Tracy Kidder Quote
One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase looking for life, destroying life, Then he explained, It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies. I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the erasing of people, the hiding away of suffering. My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase looking for life, destroying life, Then he explained, It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies. I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the erasing of people, the hiding away of suffering. My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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About Tracy Kidder
Kidder is considered a literary journalist because of the strong story line and personal voice in his writing.: 5 He has cited as his writing influences John McPhee, A. J. Liebling, and George Orwell.: 127–128 In a 1984 interview he said, "McPhee has been my model. He's the most elegant of all the journalists writing today, I think.": 7
Kidder wrote in a 1994 essay, "In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. It has everything to do with those things in nonfiction. I think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true believable."