themarginalian.org · 12 hours ago

Why Are We Not Better Than We Are – the Marginalian

When a colossal tree fell on his friend Jon in a remote Alaskan wilderness, writer Jon Mooallem found himself kneeling on the forest floor with no rescue certainty, no medical training, and nothing to offer but the poems two college professors had once made him memorize. He recited Elizabeth Bishop, then Auden, then Frost and Kay Ryan, feeling, as he put it, "like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening." His friend survived, and when the two men reflected on it decades later, what Mooallem had experienced as utter helplessness had been received as calm - a gift he hadn't known he was giving. The story lives inside Jon Mooallem's essay collection *Serious Face*, which orbits a question he first encountered in a stranger's submitted poem at age twenty-two, grieving his father: "Why are we not better than we are?" His answer, earned through crisis and time, is that we sometimes discover our better selves not by striving toward them in ordinary life, but by being bowed to our knees - and finding, there, that we already carried what was needed.