Anne Fadiman's extraordinary personal essay, "Under Water," is an adventure story. In her youth, Fadiman goes on a rafting trip. A young man gets his foot wedged between two rocks.
Here, you might expect a successful rescue. But that's not the tale. Fadiman and her friends attempt to reach the victim--but the attempt is a failure. Next, the *adults* arrive and make an attempt--and they also fail. In other words, the kid dies.
What makes a personal narrative special is the depth of the writer's thinking. A banal lesson might be this: "Don't ever go rafting." Or this: "Carpe diem." But Fadiman takes an odd, shocking path:
The victim's shirtless torso was pale and undulating. I thought, he looks like the flayed skin on St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as I had the thought, I knew that it was dishonorable. To think about anything outside the moment, outside Gary, was a crime of inattention. I swallowed a small, sour piece of self-knowledge: I was the sort of person who, instead of weeping during a crisis, thought about something from a textbook.
That chilling paragraph makes me think of an Alice Munro observation from "The Moons of Jupiter." The narrator recalls driving her older child to an urgent medical appointment. As she drives, she thinks about how you might possibly "reapportion" your emotional investments. You might subtly harden your heart. You might begin to spend more time with the *younger* child, the child who is not going to die in a medical catastrophe. (The mother then observes her older daughter observing her.)
Anne Fadiman has a perfect ending for her confession:
When I was eighteen, I wanted to hurry through life. Twenty-seven years have passed, and my life now seems too fast. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, suspended. I might then avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water.
We're all fighting our way through the rapids--we do not have the luxury of time travel.
Great writing.
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