Its easy to feel ungrateful to donors when you're the person who has to load, move, and especially sort their donations. It's dull, sweaty work, and you find yourself carping about the things that are icky or absurd instead of marveling at people's generosity. A box of books might be enticing, but is Great Dialogues of Plato really the best thing to give to a resettled hurricane evacuee? How about The Year in Milwaukee Brewers History?
One of my jobs this weekend was sorting through donated toiletries. Can of hairspray? Into the pile of hair care products. Half-bottle of shampoo? Trash. Stick of deoderant? Open it up and see if it's been used. The worst are opaque bottles of lotion — the stuff's so gooey that it's really hard to tell.
The woman working with me had been doing this longer than I had. "I actually found used toothbrushes," she said.
"Really?"
"Yes."
"But," she added, "there were hundreds of new ones."
Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 6, 2005 10:46 AMI take it back about Plato.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 6, 2005 05:04 PM"......If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war of 1914-18, one notices that nearly all that have remained readable after a lapse of time are written from a passive, negative angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective. As for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr E.M. Forster has described how in 1917 he read 'Prufrock' and others of Eliot's early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were 'innocent of public-spiritedness'...."
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 6, 2005 06:48 PMWhat was that?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at September 7, 2005 10:42 AMThat was "Inside the Whale," specifically from a chunk I transcribed at length on September 17, 2001 because at that time it seemed comforting. I think there's another section in which Orwell talks about people's need to mentally transplant themselves elseewhere through reading in times of great danger and hardship -- but then if I went back and found it, it would probably say something a little different.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 7, 2005 11:54 AM