Alan Jacobs

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Maria Albertina Iraheta Guardado was 37 when she decided to leave the Dos Bocas community in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Honduras, and emigrate to the Bronx to meet up with her sister, who works as a house cleaner. She wanted to send money back to her mother and help support her six children. Some of them are already adults. But two—a nine-year-old and a 14-year-old—still live with Iraheta Guardado’s mother.

According to the mother and sister, who spoke with me on the phone, Iraheta Guardado also wanted to leave because of a growing weariness with the violence that plagues Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world, as of 2012. Several years ago her husband was fatally shot by stray bullets in a cross fire, says Iraheta Guardado’s mother, Maria Amelia Guardado: “Like everyone else here, he was just murdered, because that’s what happens here.”

The mother learned from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that her daughter crossed the border near Brownsville, Tex., on June 15, 2012, along with a group of other migrants and a human smuggler. She had walked for two days before fainting and being left behind near Falfurrias.

Identifying Iraheta Guardado took the combined efforts of forensic anthropologists, human-rights organizations, foreign consulates and law-enforcement agencies. Her mother then waited anxiously for her daughter’s remains to be returned; they had been delayed because of a bureaucratic snafu over a death certificate. Finally, in early April 2015, they arrived and were returned to the family for burial.

Maria Albertina Iraheta Guardado was 37 when she decided to leave the Dos Bocas community in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Honduras, and emigrate to the Bronx to meet up with her sister, who works as a house cleaner. She wanted to send money back to her mother and help support her six children. Some of them are already adults. But two—a nine-year-old and a 14-year-old—still live with Iraheta Guardado’s mother.

According to the mother and sister, who spoke with me on the phone, Iraheta Guardado also wanted to leave because of a growing weariness with the violence that plagues Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world, as of 2012. Several years ago her husband was fatally shot by stray bullets in a cross fire, says Iraheta Guardado’s mother, Maria Amelia Guardado: “Like everyone else here, he was just murdered, because that’s what happens here.”

The mother learned from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that her daughter crossed the border near Brownsville, Tex., on June 15, 2012, along with a group of other migrants and a human smuggler. She had walked for two days before fainting and being left behind near Falfurrias.

Identifying Iraheta Guardado took the combined efforts of forensic anthropologists, human-rights organizations, foreign consulates and law-enforcement agencies. Her mother then waited anxiously for her daughter’s remains to be returned; they had been delayed because of a bureaucratic snafu over a death certificate. Finally, in early April 2015, they arrived and were returned to the family for burial.

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“When I first started getting some attention, stories published here and there, Don DeLillo took me aside and gave me some advice that ended up being very formative for me. He said, ‘George, if you keep breaking into my home to use my swimming pool, I’m going to have to call the police.’ I always thought that was really wise.”

- George Saunders, advice to young writers

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When I first started getting some attention, stories published here and there, Don DeLillo took me aside and gave me some advice that ended up being very formative for me. He said, ‘George, if you keep breaking into my home to use my swimming pool, I’m going to have to call the police.’ I always thought that was really wise.

“Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small number of students this is in the main right. Even at a very early stage of school life, we can identify a few individuals with a definite inclination towards one group of studies or another. The danger for these unfortunate ones is that if left to themselves they will overspecialize, they will be wholly ignorant of the general interests of human beings. We are all in one way or another naturally lazy, and it is much easier to confine ourselves to the study of subjects in which we excel. But the great majority of the people who are to be educated have no very strong inclination to specialize, because they have no definite gifts or tastes. Those who have more lively and curious minds will tend to smatter. No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”

- T. S. Eliot (1932)

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Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small number of students this is in the main right. Even at a very early stage of school life, we can identify a few individuals with a definite inclination towards one group of studies or another. The danger for these unfortunate ones is that if left to themselves they will overspecialize, they will be wholly ignorant of the general interests of human beings. We are all in one way or another naturally lazy, and it is much easier to confine ourselves to the study of subjects in which we excel. But the great majority of the people who are to be educated have no very strong inclination to specialize, because they have no definite gifts or tastes. Those who have more lively and curious minds will tend to smatter. No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

“Pour tenir dans la lutte qui oppose les deux seuls grands pays d’Europe restés démocratiques à un régime de domination totale, quelques formes que le temps puisse donner à cette lutte, il faut avant tout avoir bonne conscience. Ne croyons pas que parce que nous sommes moins brutaux, moins violents, moins inhumains que ceux d’en face nous devons l’emporter. La brutalité, la violence, l’inhumanité ont un prestige immense, que les livres d’école cachent aux enfants, que les hommes faits ne s’avouent pas, mais que tous subissent. Les vertus contraires, pour avoir un prestige équivalent, doivent s’exercer d’une manière constante et effective. Quiconque est seulement incapable d’être aussi brutal, aussi violent, aussi inhumain qu’un autre, sans pourtant exercer les vertus contraires, est inférieur à cet autre et en force intérieure et en prestige; et il ne tiendra pas devant lui.”

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Simone Weil, fragment written probably in September 1939. Words to the wise.

Pour tenir dans la lutte qui oppose les deux seuls grands pays d'Europe restés démocratiques à un régime de domination totale, quelques formes que le temps puisse donner à cette lutte, il faut avant tout avoir bonne conscience. Ne croyons pas que parce que nous sommes moins brutaux, moins violents, moins inhumains que ceux d'en face nous devons l'emporter. La brutalité, la violence, l'inhumanité ont un prestige immense, que les livres d'école cachent aux enfants, que les hommes faits ne s'avouent pas, mais que tous subissent. Les vertus contraires, pour avoir un prestige équivalent, doivent s'exercer d'une manière constante et effective. Quiconque est seulement incapable d'être aussi brutal, aussi violent, aussi inhumain qu'un autre, sans pourtant exercer les vertus contraires, est inférieur à cet autre et en force intérieure et en prestige; et il ne tiendra pas devant lui.