“You go to the very end, Jennifer. Which is why I wanted to be here.” — Pamela Combastet, Paris, 8 p.m. Welcome into Flight School and this deep conversation I was lucky to have with Pamela who is the President of WICE, a Paris literary program, a former New York magazine editor, and one smart lady. When we met in Paris, a few years back, she passed me the little book on conscience examination and I have it still. I’m not as rigorous about this examen as she is but the fact that she is a woman of deep conscience makes our conversation perfect. It was just Pamela and me in the room, too. Calling in from Paris at eight o’clock on a sweltering Monday night, Pamela was still thinking hard about Watchman, which she’d already read year ago but now listened to as a performance, in order to get through to the end. Together we did what good literature demands: We worked hard, we thought harder, and we let the questions go all the way down. It is a deep, therapeutic how do I live my life conversation. How do I bear the discomfort of the unbearable? This is what we found. On the book that changed you: Think about the one book you’ve read over the course of your life that moved something in you. What was the title? What did it ask of you? And looking back — does it still? Why? Or why not? These are the questions that literature, good literature, have been nudging out of human beings since pen was put to papyrus. Not answers. Questions. The kind that live in you for decades and keep changing shape. Pamela and I, in this conversation, used our time to push those questions about Go Set a Watchman. It is raw, unfinished, exposed, and yet inside live gems that cannot be gathered without going the full distance and finishing it. Who was your Atticus? Pamela has been turning this question over since she registered for this series. She can’t land on a single person. What she named instead was a moment. Robert Kennedy. Campaigning in the South. Stopping at a sharecropper’s farm. Asking a group of children if they’d had lunch. The children, aware of the camera, said yes. And she watched his face — the blank moment when he knew they were lying. When he understood they hadn’t eaten. When the crusade stopped being political and became personal. That, she said, is when he became sincere. She has never forgotten that quiet moment. Years later it still lives in her — the standard for what authentic engagement with another person’s reality actually looks like. That is not a borrowed conscience. That is a formed one, built from a single witnessed moment of genuine recognition. I took that and turned it around for anyone watching, because the question works both ways. Jean Louise projected a kind of perfection onto Atticus — his view became her view, his certainty became hers, and she didn’t have to think too hard because she could always go to him. That is the borrowed conscience. But the reverse is also true: we have all been someone else’s Atticus at some point. We have all been the person someone projected their ideal onto, and then disillusioned, and then condemned. When I was writing Blackbird and evidence showed me a different father than the one I’d believed in, I went from idealization straight to villain. Just like Jean Louise. It takes time to find the full human being in the middle. Jean Louise has less than a week. That’s what makes the book so uncomfortable to read. That teeter-tottering, with no processing time, compressed into seven days. The question Jean Louise, and all of us, are being asked: I put it to Pamela directly: what do you think the end of this conversation is? When you are standing in a room with someone whose position you find monstrous, whose words eliminate the humanity of entire groups of people — what do you do? Pamela: You accept them. Not superficially — not ‘I’ll pray for you’ which often just means go to hell. But a real acceptance. I can’t understand you but I agree to be in this difficult uncomfortable middle space. Where hopefully something will illuminate between us. A way forward. And that is exactly what Uncle Jack is pointing Jean Louise toward. Not agreement. Not forgiveness. Not pretending the horrible man at the Citizens’ Council meeting didn’t say what he said. But the recognition that she has a gift. Jean Louise doesn’t see color, she never has, because of how Atticus raised her and entrusted his children to Calpurnia and stood in a courtroom for Tom Robinson. Uncle Jack offers that Jean Louise’s gift needs to come back to Maycomb as a voice, not a judge. On serving wittily: We landed, near the end, on a quote from A Man for All Seasons. Thomas More, on the brink of being beheaded by Henry VIII, speaks to his daughter: God made the angels to show him splendor, he made animals for innocence, plants for their simplicity. But he made man to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. That is what this book is asking of us. Not to resolve the tangle. To serve wittily inside it which means to use the mind that was given to us, connected to the heart, connected to the soul, and asking the hardest questions without looking away from the answers. (24.25) “You walk through Paris. I walk through Portland,” I said. “We see the suffering. We ask what we can do.” “We surrender. We accept,” she said. A note on faith: Yes, this conversation steps into the terrain of God and we make no apology for that. We are not talking about religion or pushing a particular belief system. We are talking about the greater consciousness of the human heart and soul. Land where you can. Let it move you toward the biggest questions you can ask. Three questions: * Who formed your conscience? * If that was shattered by disillusionment, how long would you need to process it? (I’ve personally needed forty years after my father disillusioned me.) * And — can you arrive on the other side changed enough to withstand someone you detest, in order to add your own voice to the conversation That last one is what Uncle Jack is asking of Jean Louise. It is what this book, never meant to be read, is asking of us. Coming July 21st: Post Three of this series drops about the editorial miracle performed by Harper Lee on Go Set a Watchman. The miracle that produced one of American’s foundation literary masterpieces. Watch for that. AND, you are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Same town. Twenty years earlier. Through a child’s eyes that see everything clearly, precisely because she doesn’t yet know what she’s supposed to look past. If you want to catch up, here’s your map: Post 1: Summer of the Finch. The Beginning Post 2: Summer of the Finch: Zoom Launch Post 3: Go Set a Watchman: Post 🤔 Your Turn What is the one book that changed you? And what did it ask of you that you are still answering? Drop your answer in the comments. I’m listening. Thanks to Pamela for thinking so hard with me and thanks to all of you for being with me on this journey, Jennifer, 🐦⬛ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jenniferlauck.substack.com/subscribe
