Generosity

Berber Algerian, from Kabylie, via Algiers, via Paris, via Montreal. Her eyes are claret. She sits inside her nimbus, chatting with ease. He thinks he hears her say she fled from the Algerian civil war. He wants to ask her to repeat herself. Instead he panics and prompts her for her life philosophy.

“Life is too good for philosophies,” she tells them. “I try my best to decide no more than God.”

My eyes adjust: dark, cracked linoleum and broken-sashed windows. Fluorescent lights humming like a prop plane hang low over a circle of students filled with that first-day mix of nerves and thrill, as if anything might still happen, even this late in history, even in Chicago.

The first class goes so well it scares Russell Stone. The students pretty much hijack the syllabus. Each of them is starved for fresh. Even the older ones still believe in a destiny sure to reveal itself, any semester now. Three of them admit they’re here because Journal and Journey is the easiest way for visual majors to complete the writing requirement. Words are not the shape their desperation takes; sentences can’t hope to survive the flood of images. But who knows? Even a journal entry might someday become a short video.

Mason Mason asks the obvious. “Why don’t we write online? Aren’t journals just dead blogs?”

Russell has prepped three days for this question. He defends private writing against writing for any stranger with a search engine. “I want you to think and feel, not sell. Your writing should be an intimate meal, not dinner theater.”

They shrug at his nostalgia. They’ll take a spin in the Wayback Machine, just for the sheer novelty.

Sue Weston details her current artwork. “It’s called ‘Magpie.’ I stand in Daley Plaza, jotting down the things people say into their cells. Then I post it on a tumblelog. Amazing, what people will tell a street full of strangers.”

Roberto Munoz whispers, “I’m amazed you think that’s ethical.” A hoot comes from the group, and soon it’s an art-student free-for-all. Russell Stone watches his lesson plan vanish.

Adam Tovar describes his automatic spirit writing. “I just let it come.” After a roll-call vote, the class decides that ghosts do indeed exist and are the soul’s upload to virtual storage.

“Writing always comes from beyond the grave, anyway,” John Thornell says. “I mean, either the author or audience is already dead, or will be soon.”

The Algerian watches fascinated, like a child fresh from months in the sick bay, at a tennis match under a spotless sky. The others ignore her, with pretend nonchalance. But when Thassadit does raise her finger, the room freezes. “In my country? During the Time of Horrors?”

Russell loses her words. Something about her father being shot for writing a letter, but she speaks so serenely it must be a metaphor. Stone knows nothing about Algeria except that it’s a former French colony with an astronomically impossible flag. Their civil war is news to him. The whole world is news to him.

The Berber’s ready grin unnerves the Americans, who return to the ethics of eavesdropping. She resumes watching them, hands peaceful on the table, centered in herself, smiling through the discussion as if it’s the most entertaining feature film.

This first night’s class runs overtime before Russell can get through a quarter of his notes. He assigns them twenty pages from Make Your Writing Come Alive, half apologizing for the text, as if someone else chose it. He gives them their first journal assignment, the one about rescuing one fragment from their last day worth telling a perfect stranger. They’ll read their entries out loud together, two nights from now. “Have fun,” he tells them, avoiding the eyes of the Algerian. “Surprise me.”

Then he stumbles back out through Building Security into the September night. The Loop has quieted. Its 3-D lattice of light now looks like the twitch-grid computer games his brother is addicted to. Nine million lives from here out to the horizon, and God only knows how many art schools calling it quits for the night. Night classes in Lima will follow in an hour. Day classes in Tianjin are already under way.

It strikes me that my adjunct has never heard of Tianjin. He boards the northbound Red Line at Roosevelt, avoiding the sparsely populated cars. The train emerges from its grotto into a canyon flanked by the backsides of brick apartments scaffolded in wooden fire escapes. Tonight’s glow turns tenements into upscale condos. He’s elated by how well his first class has gone. He spends the subway ride scribbling an account of the last two hours into his own journal. He describes his students’ willful naivete and fearless self-invention. What would life be like, he writes, if art students finally had their revolution?

Russell Stone doesn’t answer his own question. I watch him trying to decide no more than God.

In his studio apartment in Logan Square, he makes himself a one-hand sandwich of wilted veg and cheese, from which he scrapes a thin skin of mold. Then he sits down to find Kabylie. He wants to see it on a printed page, not online. He finds it in the atlas. In the Atlas Mountains. The place is a rugged hideaway, a separatist hot spot full of goats and olive trees, a land graced by all accounts with the most aromatic and beautiful spring known on earth.

He lies in his dark bed, replaying the night’s conversation. Creative nonfiction runs through his head. He needs to be up in four hours, for the long ride back to his daytime editing shift. After forty minutes of mimicking sleep, he rolls over and turns on the light. His journal still waits on the nightstand. Beneath his keyed-up subway entry, he adds: She must be the world’s most blissful refugee.

I give myself a first assignment: Russell Stone in one hundred and fifty words.

Start with this: His earliest crime involved a book about a boy whose marvelous scribbling comes alive. He wrecked every page with crayon, aping the trick. His mother never really forgave him.

He hates books with teacher protagonists. He avoids stories set in any school. He can’t think of a single bildungsroman that seems useful anymore, or beautiful, or even merely true.

Taped to the inside of the desk he inherited from his grandfather, he keeps the Schiller quote found in Melville’s desk after his death: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” His forgotten note awaits the discovery of death’s garage sale.

He dreads the question What music do you listen to?

He’d be pleased to know that in my mind, he’s still mostly white space.

Once, out of character, he scrawled on the bathroom stall at the magazine where he edits, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

Stone hasn’t kept a journal for years. He shed the personal memoir right around the time that the MyBits Age took off. Self-examination leaves him seasick.

Once he kept florid diaries. From sixteen to twenty-four, he couldn’t see, hear, smell, or taste anything without polishing it into a perfect paragraph. He hoarded great descriptions to spend later, as needed. Before his private wipeout, he filled a whole shelf with spiral notebooks. He has tried to destroy them, but is too cowardly. They’re in his mother’s crawl space, awaiting discovery by a future stranger.

But even as he shrinks from it, the world graduates to runaway first person. Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafes, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even war-zone journalism all turn confessional. Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.

He looks up his students online. All but two have flourishing personal pages. They reel off more intimate specifics than Stone has the courage to read: favorite music, favored drugs, preferred sexual practices, hated movies, crimes they’ve committed, appetites they’ve fed, celebrities they would kill or do or be if they weren’t themselves

Why this is happening Russell Stone can’t say. He himself gave up journals when he realized his life story held no interest even for himself. No: I’m deciding too much, again. He gave them up overnight, shortly after tasting his first public success, in his fourth year in Tucson, just after completing his master of fine arts.

In the course of a dozen dizzy weeks, three leading magazines took his pieces for publication. His work was that contradiction in terms: creative nonfiction. Back then, people still called them personal essays. Russell Stone wrote them to amuse Grace Cozma, the rising star of the