Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest essay in The Paris Review is, on the face of it, about the game Red Dead Redemption 2. It even gets the rubric “On Gaming” stamped at the top, a tiny taxonomic flourish. But while the piece does detail how and why Abdurraqib plays the game a specific way—upstanding, moral, and ultimately futile—it’s far more about the way we flesh-and-blood beings adjust our own compasses to deal with the Wild West that is human existence.
It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.
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