Here’s what happens in Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing.” This is spoilery, if you haven’t read it.
A woman orders a cake in a bakery for her son’s birthday. The baker isn’t rude, but he is abrupt and uninterested in Ann’s desire to chat about her son. The cake will be ready on the boy’s birthday, Monday.
On Monday, the boy is hit by a car. The driver doesn’t stop. Although Scotty, Ann’s son, seems only slightly hurt at first, he goes home, complains of a headache, and collapses on the couch.
They take him to the hospital, where the doctors assure them that the boy only has a mild concussion and a slight skull fracture. But they can’t seem to wake him up. The doctor assures Ann and Howard, the boy’s father, that this is a temporary state and the boy will wake up soon. It’s not a coma.
Howard goes home to take a shower and eat. While he’s there, he receives a phone call where someone seems to be asking him about Scotty. He assumes it is a crank call, and angrily tells off the caller and hangs up.
Back at the hospital, Scotty still hasn’t woken up and the doctors are becoming more concerned. They run tests, but nothing seems conclusive. Howard persuades Ann to go home to feed their dog, take a shower, and get a break from the hospital. On the way out of the hospital, she encounters another family in the waiting room. Their son was a bystander when a knife fight broke out at a party, and he’s now in surgery. Ann tells them about her son, and goes home.
At home, she receives the same mysterious calls that Howard did, talking about how she needs to come get Scotty. She calls the hospital, but Howard tells her that there’s no change in the boy’s condition. When she goes back to the hospital, she asks about the boy who was knifed. He died in surgery. Howard then tells her that the doctors have decided that they need to operate on Scotty. Briefly, while Ann and Howard are waiting for him to be rolled down to the OR, the boy wakes up. He looks at his parents, and then takes his last breath.
The doctors explain that he had a one-in-a-million head injury that they might have been able to do something about if they’d realized it right away, but they didn’t. Ann and Howard return home, heartbroken. They try to pack away their son’s toys, but they can’t bring themselves to do even that. Then, they get another one of the mysterious calls. Ann believes the caller is the hit-and-run driver, and she screams that he is evil, and hangs up. Then, suddenly, she realizes who it is: it’s the baker who made the cake for her son’s birthday party.
Still furious, she and Howard drive over to the bakery in the middle of the night to confront the baker. They argue at first, exchanging insults about the cake, which was never picked up or paid for, and the calls to the house that the baker made. Then something breaks. Howard and Ann tell the baker what happened to their son. He invites them in. He feeds them fresh bread, explaining that it is the titular “small, good thing.” He also tells them about his life as a baker. He feeds them more bread, although the description is so lovely that I think it’s worth quoting:
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
. The story ends.
Carver was notorious for just this kind of short story: minimalist descriptions of shattering events in human lives, containing some kind of surreal element that is misunderstood by their characters for most of the plot—in this case, the phone calls. Ann and Howard are so caught up in their son’s medical emergency that they forget about the cake they ordered for his birthday, or the baker who is left holding the bag for it.
My plot summary above doesn’t convey well the suspense in the story, or the feeling that you have (especially if you’re a parent, but even if you’re not) of waiting. Hospital waiting, which I once heard described as the most stimulating boring experience that you’ll ever have. You experience the rise and fall of expectations along with both parents, and live the agony of not knowing what’s going on with them. When they start receiving the phone calls, you are just as confused and bewildered and out of your mind as they are. Could it be the anonymous hit-and-run driver taunting these grieving parents? I felt my own fury rising in my throat.
Lately, and to cope better with my own feelings about a recent loss, I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy. I also looked at Massimo Pigliucci’s excellent 2017 book, How to Be a Stoic, which synthesizes the principles of Stoicism and tries to offer ways to put it into practice given that most of us are not early imperial Romans.
The dichotomy of control: There are things inside and outside of our control. Most of the events of life are outside of our control. What’s in our control is mostly our own response to events, which should be dictated by both an equanimity about how much is outside of our control and our understanding of virtue.
There are several Stoic virtues, including: courage, temperance, justice, and practical wisdom. Within Stoicism there is disagreement about whether all of these virtues can really be boiled down to Wisdom: understanding the true nature of the world and not falling into the kind of errors that make us act with injustice, intemperance, or cowardice.
This relates to the three areas of proper Stoic inquiry, which are: physics (the nature of physical reality); ethics (the nature of relations among people); and logic (how to use conclusions about the two above to conduct yourself in the world).
