Generosity: An Enhancement Read Free Page A

and beautiful spring known on earth.
    He lies in his dark bed, replaying the night’s conversation. Creative nonfiction runs through his head. He needs to be up in four hours, for the long ride back to his daytime editing shift. After forty minutes of mimicking sleep, he rolls over and turns on the light. Hisjournal still waits on the nightstand. Beneath his keyed-up subway entry, he adds:
She must be the world’s most blissful refugee
.

     
    I give myself a first assignment: Russell Stone in one hundred and fifty words.
    Start with this: His earliest crime involved a book about a boy whose marvelous scribbling comes alive. He wrecked every page with crayon, aping the trick. His mother never really forgave him.
    He hates books with teacher protagonists. He avoids stories set in any school. He can’t think of a single bildungsroman that seems useful anymore, or beautiful, or even merely true.
    Taped to the inside of the desk he inherited from his grandfather, he keeps the Schiller quote found in Melville’s desk after his death: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” His forgotten note awaits the discovery of death’s garage sale.
    He dreads the question
What music do you listen to?
    He’d be pleased to know that in my mind, he’s still mostly white space.
    Once, out of character, he scrawled on the bathroom stall at the magazine where he edits, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

     
    Stone hasn’t kept a journal for years. He shed the personal memoir right around the time that the MyBits Age took off. Self-examination leaves him seasick.
    Once he kept florid diaries. From sixteen to twenty-four, he couldn’t see, hear, smell, or taste anything without polishing it into a perfect paragraph. He hoarded great descriptions to spend later, as needed. Before his private wipeout, he filled a whole shelf with spiral notebooks. He has tried to destroy them, but is too cowardly. They’re in his mother’s crawl space, awaiting discovery by a future stranger.
    But even as he shrinks from it, the world graduates to runaway first person. Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafés, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even war-zone journalism all turn confessional. Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.
    He looks up his students online. All but two have flourishing personal pages. They reel off more intimate specifics than Stone has thecourage to read: favorite music, favored drugs, preferred sexual practices, hated movies, crimes they’ve committed, appetites they’ve fed, celebrities they would kill or do or be if they weren’t themselves . . .
    Why this is happening Russell Stone can’t say. He himself gave up journals when he realized his life story held no interest even for himself.
No
: I’m deciding too much, again. He gave them up overnight, shortly after tasting his first public success, in his fourth year in Tucson, just after completing his master of fine arts.
    In the course of a dozen dizzy weeks, three leading magazines took his pieces for publication. His work was that contradiction in terms:
creative nonfiction
. Back then, people still called them
personal essays
. Russell Stone wrote them to amuse Grace Cozma, the rising star of the Arizona writing program, winner of the coveted Avignon residency, and—still bewildering—ten-time visitor of Russell Stone’s own bed. Grace had told him, with an electrifying squeeze of the ribs on her way out the door to France, that letters during her year abroad would not be unwelcome, providing they amused her. So he wrote her long rambles, as if they were life itself.
    He described his run-ins with Southwestern drifters. He told her about the old desert rat who ran a collapsing gem-and-mineral shop not far from Saguaro West. The man claimed to have once done some “groundbreaking work in geology,” swearing to Stone that he was just $10 million short of producing a working prototype