poems to be great daily friends, which of course is what great poems are supposed to be. Haxton brings to bear his wild poetic gifts, subjugating them to the demands of the original poems, and the effect is that we are receiving these poems in the way their original audience must have — not as museum pieces, but as essential communication.
The Bridegroom by Ha Jin
Ha Jin is an astonishingly good writer of short stories, the kind of writer who gives other writers headaches of envy even as they are rejoicing that he is in the world. His language is simple and these stories produce that wonderful feeling I get when reading Chekhov or Alice Munro or Shakespeare— I don’t sense a writer behind them. They simply exist, with as much unpredictibility and strange gorgeousness as life itself. Authorial intent seems totally absent, unless the intent can be said to be to pay total attention to the needs of the story, without attachment, and to look frankly at life in all its ugliness and wonder. I have learned never to pick this book up, even for second, unless I have a couple of free hours ahead of me: it is that good.
