A few weeks back, our four-year-old tore the paper off an Arctic Explorer Lego set and said the golden words of gift-giving season: “It’s just what I wanted!”
And it is like that when you’re four—or it was for me and seems to be for our kid. You have so little control over your surroundings, so little understanding of the world, no matter how much your parents talk with you and listen to your ideas, no matter how much you do understand. You don’t get to choose when the sun sets, whether there’s nap time at school, whether you have to eat, whether it’s cold in winter. You don’t get to choose when to leave the park, though you can pull for “five more minutes.” You might not get that second piece of cake. You can ask for your favorite foods, and maybe they’ll be served, but your requests are susceptible to review. You’re not the one going to the grocery store to shop, or earning the money to buy.
But in a season of gifts you can wish for things, and sometimes they happen. You tear open shining paper and see your hope, your dream, made real in the world, and experience the thrill of being heard. It’s rare to be a four-year-old with power.
There was so much joy in that moment. I remember being there for most of my childhood, experiencing that “oh my god you listened” electricity. There’s a picture of me in a plaid robe, age maybe seven, with a copy of The Last Command in forbidden (because expensive) Hardcover.
But it’s changed a bit for me as I’ve grown up.
I know something about the world now, though always, it turns out, less than I think. I have some measure of control. I can buy some of the things I want, so long as I don’t want things that are too expensive. I can have the second piece of cake. But the eye has changed, and the I has changed. My desires fit themselves to the environment: I might wish I could choose when the sun set, or whether there were clouds, but I know I can’t. (Though some part of me still occasionally wants to work the clouds away.)
And I know myself. I know what I want, and I have enough experience of getting it, and whether that made me happy, to doubt the urgings of my will. Was that second piece of cake worth it thirty minutes later? Sometimes! Not all the time. (As Faulkner’s supposed to have said when asked, “Are you drunk when you write them books?”) Maybe you’ve felt it, too, the odd hollowness of a gift that’s “just what you wanted,” as in, you circled it in a catalog or texted someone a link with a nudge and a hint. The emptiness of fulfilment.
There are still golden moments. It’s just that different ones gleam, now. I open a gift, or hear the words of a friend, or experience a small act of kindness, and find myself not just surprised, but known. Seen and recognized, cared for and understood. I receive not “the thing I wanted,” but the thing I didn’t even know I wanted, and yet suits me perfectly. For me, as a child, a gift was power. As an adult, a gift is grace.
Forthcoming events and other housekeeping:
If you’re in the greater Boston area on Friday, Feb 9 at 7pm, please drop by Brookline Booksmith to see me in conversation with Seth Dickinson, about Seth’s new book Exordia. It’s a hell of a book—a edge of your seat, sleep-destroying proposition bridging Michael Crichton and Peter Watts and I wasn’t able to compose a blurb for it without cursing heavily. The event’s at 7pm—register here. I can’t make it to Boskone this year for family reasons, but if you’re in town, come on over and say hi!
I’ll be Guest of Honor at CoastCon in Biloxi, Mississippi March 1-3. I’ve never been to Biloxi before—excited for the trip! More information here
And, this is a bit far out, but it’s on the website so I think I can talk about it: I’ll be Principle Speaker at PhilCon in Cherry Hill, NJ this year. More details on that as they firm up; you can find the conference website here.
If you’re nominating for the Hugo and Nebula awards this year—and you should—I’d be flattered if you’d consider Dead Country for best novel.
I don’t think the Craft Sequence is eligible for best series yet, by my count—it was last nominated in (early) 2017, but since Dead Country was a svelte 85,000 words and Ruin of Angels a chonky 145,000, I’m some ten thousand words shy of the “240,000 words of new content in series” marker that, by my reading, determines re-eligibility. Should have written some tie-in short fiction, I guess! I will have cleared the deadline in spades after Wicked Problems—but WP doesn’t publish until a month after the Hugo deadline, so, it is what it is.
That’s all I have at the moment, though I’ve probably forgotten something that will occur to me 10 minutes after this email sends. To be continued! Take care of yourselves, friends. Happy reading. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Yes, extremely well put! I've also noticed a slowing down in my gifts. Things that I really want, things that are perfect, less frequently arrive in neatly bound up packages once or twice a year. Sometimes, they flow so imperceptibly that I have to make myself notice the moment of arrival.