Word: stoics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...both authors, reticence is linked to a code of honor, to an idea of courage that requires accepting misfortune without complaint. The code is not necessarily a male code with Carver; the women (in "Careful," for example) are often more stoic than their men. In narrative style, Carver believes in saying less. He has been called the founder of the new Minimalism, or, according to Granta, Dirty Realism, whose followers include Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tobias Wolff and Bobbie Ann Mason...
Consider for a moment the blessings of the apple tree. First of all, it is beautiful, not with the upright pride of the pine or maple but with a gnarled and twisted strength that implies the stoic wisdom of many gales survived. And it flowers every spring, with a glowing white fragrance that attracts the inquiries of the honeybee. Once its leaves are out, it provides shelter for the larks and thrushes that sing from its branches. In due time, the fading flowers turn into apples, offering a thousand fulfillments: apple pie, apple cake, applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, apple...
...those less given to ice worship, the historical approach may prove equally illuminating. Consider the early Arctic explorers, their heroic exploits, their terminal frostbite. Cultivate a noble and stoic reserve. Look hungrily about you--after all you have been subsisting exclusively on stewed husky for the last few weeks. Perhaps that light ahead is your next food depot. Perhaps you are going snow blind. What if your frostbite gets worse and your toes drop off? Where are all the Eskimos...
...easy for the artists' families, who had to endure the discomforts of the journey and then, somehow, acclimatize themselves to the utter unfamiliarity of French life. One senses a feeling of doom beneath the stoic words written by Yoneko, the wife of Saeki Yuzo, who spent two sojourns there: "After returning to Japan, my husband, it seems to me, was constantly thinking he could only accomplish the task remaining to him during his life by going back to Paris in order to paint the soiled walls and loosely-fixed posters he found on the back streets." Saeki today...
...mind those almost forgotten revolutions in Africa, from Angola through Zaire, where the rhetoric has marched quickly away from reality. An aging Chevrolet Impala with a cracked windshield and an oil light that glows menacingly in the dark rattles down a potholed road. Bouncing headlights pick out clumps of stoic people waiting for buses that arrive infrequently and full. The bus fleet, local wisdom has it, has almost been run off the road because its mechanics are employed fixing the army's Soviet T-54 tanks. Many people resort to walking, and after dark, shadowy figures flit ghostlike through...