Finally, there are three areas of Stoic practice. The discipline of desire tells us what it is good for us to want and not to want, which is ultimately subject to the dichotomy of power. We should only want things within our control, and which conform to physical and ethical reality. The discipline of action is about our obligations to the world around us. The Stoics always said that they were citizens of the world, and that to prefer one’s own (children, for example) was the kind of thinking and feeling that leads us into injustice. This is the hardest part of Stoicism for me, for reasons I’ll explain below. The third discipline is assent, which relates to the thinkable. When we find ourselves having a thought—i.e. “I am furious that this person has slighted me”—we ought to subject it to what we’ve learned from logic, which would tell us to regard an insult or a slight as either helpful (pointing out a fault that we genuinely have) or unimportant (if it doesn’t point out a genuine fault, then the insulter is simply in error, and we ought to feel sorry for him/her).
Of all of the philosophies I’ve encountered, I find Stoicism the most practical, by which I mean that it makes the most sense and subjectively speaking, it raises the quality of my life. It does so by reducing the friction between me and the world. Stoicism tells us that there are only two options when we’re confronted with the inevitable tragedies and injustices of the world: accept and learn from them, or flail our tiny impotent fists against reality. Guess which one is the better option!
But there’s a part of Stoic thought that I’ve always found difficult to accept. And it’s not a minor part, because it serves as one of the centerpiece examples for Epictetus, the Greek slave whose sayings—as written down by one of his followers, Arrian—form one of the most accessible and frequently cited Stoic texts. It concerns children, or, more broadly, how we should regard our relationships with our family members and those who are closest to us. Epictetus famously says that our response, if our child dies, should be to calmly and dispassionately say to ourselves, “It is returned.” This is the same phrase he recommends if someone steals your lamp or breaks your pottery.
That’s a hard doctrine. Maybe it was easier in an era where childhood death was more common, but I don’t want to fall into the error of believing that people in the past were more callous or unfeeling because death was more present and visible for them. After all, one of Epictetus’ other set pieces involves a father who can’t bear to see his little daughter suffering from an illness. His suffering in turn is so extreme that he actually removes himself from the child’s presence until he knows that she has recovered and is no longer in any danger of dying. When Epictetus hears about this, he asks the father a series of questions. Does her mother care for her, too? Yes, the father answers. What about the child’s servants? Yes, they do as well. Does it follow that they should have abandoned her, too, and let the girl die among strangers who don’t care for her at all? Well, no, says the father. Then why does he think that alone among the people who care for the girl, he should allow his strong feelings to overwhelm his sense of duty to his child?
Epictetus gets at something real here—allowing our feelings to overwhelm us can interfere with the responsibilities that we owe to others, even when they are the best and most noble of feelings—but I've always been left a little cold by his response to the father myself. It is incredibly difficult to watch our children suffer. I feel boundless compassion towards this first century father, even if I also find, with Epictetus, that he shouldn’t have left his suffering daughter alone in her illness.
More generally, the Stoics’ idea that the duties of justice seem to require us—in regarding ourselves as citizens of the world with no particular preference for our own—to act as if we don’t really love our own children more than other children has always seemed to me unrealistic about human nature and maybe a real duty that we have to care more especially and carefully for the people who are closer to us, and count on others to do the same. This was Adam Smith’s critique in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: that a man who seemed to care no more about the death of his own father or his own child than he did about anyone else’s would seem highly unnatural and repulsive to almost everyone. Furthermore, there was a certain class of bad actors who would use Stoic philosophy to cover up their own lack of feeling, claiming that their citizen of the world status was what dictated their essential indifference to the suffering or deaths of others.1
So I was left with a dilemma: mostly Stoicism seemed right to me. It has helped me re-align myself with the world and got me through a particularly difficult six months in my life. But if it got things so wrong in this important category of human experience, did I have to wonder if it got other things wrong, as well?
Reading “A Small, Good Thing” made me understand, finally, what Epictetus was getting at.
How does a short story with fictional characters help me see what reading just the philosophy of Stoicism could not?
Reading the story brings us very close in to the perspective of the characters; particularly Ann, the child’s mother. We’re with her as she first meets the baker when she orders Scotty’s cake. Although the narration (from Ann’s perspective devotes lavish attention to the details of the cake, she only observes two things about the baker: he has a thick neck, and he is “not jolly,” as Ann hoped he would be. She hopes they will bond over the ordering of the cake for the joyful occasion of a child’s birthday, which she assumes is an experience that everyone in their stage of life has experienced. But he is “abrupt” with her— “not rude, but abrupt.” He tells her to pick up the cake on Monday morning, and she doesn’t give him another thought until the end of the story.
