{"id":4091,"date":"2011-02-07T10:30:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T15:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/?p=4091"},"modified":"2011-02-07T10:54:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T15:54:21","slug":"the-treasure-he-left-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/2011\/02\/the-treasure-he-left-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The treasure he left us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reader.100.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reader.100.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"reader.100\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4092\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reader.100.jpg 100w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reader.100-80x80.jpg 80w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 100px) 100vw, 100px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>By <em>Vicky Dickson<\/em><br \/>\n<\/strong>There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an irony attached to achieving great renown as a writer. In a way, such writers become like landmarks, those places everyone intends to visit &#8230; eventually. <!--more-->There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no real urgency, since it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assumed the landmarks will always be around; the books will always be in print. So we put off visiting, put off reading, and thereby deny ourselves both pleasure and enlightenment.<br \/>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4094\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4094\" style=\"width: 229px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reynoldsprice.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reynoldsprice-229x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"reynoldsprice\" width=\"229\" height=\"300\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-4094\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reynoldsprice-229x300.jpg 229w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reynoldsprice-61x80.jpg 61w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/reynoldsprice.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 229px) 100vw, 229px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4094\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo courtesy of Duke Office of News & Communications<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\nSo it was for me with Reynolds Price. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d often heard him on NPR\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s All Things Considered, and read his memoir, A Whole New Life, about the aftereffects of the treatment for a deadly tumor that grew around his spinal cord. But I was embarrassingly ignorant of the great body of Price\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work. So his death has inspired me to begin a study of some of the 40 genre-spanning books that the longtime Duke professor produced during 50-plus years of writing.<br \/>\n I wanted to see for myself why Price became such an important figure in America literature. It only took reading \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Fare to the Moon,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a long story from the three-story collection The Foreseeable Future for me to start to understand, and to be awed by his ability to craft sentences that are breathtaking in the way they cut to the quick. Like this one:<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153She was one real woman named Leah Birch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c whatever her color or the size of her house \u00e2\u20ac\u201c who had finally cared so deep and steady as to all but fill the gully cut in him by his beautiful mother when she heard his prayers one December night and kissed his cheek and then left him forever by morning.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nPrice\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s are sentences you need to pay close attention to; they need time for their revelations to unfold.<br \/>\nBut beautiful sentences don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t count for much in a story in which the characters don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel real, where they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re one-dimensional or their actions conform to the needs of a plot rather than springing from any essential motivation. So it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fortunate that Reynolds also had great empathy for his characters. Though \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Fare to the Moon\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is about tremendous pain that is caused by interracial adultery, none of the people in it are stereotypical; you come to understand why they do what they do, and don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel like blaming any of them. And perhaps the empathy produced by reading about such people even enhances your ability to empathize with the people struggling all around you.<br \/>\nIt may well be that Price\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to empathize was grounded in his deep religious faith. In Letter to a Man in the Fire, he wrote of the private, non-institutional faith that probably enabled him to successfully face the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153danger for me if I went on living as my sense of a writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life appeared to demand \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a long silent watch on the world, then decades of solitary reporting.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nThat faith may also have allowed him to see the awful pain that accompanied his cancer as not only a condition that connected him more surely to the whole of suffering humanity, but as a path toward strength: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Poets more ancient than Aeschylus have hymned the awful paradox that humankind can apparently only advance through suffering.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nPrice offered his faith, in full awareness of the disdain religion often provokes among the learned, as a means of countering the cynicism he perceived among some of the college students he taught, their choice of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lifelong mental and spiritual death in late adolescence, if not sooner \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the curse of surrender to the backwash of time and the all but irreparable friction of trifling or too demanding human interactions.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\n Price offers readers, still, a new way of looking at the world \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and hope to those in search of it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another measure of the greatness of the artist we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lost.<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<br \/>\nLocal history buffs, and anyone else who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curious about the town we live in, have a real treat in store this month with the Feb. 7 release of Carrboro, a pictorial history by longtime residents Dave Otto and Richard Ellington. Come out to Flyleaf on Feb. 20 at 4 p.m. to pick up a copy and get it signed. You can also catch the authors at Carrboro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Centennial Event on March 3, or stop by Townsend Bertram &#038; Company on March 5 between 2 and 5 p.m. for another book signing.<br \/>\nChatham county resident Belle Boggs will join Kenan Visiting Writer Lori Ostlund at McIntyre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s on Feb. 5 at 11 a.m. for a short story reading. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss the opportunity to become acquainted with these two highly talented young writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Vicky Dickson There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an irony attached to achieving great renown as a writer. In a way, such writers become like landmarks, those places everyone intends to visit &#8230; eventually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4091"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4096,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4091\/revisions\/4096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/mill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}