Adelphi University assigned The Impossible‘s initial edition to every incoming student. They mailed the copies in advance and then asked students to write a letter to me summing up how the book had affected them. They then discussed their responses in class. These are two examples that they passed on to me.
Dear Paul Loeb,
Many thanks for your inspiring book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. However, post-impossible, I can’t seem to shake off this overwhelming feeling of guilt. Why, Loeb, must you strive to make me feel bad about myself? You see, I’m the kind of person who chooses reading Harry Potter over the daily news, who actually covets her time in front of the tube to zone out and soak in hilarious, but albeit, useless jokes from shows on Comedy Central or The Office. Like many other young adults I am the possessor of a cell phone, notebook computer, Ipod, and countless other gadgets and gizmos that are somehow necessities in this fast paced world. When it comes to politics, or –gulp- even the War in Iraq, I am completely in the dark. I do try, I do! I’ve made attempts to do the right thing- read an article here and there, throw a few coins in a Save Darfur collecting bank in my high school hallways, and even sport a “Be Green” bumper sticker on my dad’s old Corolla. But I can’t deny that I find it hard to keep up. I’ve admitted it, I’m a self-absorbed, ignorant, young adult with the ecological footprint of a Sasquatch, and this is my cry for help. I know I can do better, so can we talk about it?
When I read Nelson Mandela’s passage, “The Dark Years” your ideas about hope hit me. The efforts put forth by Mandela and his inmates to obtain news from the outside world were extremely risky. It was touching to see unyielding hope in a grave place, to hear of Mandela and his inmates relying on friendship, optimism, dignity and justice to fight for their rights. I am never that motivated to fight for “what’s right”, and I’m afraid that this feeling is shared among the majority of my friends, and their friends, and in fact, a large part of American youth. We’re a whole big lot of behemoths in bathrobes. (Seaquist hit close to home with her saucy passage- that “voice” could have been coming from my own head, rattling my subconscious awake and yelling “HEY! It’s time to get moving!”) Why is my generation so apathetic? It seems we are stuck in our own “Dark Years (73, 298).”
Kushner would agree with me, and in his passage he warns us that “what’s more likely to get us (169)” rather than global warming or the sun blowing up, is “our present condition of living in a world run by miscreants while the people of the world either have no access to power or have access but have forgotten how to get it and why it is important to have it (169).” The reason I think we have forgotten how to get it, this explanation for our unashamed hopelessness in obtaining power, lies in an assortment of aspects of modern society. For one, our media breeds warning. From red-meat to no-carb to no-meat –with diets that are in and out again faster than tween trends, it’s hard to be right with the times. Then, there’s always a new food revealed to have cancer causing elements. Let’s not even get into Bird Flu, E. coli, HPV and all the other life-threatening diseases. A lot of what is promoted in advertising and the media is what we need LESS of, of what out in the world is dangerous and bad. So isn’t surprising to see how easily we are scared, and on the other hand, how hard it is to regain hope in a world with such a suffocating media.
From race to religion, to even the general appearance of a person, nearly everyone can be labeled and stereotyped. Actually I am fortunate to know that in my life I have never felt prejudiced for my skin color, or subjugated for my sexuality. Unlike women in Iran whose latest fads are getting nose jobs because in their society, it’s basically the only thing worth fixing that’ll be visible to anyone besides their husbands, I have never been pressured into extreme measures for beauty. Still, thanks to the media and idea of “popular image” today even I, and any other suburban Americans like me, can be imprisoned from head (biased news stations, endless advertisements) to toe (which color polish is hottest for the season?)… quite literally. But outside my microcosmic world dominated by fashion, music, and the due dates of papers like these, there are people fighting for change. And if there’s one thing this book has taught me, it’s that it’s never too late for change, and even little ole me could make the biggest difference. I no longer feel guilty, but rather, refreshed. I have shed my “bathrobe” and call out for a newer, more libertarian garment! Thank you, Loeb, for helping me take this step toward personal change. I now vow to become aware, to believe in myself and the world, and to have hope. The next question is- what to hope for? According to Pablo Neruda, who says that simply “…to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know… widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things (133).” just to have faith in humanity and share a little compassion can make the biggest difference.
