Chapter 1: What are the daily decisions we face before encountering a fork in the road?
Most days don't require big decisions. We work, eat, sleep, and get ready to do it all again. But then, every once in a while, we come to a fork in the road. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and coming up, Selected Shorts brings you fiction about hard choices and profound changes. Choose the right path and stay with us.
You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. The only constant is change. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote this millennia ago, and the idea still feels elegant and potent.
Chapter 2: How does Heraclitus's philosophy relate to change in our lives?
Heraclitus illustrated his point by adding, "...no one ever steps into the same river twice." And in our own lives, a lot of change can feel like that, almost imperceptible. Take aging, for instance. We almost can't feel it happening, and then suddenly we wake up and we're 40 or 50 or 80 years old. How did that happen?
I'm a grandmother now, but I feel like going up to my toddler and infant grandchildren and saying, just so both of you know, grandma used to be considered precocious. Sometimes, though, we come to an inflection point, a proverbial fork in the road. Maybe it's unexpected. Maybe we sense it coming on.
Whatever the case, we're going to have to recognize where we stand and make a choice about which direction to go. The days of slow and gradual are gone. Now change is barreling toward us. Today's stories are about characters who find themselves in a place in which they need to make a choice, something that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
In one tale, an ancient being forces humans to contend with the world around them. And in another, two people, each facing their own crises, might make things even stranger for one another. Our first story comes from the speculative fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin, best known as the author of the Earthsea series and the Hainish Cycle.
In her lifetime, she won every big sci-fi and fantasy award, as well as the National Book Award. And there's even a documentary about her, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. This story, Direction of the Road, is read by Nikki M. James. She recently appeared on Broadway as Ida B. Wells in the musical Suffs, won a Tony for her role in The Book of Mormon, and has appeared in series including Severance.
Just one final note before we hear the story, because I think it'll enhance your enjoyment of the piece, and it's not exactly clear right away. Your narrator isn't human, so listen closely and you will soon figure out who or what is speaking. And now, let's hear Direction of the Road by Ursula K. Le Guin, read by Nikki M. James.
Direction of the Road They did not used to be so demanding. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare. Most of the time it was just a jig-jog foot pace, and when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style.
There he'd be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside at the fields or straight at me.
And I'd approach him steadily, but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I'd finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size, 60 feet in those days, I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the ancient being in 'Direction of the Road'?
I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be windbroken or uprooted, honed or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances, be squashed. With the presence of many motor cars on the road at once, a new level of skill was required of me. As a mere seedling, as soon as I got my head above the weeds, I had to learn the basic trick of going two directions at once.
I learned it without thinking about it, under the simple pressure of circumstances on the first occasion that I was a walker in the east and a horseman facing him in the west. I had to go two directions at once, and I did so... It's something we trees master without real effort, I suppose.
I was nervous, but I succeeded in passing the rider and then shrinking away from him while at the same time I was still jig-jogging towards the walker and indeed passed him, no looming back in those days, only when I had quite gotten out of sight of the rider. I was proud of myself, being very young, that at first time I did it. But it sounds more difficult than it really is.
Since those days, I have done it innumerable times and thought nothing about it. I could do it in my sleep. But have you ever considered the feat accomplished, the skill involved when a tree enlarges simultaneously
yet at slightly different rates and in slightly different manners for each one of 40 motor cars facing two opposite directions, while at the same time diminishing for 40 more who have got their backs to it, meanwhile remembering to loom over each single one at the right moment and to do this minute after minute, hour after hour, from daybreak till nightfall or long after?
For my road had become a busy one. It worked all day long under almost continual traffic. It worked, and I worked. I did not jounce and bounce so much anymore, but I had to run faster and faster to grow enormously, to loom in a split second, to shrink into nothing, all in a hurry, without time to enjoy the action, and without rest, over and over and over again.
Very few drivers bothered to look at me, not even a seeing glance. They seemed, indeed, to not see anymore. They merely stared ahead. They seemed to believe that they were going somewhere. Little mirrors were affixed to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been. Then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only Beatles had this delusion of progress.
