Mark Jacobs at the Hudson Review:
Unknowability was everywhere, not just in my interactions with people, but in the life and world I was eagerly observing. One morning early, maybe five a.m., I woke in a one-room shack of boards with a dirt floor and a thatched roof. It was raining. I had no bed; slept on a pallet. The thatch leaked, making the floor a muddy lake whose shore brushed my pallet.
In the soft insistent rain, across the way I heard a family stirring. Someone was building a fire, someone filling a kettle for the morning mate, without which no day began. I lay on my soggy pallet and listened. They were speaking in Guaraní, the Paraguayans’ private language, in which I had less than a baby’s proficiency. I was still working on my Spanish. (Years later, a government minister told me that, while serving as an ambassador abroad, he and his colleagues spoke in Guaraní when they wished to keep a conversation confidential.) That rainy tranquil morning, what I experienced was more than the novelty of fresh perception, it was a shimmering. For me, it was in the wake of such shimmer that the impulse to tell a story found its first working out. I was at an intersection: new knowledge collided with a headstrong drive to say what I was seeing. I started writing Paraguay stories. Never stopped. Their genesis was everywhere.
more here.
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