4.6 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
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“And then all the emotions sort of flowed and I started crying in a way I don't think I have since or probably didn't before. I was just sort of heaving and then I thought, wow, this is going to ruin me. This is the end of my life. You know?”
Darin lives in New York City. His memoir Half a Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2011, and his latest book is called The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story.
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0:00.0 | I want to sat at the deathbed of a woman in her 70s to take her final confession. |
0:15.7 | And the thing that broke my heart wasn't her admitting that she'd had a secret affair |
0:20.1 | early in her marriage. |
0:22.4 | It was that a few years later, when she and her husband had a stillborn child, that |
0:27.1 | she blamed her earlier infidelity for it. |
0:30.7 | For 45 years, she carried the moral burden of something she actually had no control over. |
0:38.6 | But it's this thing we do as humans. |
0:41.6 | We assign blame to ourselves when the chaos and randomness of life is just too existentially |
0:48.2 | uncomfortable for us to handle, because it's better to fill in the blank than to face |
0:54.4 | the void. |
0:56.7 | It's terrifying to think that horrible things can happen for no reason whatsoever, but |
1:02.3 | sometimes life is unfairly random. |
1:05.4 | And it can be unfairly random in both beautiful and terrible ways. |
1:10.8 | Causal fallacies are how we make sense of life, blaming ourselves or others or God for |
1:16.8 | things that are too painful to think of as happening merely by chance. |
1:22.5 | But really, there's almost never a reason for a tragedy. |
1:27.2 | We can easily answer the who, the what, the when, and the where of it. |
1:31.9 | It's the why that's impossible to get right without painful self-incrimination or theological |
1:38.5 | hogwash. |
1:40.8 | But we are human beings, which means that while we might never find a satisfying reason |
1:47.4 | for the awful shit that happens in life, sometimes we can still find |
1:52.4 | meaning in it. |
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