To the editors.
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So far, I have different favorites, mine being “Men Under Water,” by Ralph Lombreglia, and “The Lover of Women,” by Sue Miller. Both stories delighted and frightened me by catching the cruelties and distances, frank humor and constant irony, and incessant senseless swirl of our lives, but, like Frankel, I read Beattie’s introductory essay and the other stories looking in vain for the point.
Writers have been bemoaning the meaninglessness of life since they began to feel it. Maybe the contemporary writers are in a transitional stage, post-pointlessness, on the way to or on the way back to something. (I don’t know what.) I know I live in a kind of dilemma summed up as, “I can’t do anything I don’t believe in, and right now I don’t believe in anything.” But I’m hoping to conquer that, not by believing in falconers or false gods, but by doing something anyway, or in spite of. In spite of what?: the apparent fact of pointlessness.
Kathleen Kirk
