‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: George Saunders on how stories teach empathy (from ‘The Guardian’):

The Booker-winning author on how fiction unites us as societies become ever more fractured

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/15/could-i-understand-the-people-who-rushed-into-the-capitol-george-saunders-on-how-stories-teach-empathy

 

FROM A GORDON PARKS BOOK of his photos I looked through yesterday in Strand bookstore. Mobile, Alabama in the 1950s. I know such signs existed from seeing pictures like this in books. I think I remember small signs saying that at gas station drinking fountains and restrooms when my family would drive to Florida when I was young.

For five days now I’ve been reading five pages of Ulysses in the morning. I enjoy the ritual of it, and the language which has a music to it. I don’t understand every line. But so what. I don’t understand every line of some of my favorite songs. I’ve read Ulysses twice before. 30 years ago I read five pages every morning like now in a first floor apartment in Lakewood, Ohio. I read it out loud. I maybe had a cigarette.