Excerpt from More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss:
The question for Josh had always been: how much blindness does a happy life require? Josh had grown up watching the Mr. Magoo show, in which a wealthy man took on the difficulty of failed eyesight by sallying into the world as if everything were fine: he walked off the edge of a girder (the hardhats pointing, yelling, panicking). But right as he stepped into space, some crane swung an I-beam up under his shoes. Or he would saunter into an animal pen, mistaking it for a doctor’s office, and caress a tiger in the belief that he was petting a kitten—and the jungle beast would purr and nuzzle. If Josh could just mosey through his days like Magoo through a room, narrowly avoiding the furniture of human faults, wasn’t there a chance the world might be flattered, and agree with him, and transform itself into a series of blessings? But if that worked, it led to another question, one he hadn’t thought about before: What sort of life did that become?
Authors@Google reading on June 19, 2008.
