Twenty years ago, which was twenty years after The World According to Garp was published, I wrote an afterword to the novel. Rewriting is the unglamorous part of creating, but revision is essential for clarity. In rewriting this new introduction to Garp, of course I found things to cut or change in that 1998 afterword, and I found a lot of necessary things to add.
In retrospect, it’s unnecessary to say that Garp is a worst-case scenario or that I am a doomsayer novelist, but in 1972–75—when I was teaching at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where I began writing Garp—I was worried that the subject of sexual hatred (of intolerance of sexual minorities, and sexual differences) would be outdated before I finished the novel. In 1976–77, when I was living in Massachusetts and Vermont, where I finished Garp, it was inconceivable to me that the sexual violence I was writing about would long endure. In short, I thought sexual discrimination was too backward and too stupid to last.
It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life.
It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world.
So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing.
We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow.
There are two main ways to send information out into space—as a transmission or by blasting up a physical object. Through both methods, humans have sent off all sorts of intriguing data about life on Earth. In 1995, for instance, the National Science Development Agency of Japan transmitted, among other images, one of an alien and an earthling holding hands, in the direction of the Libra constellation. We’ve sent a copy of War of the Worlds to Mars, and models of Lego figures (of the Greek gods Juno and Jupiter, as well as Galileo Galilei) to orbit the planet Jupiter. The sculptor Forrest Myers reported that he sent, without permission, a tiny ceramic tile with miniature artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and three other artists to the Moon with Apollo 12. This month, a golden urn honoring astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. will be sent into orbit.
Until recently, no one had really put together a full picture of what humans have sent off-Earth with intent of communicating something about life on this planet. So Paul Quast, director of the Beyond the Earth Foundation, set out to catalogue every cultural artifact and intentional message humans have launched or beamed into space. Published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, his accounting is (as far as he knows) the first attempt at simply documenting what we’re sending out there—a first step toward piecing together a complete sense of what we’re signaling about our world.
There are unofficial rules about how a modern biography should begin. To start with the birth or even the death feels increasingly generic and stale. Instead, you are expected to find an incident from the middle years, something dramatic and specific like a lost manuscript, a duel, an accident that leaves your protagonist radically reconfigured. It’s got to be snappy and tense, the sort of thing that makes readers feel that they have landed in the middle of a particularly thrilling heist movie in which it’s unclear whether anyone will get out alive.
So when Sue Prideaux decides to open this life of Nietzsche with something else entirely, you know you are in the hands of a biographer who is either incompetent (unlikely, given that her earlier books on Strindberg and Munch have scooped prizes) or very sure of herself. For instead of showing us middle-aged Nietzsche making horrible animal noises while his prim mother receives visitors in the sitting room, or peak Nietzsche striding over the Alps imagining himself as an Übermensch (usually translated as “Superman”, even though it sounds silly), she gives us indeterminate Nietzsche, Nietzsche before he – or anyone else – has much idea who he really is.### The World According to Garp Was Never Meant to Be This Timeless, by John Irving, Esquire
Twenty years ago, which was twenty years after The World According to Garp was published, I wrote an afterword to the novel. Rewriting is the unglamorous part of creating, but revision is essential for clarity. In rewriting this new introduction to Garp, of course I found things to cut or change in that 1998 afterword, and I found a lot of necessary things to add.
In retrospect, it’s unnecessary to say that Garp is a worst-case scenario or that I am a doomsayer novelist, but in 1972–75—when I was teaching at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where I began writing Garp—I was worried that the subject of sexual hatred (of intolerance of sexual minorities, and sexual differences) would be outdated before I finished the novel. In 1976–77, when I was living in Massachusetts and Vermont, where I finished Garp, it was inconceivable to me that the sexual violence I was writing about would long endure. In short, I thought sexual discrimination was too backward and too stupid to last.
It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life.
It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world.
So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing.
We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow.
There are two main ways to send information out into space—as a transmission or by blasting up a physical object. Through both methods, humans have sent off all sorts of intriguing data about life on Earth. In 1995, for instance, the National Science Development Agency of Japan transmitted, among other images, one of an alien and an earthling holding hands, in the direction of the Libra constellation. We’ve sent a copy of War of the Worlds to Mars, and models of Lego figures (of the Greek gods Juno and Jupiter, as well as Galileo Galilei) to orbit the planet Jupiter. The sculptor Forrest Myers reported that he sent, without permission, a tiny ceramic tile with miniature artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and three other artists to the Moon with Apollo 12. This month, a golden urn honoring astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. will be sent into orbit.
Until recently, no one had really put together a full picture of what humans have sent off-Earth with intent of communicating something about life on this planet. So Paul Quast, director of the Beyond the Earth Foundation, set out to catalogue every cultural artifact and intentional message humans have launched or beamed into space. Published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, his accounting is (as far as he knows) the first attempt at simply documenting what we’re sending out there—a first step toward piecing together a complete sense of what we’re signaling about our world.
There are unofficial rules about how a modern biography should begin. To start with the birth or even the death feels increasingly generic and stale. Instead, you are expected to find an incident from the middle years, something dramatic and specific like a lost manuscript, a duel, an accident that leaves your protagonist radically reconfigured. It’s got to be snappy and tense, the sort of thing that makes readers feel that they have landed in the middle of a particularly thrilling heist movie in which it’s unclear whether anyone will get out alive.
So when Sue Prideaux decides to open this life of Nietzsche with something else entirely, you know you are in the hands of a biographer who is either incompetent (unlikely, given that her earlier books on Strindberg and Munch have scooped prizes) or very sure of herself. For instead of showing us middle-aged Nietzsche making horrible animal noises while his prim mother receives visitors in the sitting room, or peak Nietzsche striding over the Alps imagining himself as an Übermensch (usually translated as “Superman”, even though it sounds silly), she gives us indeterminate Nietzsche, Nietzsche before he – or anyone else – has much idea who he really is.