Excerpts from American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
—–
“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
—–
As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense-for they are born and they die-they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details . . . and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.
–Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Introduction,
Hindu Myths
—–
“You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”
And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.
This time Shadow got it.
—–
COMING TO AMERICA – 1778
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr Ibis in his perfect copper-plate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.
There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look — here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers — many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems to simple.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was some human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes: forming patters we have seen before, as like one another as peas in the pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you would mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection) but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to up to a million’. With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, the flies that crawl in the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume out lives.
A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.
And the simple truth is this: there was a girl, and her uncle sold her.
—–
One describes a tale best by telling the tale.
You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.
–from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis
—–