let everything happen to you
Time & Distance Overcome- Eula Biss
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Video by Joe DeGrand
As an aspiring writer and essayist, Eula Biss has inspired me beyond imaginable. When I first read this essay, "Time and Distance Overcome", I wrote in the margins "holy shit" and "Jesus Christ". Her way of weaving personal narrative with research and eliciting emotion from a universal standpoint throughout the writing is nothing short of incredible. I aspire to write as beautifully and movingly as she does.
In this clip (thank you, internet) a man narrated (almost all of) the essay and paired it with jarring photos from our country's dark and lurid past. The essay itself burned itself steadily into my mind without the need for images, but since I know most people won't read it, please, please, watch it.
"When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadways was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he said, "My dad could raise a pole by himself." And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.
Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.
One summer, heavy rains fell in Nebraska and some green telephone poles grew small leafy branches."
But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.
But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.
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