Facing It Speer Morgan An old friend of mine called me in early May to tell me that he was alive, after all. He had caught covid-19 and been on a ventilator, his survival unlikely for several days. After three weeks in a hospital bed, he told me, “You don’t want to get this, Morgan.” Another friend, a writer and recently retired emergency-room doctor, sent me an e-mail summarizing the basics that he had learned about the virus from reading medical articles. He asked, too, if I remembered that in 1969, I had had a gun pulled on me by a revolutionary housemate. I didn’t, oddly enough, although I do remember this housemate repeatedly yelling at me for not being purely and totally revolutionary enough, and I do remember inhaling plenty of tear gas at demonstrations. The events starting in Minneapolis and quickly spreading throughout the rest of the nation over the murder of George Floyd are indeed reminiscent of that year. Protests and less-than-peaceful demands for justice seem called for now, as they did then, after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, along with what seemed like the endless dragging out of the Vietnam War. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim says after the latest disaster in the endless series of disasters in the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Pandemics and racism and riots and the lack of national leadership make us think, “So it continues to go—and when will it stop?” This issue of TMR reminds me of the basic ideas of Stoicism, a philosophy that arose long ago as an approach to dealing with the seeming harshness and unfairness of life. Stoicism in different manifestations has been one of the more resilient philosophies in Western thought. It began [End Page 5] with the teachings of Zeno in the marketplace of ancient Athens, and it lasted through six centuries of Greek and Roman thinkers, including Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. It influenced the epistles of the Christian Paul and many later classics of European literature. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy begins with an epigraph from Epictetus—“Not things, but opinions about things trouble men”—ironic in this case, since Sterne’s antihero is so overloaded with bookish doubts and opinions that he does well to get out of bed in the morning. Renewal of Stoic thought includes writers such as Martin E. P. Seligman. Seligman and other pragmatic psychologists attend less to analyzing a person’s past or depth psychology and more to facing the present and the future through resilience, achievement, and cultivating meaningful relationships. While these behavioral qualities might sound obvious, one of the recognitions of Stoicism is that the hardest and most important changes in behavior are the ones that in fact are the most obvious. It takes only one failure or series of failures—those moments when we are truly “facing it”—to ruin lives. With the things that are going on in the world today, this has never been truer. Two of the stories in this issue are concerned partly with one bedrock idea of Stoicism—the difficult and often counterintuitive discovery that it isn’t what one imagines people care about, or what they talk about, that matters the most but what they do. Bruce McKay’s character-rich story “On the Western Bride” is about a young deckhand on a hundred- passenger fishing boat whose ambition is to captain his own small, private boat. Amid the vivid details of sea fishing and managing incompetent passengers, McKay’s narrator recounts a story of the crew’s rivalries and ambitions. It culminates in a crime revealing the unpredictability of human nature and the difficulty of reading people’s motivations. Katey Schultz’s “Wait for Me” is a resonant tale from the point of view of the twin of a gifted autistic brother who has recently been sent away to a special school. Sarvis feels the separation and struggles to find his place in the family. His parents, a professor father and cause-oriented mother, do not seem to be as concerned about him as they are about the brother and their...