A couple of days ago, a military jet crashed from the sky into a suburban house in San Diego, killing a woman, her two baby daughters, and her mother, while the pilot ejected to safety. Yesterday, the tearful widower, a South Korean emigree, held a news conference to ask people not to blame the pilot for this accident. “I pray for him not to suffer for this action,” he said. “I know he’s one of our treasures for our country.”

This story intrigues me for several reasons.

It interests me because it sounds eerily close to the inciting action of any number of Paul Auster novels. In these novels, the protagonist, a man who is usually in his 30’s or 40’s, suffers a disastrous personal loss — a reversal of fortune or, often, the sudden death of his wife, sometimes with children — that is often coupled with unexpected financial fortune. (As Dong Yun Yoon will no doubt see.) The man, having lost everything important but gaining financial security, then sets off to find the new him and his place in the universe. This is the essential plot of “The Music of Chance,” “The Book of Illusions,” “Oracle Night,” “The Brooklyn Follies,” and, for all I know, next year’s scheduled release, “Invisible.”

It interests me, of course, in the way that roadside accidents interest all of us, as we express concern while slowing down to catch every detail, glad that it didn’t happen to us.

It interests me mostly because I can’t remember when recently I’ve seen this sort of grace, the sort that in the face of a loss of this magnitude doesn’t resort to casting about for blame. It takes strength of character not to wish the pilot dead too.

Or is it cultural? That’s my wife’s theory. She says that because this man grew up in a different culture, his first thought isn’t to lawyer up, but to accept the precarious nature of life and to lend forgiveness. But if that’s so, what’s that say about us? That somehow we’ve become a people who inherently feel wronged, that we are somehow deserving of compensation even when there’s no clear fault?

If that’s the case, there’s little mystery where the financial collapse came from. Yes, some people ginned the system and made off with millions (or billions, now heading into trillions). But to do that, they needed the abetment of everyone else, who felt they were entitled to far more than they could afford. And now all of us collectively are paying for that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 11:46 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.