{"id":106126,"date":"2016-12-22T18:52:20","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T23:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106126"},"modified":"2016-12-23T09:51:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T14:51:40","slug":"living-in-the-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/22\/living-in-the-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in the Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our\u00a0complete digital archive is available now.\u00a0Subscribers can read every piece\u2014every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview\u2014from <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now<\/a> and you can start reading 0ur\u00a0back issues\u00a0right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>We\u2019ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Sylvie McNamara\u00a0recommends Joy Williams.<\/em><\/p>\n

We live in an age of fervent, misguided, conspiratorial belief. Fluoridated drinking water is poisonous. Michelle Obama was born a man. There are incriminating references to \u201cpizza\u201d in John Podesta\u2019s e-mails. We might try to buy our way out: with yoga, green tea, reusable grocery bags, or a two-week fast in Bavaria. But regardless, ideology \u201cproliferates \u2026 as merchandise,\u201d as Jia Tolentino has written<\/a>. \u201cWe can buy anything that suits us and nothing that we really need.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Yard Boy<\/a>\u201d is Joy Williams\u2019 answer to 2016, though it was published in\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0Winter 1977 issue. It\u2019s a story about a true believer: a self-professed spiritual materialist who does not understand this term to be derisive, a label for those who would seek spirituality through consumerism or ego. He\u2019s a zealot entrapped by platitudes with a New Age aura (\u201cnothing is more obvious than the hidden\u201d or \u201cthe moon can shine in one hundred different bowls\u201d). His quest to live \u201cin the Now\u201d unravels his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But \u201cThe Yard Boy\u201d is not a morality play; its less dogmatic characters\u2014the ones whose lawns the yard boy tends\u2014aren\u2019t better adjusted. The yard boy\u2019s labor is altogether lost on the woman who pays him a fortune to care for her flowers and trees (\u201cshe looks up at the mangos, hanging. Uuuuuh, she thinks\u201d). Another client is \u201cinto heroin and intangible property,\u201d and a third, an illustrator of cowboys, is violently upset that his publishers \u201chave told him that they are not interested in cowboys\u201d because \u201cthe new minority in America today is the white female.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody escapes Williams\u2019s droll characterization\u2014zealots are duped and everyone else is complacent or disconnected. This would be cynical except for the strange mysticism of the ending. The answer, she elliptically suggests, might be plants. You just have to read it to understand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn\u2019t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually.<\/p>\n

The enlightened being is free. He feels the sorrows and sadness of those around him but does not necessarily feel his own. The yard boy felt that he had been enlightened for about two months, at the most.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read \u201cThe Yard Boy\u201d in full here<\/a>; and subscribe now<\/a>\u00a0for digital access to every short story, poem, portfolio, and essay from\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The enlightened being is free. The yard boy felt that he had been enlightened for about two months, at the most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[16304,370,25912,71,7285,26426],"class_list":["post-106126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-archive","tag-back-issues","tag-digital-archive","tag-fiction","tag-joy-williams","tag-the-yard-boy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the Archive: Joy Williams\u2019s \u201cThe Yard Boy\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The enlightened being is free. 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