#586 Painted Ocean, Painted Ship- Rebecca Makkai
An albatross is a harbinger of bad fortune. When Alex, convinced to go hunting for the first time, accidentally shot and killed one of these majestic birds, misfortune was on its way. It wasn’t enough that she had to pay a huge fine, or that the story made it onto the campus newspaper where she was a tenure-tracked professor, or that she was the butt of jokes at every faculty function—her penance for the albatross would touch her career and her engagement too.
She decided to try to roll with it and started telling the story herself at parties: “The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.”
The irony of teaching Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner was not lost on her. But in the attempts to forget her mistake, she makes a bigger one in class. She accidentally assumes a quiet student of hers is from Korea, when in reality she is from Minnesota and of Chinese descent. The gaffe creates a stir on campus and Alex goes into a tailspin that ends in her dismissal from her position.
“The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistake could be, How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it.”
This is some of the point. The other, perhaps more important point is that we all make mistakes. It’s how we act after those mistakes that determines the course of our lives, not the mistake itself.
“I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”
No comments:
Post a Comment