Beatles are always rushing about and never looking up. I had always had a pretty low opinion of Beatles, but at least they let me be. I confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness, with no moon to sliver my crown and no stars occluding my branches, when I could rest, I would think of seriously escaping my obligation to the general order of things, of failing to move.
No, not seriously. Half seriously. It was my mere weariness. if even a silly three-year-old female pussy willow at the foot of a hill accepted her responsibility and jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for each motor car on the road, was I, an oak, to shrink? Noblesse oblige, and I trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty. For fifty or sixty years, then,
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Chapter 4: How does Nikki M. James portray the character in 'Direction of the Road'?
I am an oak. No more, no less. I have my duty and I do it. I have my pleasures and enjoy them, though they are fewer since the birds are fewer and the winds foul. But long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege and it has been taken away from me. It was taken away from me on a rainy evening in March last year.
Fits and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both directions. I was so busy hurtling along, enlarging, looming, diminishing, and the light was failing so fast that I scarcely noticed what was happening until it happened.
One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need to go somewhere was exceptionally urgent and so attempted to place his car in front of the car in front of it. The maneuver involved a temporary slanting of the direction of the road and a displacement onto the far side, the side which normally runs the other direction, and may I say...
that I admire the road very highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere making. Another car, however, happened to be quite near the urgent one and facing it as it changed sides, and the road could not do anything about it being already overcrowded.
To avoid impact with the facing car, the urgent car totally violated the direction of the road, swinging it round north-south on its own terms, and so forcing me to leap directly at it. I had no choice. I had to move, and move fast, 85 miles an hour. I leapt, I loomed enormous, larger than I ever loomed before, and then I hit. The car.
I lost a considerable piece of bark, and what's more serious, a fair bit of cambium layer. But as I was 72 feet tall and about 9 feet in girth at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My branches trembled with the shock, enough that last year's robin's nest was dislodged and fell. And I was so shaken that I groaned. It was the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud.
The motor car screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow. Squashed, in fact. Its hinder parts were not much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and curled together like an old root. And little bright bits of it flew all about and lay like brittle rain. The driver had no time to say anything. I killed him instantly. It is not this that I protest. I had to kill him.
I had no choice, and therefore I have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this. As I leapt at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole and saw nothing else, then or ever. He saw me under the aspect of eternity.
He confused me with eternity, and because he died in that moment of false vision and Because it can never change, I am caught in it eternally. This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion. If the human creatures will not understand relativity very well, but they must understand relatedness.
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored in Helen Schulman's 'The Shabbos Goy'?
She is my alter ego. He looked skeptical for a moment, which I suppose I deserved. Something has to be done about my karma, I said more honestly than I meant to. Karma, said the rabbi, not an innately Jewish concept. But then again, in Judaism, there is room. And here he quoted by heart, Hillel saw a skull floating on the water. He said, because you drowned others, they drowned you.
And in the end, those who drowned you will themselves be drowned. I mean, I need to perform acts of human kindness. Like you said, it would be better for us. I pointed at my kid, the dusky rose of her cheek, big black eyes, her inky curls, caramel-colored skin so rich I was often tempted to sneak a look off the brown sugar of her neck. Neat, he said, something in him brightening.
That implies that you would find it beneficial. Yes, I nodded. I was in it for the benefits. My congregation, said the rabbi, we could use some assistance this very weekend in your very building from a Gentile. Again, he shook his head at the coincidence. Not that it matters, he and I said in unison. The baby laughed, she clapped her hands, and the rabbi and I laughed too.
A few days later, the rabbi came again to the bookstore. Maggie and I had almost finished putting the last of the poetry paperbacks in boxes, and we had a little red wagon out front. We replaced them. Terry, her second eldest and my favorite of all of her offspring, six feet tall now and
ludicrously handsome, was to ferry this precious but humble cargo by hand across the bridge to the Ile de la Cité and then over to the left bank. Poor kid. Last November, he had spent the night of his 18th birthday on a restaurant's tiled floor listening to terrorists with machine guns massacring patrons in the café next door.
For weeks, Maggie wouldn't let him out of her sight, but now they were hovering around a new normal. Today, his destination was Shakespeare and Company, one of the last English-language bookshops in Paris to endure. It was a place where print lived, wild and free, as it once had done at a movable feast. And writers and readers still roamed.
