(Note: I have decided to write down sections or quotes from books that I read as another way of remembering them. [In addition to Goodreads; inspired by Mighty Girl.] This is a long one. I decided to re-read American Gods before we saw Neil Gaiman’s live appearance in late June. It’s taken me this long to finish the book. I blame Game of Thrones, the new Sookie Stackhouse book, and laziness. American Gods was worth the re-read.)

American Gods

By Neil Gaiman

Read June-August 2011 (first read 2001 or 2002)

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts that, 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 anyuthing he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he truly a 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 so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were no 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 repetitve shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a 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 like snowflakes–florming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (an have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d 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 a milion.” 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, and the flies that crawl at 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 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, pearllike, 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 our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.