Up until recently the scholar’s prize at Eastern KentuckynUniversity went year after year to some young man from anpoor and tiny backwoods holler. Many of these kids werenfrom in-bred families — and it’s not that I’m recommendingnwe follow the practices of the ancient kings of Egypt, butnthere you are. I have sometimes wondered if the legends ofnfairy changelings weren’t based on these families that, full ofndull brothers, inexplicably, out of seemingly terriblenmaterials, produce a brilliant or beautiful child. Brilliancenamong a family of hardscrabble farmers may be somethingnof a curse, but still, such genetic favors remind you thatnwhere there’s life there’s hope.nAnd if I may continue the family discussion here for anminute, hope and the happiness that is hope are alwaysnpersonal. These days, as perhaps it has been most days, thenbig picture is not looking too bright. What national goodnnews there is consists of demonstrating that the bad news isnover-reported. It’s not true, for example, that your youngnfriends who are marrying each other next week have anone-in-two chance of getting divorced. Fifty percent of allnmarriages fail in this country, but not 50 percent of all firstnmarriages; the success rate for those is about 62 percent. It’snthe repeaters, the Elizabeth Taylors, who drive the generalnrate down to one in two. So while the marriage vow is inntrouble it’s not as bad as it’s painted.nLikewise, as I think has been better reported in the lastnyear or so, the modern middle-class terror that one’s child isnlikely to be abducted by a stranger is largely a myth.nAccording to the National Center for Missing and ExploitednChildren, only about 3.8 percent of the 25,000 missing ornabducted children they’ve counted since 1984 were stolennby strangers. (About 39 percent have been taken by anrelative, usually because of a custody dispute, and thenremaining 57 percent are runaways or otherwise lost.) If younare not a hemophiliac, a prostitute, a male homosexual, ornan IV drug user, the likelihood of your getting AIDS isnsmall. The often-quoted 60 percent figure — that 60 percentnof those sick with AIDS had it from heterosexualncontact — is a worldwide figure, and may have a great dealnto do with the generally overtaxed immune systems of thenThird World and, in some places, a very different style innintimate relations from what might be considered average innmiddle-class America. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’tnworry about your children, or that we’re a healthy country,njust that for most of us those two worries should be low onnour list.nThis may be cold comfort for some of my friends,nespecially those who are a good bit my elder, who tell me (asnCore Vidal has pointed out very evocatively) that they cannremember when this was a freer country, and when theyncould read the newspaper without throwing it in despair ornanger across the room; the only response I can think of isnsomething George Carrett quotes his wife as saying: thatnthere is no such thing as public life, there is only private life.nWith regard to that tossed newspaper, unless that’s ournfamily in the Scene section, or our company on the Businessnpage, or our neighbor’s son in Sports, the world of thenCourier-Journal is not a world that for us exists. This meansnmodern life is much too fragmented, that we would havensuch tenuous ties to our neighbors around town; but whenntimes are not so good fragmentation can also be a refuge.nTrying to think of some good news for this issue what keptncoming to mind was friends’ new children and familynweddings and Maria passing her medical boards; partly, yes,nbecause there is little good news out of Washington ornChicago or even Rockford’s City Hall, but mostly becausenthe worfd of my friends and extended family is the world thatnI live in. And in this I’m hardly unique.nEven moving to the world at large, the good news isnalways local, and the best people often localists. TakenBill Kauffman’s favorite politician, John McClaughry ofnVermont, or Dick Lamm of Colorado, who as his reward fornbucking the national trend in health care received a goodndeal of slander from his state press (though he may live tonsee national opinion swing around). Or take John Lukacs, anHungarian expatriate historian living in Pennsylvania, whondespite every excuse of birth and education for being ancosmopolitan internationalist, is one of the more eloquentnnationalists (in all positive senses of the word) we have. Orntake Tom Murray, a Scot poet living near the Firth of Clyde,nwho writes in the very individualized voice of a widowernwith the same universal authority Larkin had, or BrendannCalvin in Connecticut, whose most recent book of poetry isna series of monologues by a fictional 18th-century NewnEnglander, metered local history. The world is full of junk,nbut it is full of these people too, and if the nightly news ornthe National Book Awards are getting you down, you arenmissing the trees for the forest. ;nWe live in a world ruled by paradox. There is oppressionnin every victory and opportunity in most every disaster, andnsometimes even when the big picture looks good—becausenit looks good — it can get depressing. Going up East to anhigh-intensity college as I did I saw so many people whonwere suffering from what critic Harold Bloom calls then”Agony of Influence,” or what non-Freudian nonacademicsnused to call achievement anxiety and sophomore slump: itnhas all been done; there is nothing left to contribute, or leastnI’m not capable of it; I am just some turkey wading throughnan English (French, History) major and will never be Miltonn(or Moliere or Thucydides) or anything close. I used tonwonder if a lot of the most self-promoting twenty-year-oldnpoets in my college didn’t feel this way, a prize from thendepartment going a long way to make up for a hiddennanxiousness, and the anxiety being the cause of so much ofnthe self-promotion in the first place. And I wonderednbecause I saw some succumb — like the art major whonjumped off the top of the Art & Architecture building, anreminder to the poor folks who had to clean her up thatnsuicide is not only a desperate and pitiable but a furiouslynselfish act.nThe best answer to this kind of self-absorbed teenagendepression is not the one the Yale English Departmentngenerally gives, which is to shower praise for bad writing onnyoung people who are generally smart enough to recognizenbaloney even when it is flattering baloney. The best answernis to point to people like Margaret Morse Nice. MargaretnNice was essentially a housewife, who for eight years duringnthe 20’s and 30’s spent two hours a day in Columbus, Ohio,nwatching the song sparrows in her large backyard. Thenobservations she recorded in The Watcher at the hiest andnher two-volume study of the sparrow made her one of thennnDECEMBER 1990/17n