Letters About Literature.
Natalie Babbitt:
When I was ten years old, all I did was leave the fourth grade and come into the fifth grade. It’s not a very pivotal change, fourth to fifth grade. In fact, I think it is decidedly less important than most others. Coming into first grade is a huge step, as are starting fourth, sixth, and seventh. In eighth grade you are the oldest kids at the school, and you don’t get that again for a while. As I have learned so far, in high school every year is critical. The change into grades named with words instead of numbers; the change out of being a freshman; the move into the upper classes; and finally, seniority.
Among all the transitions in youth, fourth to fifth grade means next to nothing. Ten years old means next to nothing in the year 2000. Ten years old for me in 2000 is so unimportant, so nonessential, so lifeless, compared to ten years old in 1880. When I was ten years old I was fuming about wearing a uniform to school the next year.
When Winnie Foster was ten years old, she was making the decision between mortality and infinity. She was ten years old and falling in love with a beautiful boy who was ninety-four years her senior. How could Winnie have grasped the concept of so many years? Ninety-four years is probably longer than you or I will live, though we all want to be a hundred. I try to imagine how Winnie feels when she pours the bottle out on the toad, or how the fibers and ligaments in Jesse’s arms and hands strain when he hugs her during the storm, and I know that nothing I have ever felt can give me the experience to empathize with their pain and strength, but I can hear Jesse’s soft voice in Winnie’s ear, and I can feel the slant in the rain and the electricity in the air around them.
I have read about Jesse Tuck and Winnie Foster three times, and I have built my ideas of time and sacrifice on their experiences. I am very young as humans go, and I hope I live to be a hundred, but I know I won’t. I will maybe make eighty and that’s the end. Sixty-four years left.
But I have built my life out of stones, and some of them are huge, some don’t fit, and some are perfect. I have built my life out of rocks, and a few of them are the Tucks. I know they’ll never go because they’re stuck. The Tuck rocks are not just to fill in the spaces between boulders; they are foundations of walls. They are necessary to hold the rest of it up. They are my Atlas, holding up the fragile earth.
Recent studies have theorized that an asteroid that has been hanging around our solar system for a while could hit earth in about thirty-five years. If this huge rock hits our little planet, it could kill everyone, they say. But it couldn’t kill the Tucks. Nothing can. When the world ends, Natalie, when earth breaks apart and the atmosphere dissolves, what will become of Jesse? What will become of Miles, of Tuck and Mae? When the world cracks and fire rains down from the clouds and all the humans die, where will the Tucks be? I see them thrust out into space on an ocean evaporating behind their heels, torn apart like the continents below them, to live forever choking and freezing alone in the vast night, praying for some greater power to take mercy on them and let them die.
In the endless frozen darkness, how do the Tucks go on? Do they spend their days scratching at their icy limbs, tearing at their own eyes and necks in futile attempts at suicide? Or do they swim about in the thick nothingness, searching for each other, hopeful though there is no hope? In a thousand years Mae will force her eyes open and see Miles close enough to touch. In a thousand more years Jesse and Angus will see human-shaped shadows and become frantic and meet each other. When the last thousand has passed, they will be together again. The unbeatable Tucks will have all gone insane millennia ago, but their joy will defrost the tips of their fingers, and so they will brush against each other for months until their knuckles interlock and freeze. The chain of Tucks will wander the universe, minds long gone, for the rest of time. They are rocks. They cannot be broken.
Angus Tuck says you can’t have living without dying.
Whether it can be called living or not, I hope to exist like the Tucks. Hopeful though there is no hope.
Sara Stephens
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2 comments:
That's the scariest thing I've ever read.
I haven't talked to you in like a million years. Like a week.
My word verification word was "keens." Awesome. As in, [she is] mournfully shrieking.
now its not that scary.
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