Words and Meaning

I got back a little while ago from the presentation that author Tim O'Brien made this evening for the parents at my daughter's school, where he spent the day.  Although he won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato and much acclaim for In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O'Brien is probably best-known for his Vietnam-era The Things They Carried.  I re-read about the first half of it last night; it's one of the few of the hundreds of books that I've read in the past few years that has stayed with me.  My daughter's entire school read it over the summer, and her AP English class has just finished In the Lake of the Woods (a very different book, she tells me, that is now high on my list).

Tim O'Brien is as elegant a speaker as he is a writer.  Slightly built and wearing jeans and a baseball cap, he began by noting that his interest lies not in bombs or weapons, but in matters of the heart -- a statement he amplified later by explaining that while his context is war as, for example, John  Updike's is suburbia, what he has to say has to do with what goes on in the human heart.  He ended nearly an hour later by affirming  that we write "to make the absent present."

In between, before he began to read from The Things They Carried, he told a lengthy tale of youthful experiences.  I have no idea if the stories, or any portion of them, are true in the factual sense, but the telling of them was so vivid that I could only believe in every word as he spoke.  There is no question but that the stories are true in the real sense.  His point was that,  as we live our daily lives, the ordinary words that we use in the course of that living become transformed and packed with meaning for us and, in his case, become the words from which he tells his stories.

There is no way that I can do justice to his presence or to the integrity of his presentation.  As a writer, he conveys tremendous weight and authenticity in his capacity for pulling meaning from experiences that in the hands of others would simply be lost to the wind.  As a person, he reminds us that the particularities of our lives and the ways in which we choose to remember and convey them have the potential to bind us all in the universality of human pain and joy.

I am extremely pleased with myself for having skipped my own class to make a long drive in the dark and rain to hear him speak.