John Irving

A Prayer for Owen Meany

If you care about something, you have to protect it—if you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

Your memory is a monster: you forget--it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you--and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

A PERSON'S FAITH GOES AT ITS OWN PACE.

God knows, Owen gave me more than he ever took from me--even when you consider that he took my mother.

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT.

It is a wonder to me that the changing of the year had so little effect on Owen Meany--when I consider what he thought he thought he "knew" at the time, exactly how many years he had left. Yet he appeared content to watch Ben-Hur, and Hester throwing up; maybe that's what faith is--exactly that contentment, even facing the future.

WE HAVE A GENERATION OF PEOPLE WHO ARE ANGRY TO LOOK FORWARD TO, AND MAYBE TWO GENERATIONS WHO DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

It would be a bad day for the headmaster--a FATED day, Owen Meany might have called it--but I'm sure Randy White didn't have his eyes on the future that morning. He thought he was finished with Owen Meany. He didn't know that, in the end, Owen Meany would defeat him; he didn't know about the vote of "no confidence" the faculty would give him--or the decision of the Board of Trustees to not renew his appointment as headmaster. He couldn't have imagined what a travesty Owen Meany's absence would make of the commencement exercises that year—how such a timid, rather plain, and much-ignored student, who was the replacement valedictorian of our class, would find the courage to offer as a valedictory only these words: "I am not the head of this class. The head of this class is Owen Meany; he is the Voice of our class—and the only voice we want to listen to."



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