Letter from Thomas Fuller
I reached out to Thomas Fuller the other day, not hearing from him for awhile, having published two of his books, Monsieur Ambivalence (2013) and The Classical World (2018) both novels. I've been considering re-printing Monsieur Ambivalence, the story of a man who tries to sit for one hour in a room by himself without anxiety, the cure for all of mankind's ills as originally suggested by Blaise Pascal, thinking the story has particular relevance during this era of quarantine and social distancing. Fuller's living alone these days in a small cabin in Gooseberry Creek, waiting it out as we all are--
Dear Brooks,
sorry I've been so out of touch. I'm ok, sheltering in anonymity in the great American West near my new favorite place, Gooseberry Creek. I'll send a picture.
Don't get much news here, no Rush Limbaugh for instance, just enough to assemble a metaphor or two about the present time--that the nation is having a hard time breathing and that misinformation is now the Holy Grail, though the quest for truth is unearthing some pretty good journalists. I hadn't known, for instance, untli very recently, that there's something called The McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, founded in 1991 and endowed by Senator Mitch, or that for the first time in many moons over 50% of the world population is living below the poverty line. Both these juicy tidbits delivered via fake news sources you-know-who loves to bash.
This crisis seems to have created a giant mirror that's able to reflect the whole world--north,south,east, west--both underground and from satillite pictures taken above so that we may finally be able to see ourselves as we really are. I'm hopeful, I really am, that these sobering images of death, panic, governmental inepitude and so forth will be the animating starting points of a new world order in which at least fracking will be punishable by law.
Some other Fuller extractions--notice how often the word "great" is used by our government officials and in their political marketing prograganda: they've really ramped up the use of the word. This is very disturbing to me, as it should be to any sane, thinking person, whether one believes in God or not. It seems to me also that the whole notion of freedom is undergoing a real change. Freedom's such a loose word, the right wing in this country knew that from the beginning and used the word to their great political advantage to enslave the working class, preserve gung-ho capitalism while keeping law-breaking capitalists out of jail, and create the aspirational illusion that freedom means nothing more or less than being able to go to the mall whenever you feel like it. I do worry about the kids and the disruption of the educational systems around the country. Can they really be educated on-line? I doubt it. But perhaps the disturbance in the system will have the curious effect of creating more autodidacts; as an an autodidact myself, knowing the great joys of autodidactism, I see possible long-term benefits here for the youth of our nation
I'm cautiously optimistic, I suppose, or optimistically cautious. History's in the footnotes, as Joseph Brodsky put it. ( btw I brought Brodsky's book of essays with me to Gooseberry Creek, Less Than One, and it's kept me company on many a long windblown night here in the wilds). What else? Not much. Working on a new piece of writing. Eating and drinking well, now more than ever. Watching a lot of stuff on TV, so much that I now know the difference between a good movie and a bad movie.Thanks also for the offer of re-printing Monsieur Ambivalence. I agree, it's a tale of the times, for the times, by the times, but it will never be a bestseller.
Pandemically Yours,
Tom
Gooseberry Creek, somewhere in the western United States, photo by Thomas Fuller, April, 2020.