The bookstore was run by a young couple so lovely and kissed by God they needed to do one more thing to improve their karma, but that did not appear to stop them. They offered to purchase Maggie's remaining stock. The rabbi was wiping his face with a hanky. "'Is it that hot out?' I asked. This morning had felt cooler.'
Some hoodlums, they spit on me as I cross Rue de Rivoli, he said, looking both embarrassed and upset. Hoo-hoo, I said. Oh, my God. I said I picked up my bottle of Evian. Would you like to use this to wash off? Paris is getting worse and worse for us. I've soaped my face three times already, he said, but I still feel it on my skin. It wasn't like I was stupid.
I knew things sucked for the Jews in France. I had eyes. I saw the swastikas painted on the Shoah memorial when I took the baby to the Ile Saint-Louis for ice cream.
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Chapter 6: How does the divorcee navigate her new life in Paris?
I have the original at home, he said. I'm curious about the translation. Anna Akhmatova's 20 poems, converted into English by the poet Jane Kenyon, When I used to read, she was one of my sad favorites, I said. The rabbi stared at me with his kind blue eyes. Used to. It is too painful and annoying now, I said. All that useless truth and beauty. Useless. For me, literature has the power to heal.
He sighed here heavily, I supposed at the burden of a statement somewhat blasphemous. It was Kenyon who wrote about her dog. Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life. When I first read that poem, I ran out and adopted a puppy. I said, like the husband, he didn't last long. What is the price? No, don't be silly, I said. Please, I insist, take it as our gift.
You'll have to let me know if Kenyon does justice to the Russian. I will, said the rabbi, looking again at his book. Ah, but for that third eye.
Chapter 7: What role does poetry play in the relationship between the rabbi and the divorcee?
Now, about Friday night. He took a deep breath. This spiel of his would take stamina. Elvis Presley, he said, which wasn't where I expected him to stop, Martin Scorsese, American Christians who at one point in time generously executed the services you were about to perform according to the rules of Jewish law, it is possible for a non-Jew
to complete certain tasks which Jews are forbidden to perform on the Sabbath, having to do with labor, using electricity, handling money. I am told when Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman were in the American Senate, Lieberman, who is Shomer Shabbos, would sleep on his couch in his office before Saturday votes, and Gore would turn the lights off for him.
Even the President of the United States, here the rabbi could not wring the pride out of his gentle voice, President Obama did such charitable acts as a young man with loving kindness in his heart. I could never have requested this of you outright. A Jew may only accept the work of a non-Jew if it is in his or her own free will and for his and her own gain. But you volunteered. Yes, indeed.
Out of regret and existential fear or maybe just ennui, clearly I was ready to volunteer for anything. He reached into his pocket for his handkerchief once more and wiped away at that indelible, hateful spittle.
That next week, he said a man and a woman were to be married in the rabbi's shul and the bride's American relatives had rented a flat in my very building through the same website that I had, Paris Oulala. As with many apartments in Paris, the outer door to the building was unlocked only by pressing a series of numbers on a matrix that then buzzed one inside.
The lock itself was electric, as were the light switches. I turned on by my footfalls as I ascended each stairwell landing. I could safely usher the wedding guests into the interior lobby, Friday dusk through Saturday nightfall. "'until three stars are visible,' the rabbi said. "'After that, my services would no longer be necessary.'"
Although they had arrived earlier in the week, I did not meet the Grinbaums until Friday night. Around 11 p.m., they hollered up to me from the street as they could not use the phone or the outside intercom. I leaned out the window in my T-shirt and sweatpants and waved.
They thanked me so profusely when I came down the steps, my baby wide awake and ready to rock, and fussed over her so satisfyingly that I practically swooned from all the attention. For so long, only Maggie had admired her. They had Shabbos dinner at their relatives that very night and stayed out late talking. We picked this place because it was walking distance from my cousins, the mother said.
We didn't even think about the door code. And then she stifled a Pretty yawn. My cue, so I push the wooden door aside, and we enter this stairwell, ladies first.
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