George Saunders, la amabilidad

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/20/george-saunders-kindness-story/?mc_cid=7d3d144065&mc_eid=0f37cf1548

Saunders offer the simple, intensely difficult remedy:

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.

The great writer’s gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply. I find Saunders’s generous words about Grace Paley to apply perfectly to his own writing:

Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.

[…]

What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking.

[…] 

Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.