Keep the faith
[Name withheld for privacy]
And another student that they forwarded:
Dear Mr. Loeb,
Hope is defined in a modern sense “to wish for something. With expectations of its fulfillment” yet as your book has shown it transcends a simple wish and becomes sustenance for the very soul; it guides us at times when all else has failed and illuminates even the darkest corners of the human mind. Hope — such a simple word and yet it is a driving force behind the lives of so many people, hope for the future, hope for a better world and hope for peace. As a child of the new millennia I have long been without hope, just as the boy in “Mountain Music,” my life has been forever colored by the cynicism of a modern materialistic youth and the constant proliferation of the sentiment that the world around us is slowly being destroyed and there is nothing we can do about it. Everyday life serves to suck the marrow of our spirit from us and leaves us empty husks of despair, to trudge lemming-like through the shallow pool of existence. Hope in the world of today is not seen, it is not heard and to many it has deserted them.
Before reading The Impossible Will Take a Little While, I had no thoughts to the nature of hope, the amorphous concept of it was unreal to me as I meditated in my hard cocoon of antipathy. I stared first at its bright continence and resented its existence as a harbinger of change — an end to summer and the beginning of a new chapter in my life, yet now upon reflection I realize that your book has changed me more than I expected, it has evolved me from my pupa-like state and I have emerged a new being, for the first time in my life I have hope. Not only do I have hope but I am able to recognize the hopes of others and how as a global community it is hope more than anything that connects us, it surpasses the barriers we place against others and leaves us with a tether that cannot be broken or disbanded by the hatred of dissidents. As I sat here reading, I began to wonder about the nature of your hope? Were you too, stuck in the apathetical whorl that has become modern America? Is that why you have now strove to be a leader to the rest of us; to serve as an enlightened man to lead us from the cave of our unknown despair? Do you too feel that we have been splintered; yet our spirits, numb with inanity of television and fast food, are unable to feel the pain?
Your book, for me, now serves as a beacon not even of just hope but of enlightenment, it has shook me from the eternal stupor of living in a world where Brittany’s hair carries more importance than how the government is running our nation, where we should care more now than ever but instead, reality has been rejected in favor of the ephemeral pleasures of ignorance. While our illusion of invincibility sat around us like the shattered ruins of Pompeii, we did not rise and question what could have brought us so swiftly to the brink of total annihilation; we did not look for the long festering wound of ignorance and hatred that burrows into the very soul of our country; instead we turned our eyes blind and placed blame solely on those who did us wrong. We, who claim to be the height of civilization, did not turn the other cheek; instead while our nation still shook from the tremors of devastation we set about to perpetrate the same devastation on our fellow man. Now fear has become the motto of our nation; when we should have extended the healing hand of peace, we in its place pushed forth the brutal gauntlet of war and the American people set idly by, engrossed in the latest celebrity scandal and reality TV show. Yet I did not write this to discuss war, for even within this war there is still a burgeoning sprout of hope. Is that not what this is all about — life, love, existence — it’s all about hope and our ability to reach beyond ourselves to see the hopes of others; to realize that when it comes down to everything we all have the same fundamental hopes, to be safe, live in peace, and be loved by both our god and our fellow man.
I think strangely enough, I was most inspired by perhaps the shortest selection in your book; “Origami Emotion” brought tears to my eyes because I found that within my new found hope was fighting for wings just as Elizabeth Barrette’s small paper cranes. Does hope not grow just as Ms. Barrette’s cranes from blank nothingness into something truly beautiful through the labor of a small few? The simplicity of this selection reached out to me, because of endurance of spirit, just like endurance of body, we are able to reach out and grasp something meaningful, something with the ability to give our souls wings just as Barrette gives wings to her cranes.
Hope births us as nothing else can, it forges us. Antonio Machado once claimed that, “Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits;” beyond everything, beyond our political affiliations, our religious beliefs, and our own personal morals, lies who we are as people. I thank you Mr. Loeb, you have unfurled my wings and given my spirit a chance to now fly free, unchained by the weight of my cold apathy and warm in the glow…of hope.
With All My Thanks,
[Name withheld for privacy]