On Monday, the very day of his birthday, Scotty steps off a curb and is hit by a car. The driver stops a bit down the street, sees that Scotty eventually rises to his feet, and drives off in a hurry. I remember reading this story in a college literature course and wondering why Carver made it a hit-and-run. Partially it has to be this way because later on, Howard and Ann—in their astounding and bottomless grief—will assume that the calls to their house are a form of mocking on the part of the driver. This makes absolutely no logical sense—how would the driver know the little boy he hit, or his parents’ home phone number?—but it makes sense to them. It makes sense to them because they believe that the universe is mocking them. It kills their only child on the day of his birth. How could it not be said to have some particular inhuman, supernatural animus towards them? In our grief for their grief, this almost makes sense, and the fact that you only ask yourself about the logical holes upon a second or closer read describes what it must be to live in their personal hell. Everything becomes relational. Nothing is random.
What Stoicism would counsel, of course, is that almost everything in the universe is random and uncontrollable. What we might describe poetically and metaphorically as a god striking us down for our hubris simply gets at something that the King James Bible and the words of the Christian burial service puts rather beautifully: In the midst of life, we are in death. According to the Stoics, we only increase our pain when we believe that the uncontrollable disasters of life are within our remit, or that we’re being chased by a shadowy Fury of vengeance. According to cognitive behavioral psychology, which derives in large part from Stoicism, anger is a kind of avoidance strategy that prevents us from encountering real pain and grief. While we feel anger at said Shadowy Fury of Vengeance, we don’t have the emotional space to deal with the real nature of things. The real nature of things is that it is joy and life and birthdays that are the temporary respites from death and suffering, not the other way around.
It’s easy to recognize this from a distance, but harder to know how you would feel or react if you were placed in the same situation as Howard and Ann. Their child has been hit by a car. He seemed to recover but then fell into a state that looks like a coma to them but which the doctors keep insisting isn’t one. They sit in the child’s room at the hospital, living for brief moments when the doctor stops in on his rounds. Their only recourse seems to be to pray, which neither of them has done in a long time. Nobody can tell them why their son isn’t waking up as the doctors predicted.
One small moment of relief occurs in the middle of the story, when Ann asks Howard if he’s been praying. When he responds that he has, Ann has a thought about what has been making this experience of watching and waiting more difficult for her:
For the first time, she felt they were together in it, this trouble. She realized with a start that, until now, it had only been happening to her and to Scotty. She hadn't let Howard into it, though he was there and needed all along. She felt glad to be his wife.
This is the first sounding of a particular theme in the story: that when we believe that we are uniquely visited by a tragedy, realizing that we are in it with others alleviates our grief. There’s something about understanding that the universe isn’t particularly targeting us for sorrow and suffering—which is an application of logic but monstrously hard to remember when you’re in the middle of something like Ann’s situation—that makes it easier to endure. It’s an acknowledgment, I think, that tragedy and suffering aren’t intrusions into life, but part of life itself.
Ann’s next strategy is a less helpful but also understandable one: magical thinking, the belief that actions that she might take that are logically disconnected from her son’s medical emergency will allow him to recover. She doesn’t want to leave his side, but Howard convinces her that she needs to go home, take a shower, feed the dog, and eat something herself. She eventually agrees only because she has the strange belief that “if I'm not just sitting right here watching him every second, he'll wake up and be all right. You know? Maybe he'll wake up if I'm not here.”
A Stoic would say that this is the sort of reasoning in which we engage when we can’t acknowledge the dichotomy of control. A false sense of control is a terrible drug—it gives us what we need in the short term but makes it harder for us in the long term. It’s the origin of all of those superstitions that we ridicule but ultimately resort to in moments of weakness. If I don’t let a black cat cross my path, my mother won’t die today. If I don’t walk under this ladder, my house won’t collapse. When our mother dies anyway, or our house collapses, we feel worse for thinking that these events were in our control to begin with.
On the way out of the hospital, Ann encounters another family who are “in the same kind of waiting she was in. She was afraid, and they were afraid. They had that in common.” She wants to talk to them, and does talk briefly with the boy’s father, who tells her what she needs to hear:
Our Franklin, he's on the operating table. Somebody cut him. Tried to kill him. There was a fight where he was at. At this party. They say he was just standing and watching. Not bothering nobody. But that don't mean nothing these days. Now he's on the operating table. We're just hoping and praying, that's all we can do now.
Like Scotty, Franklin bore no particular role or responsibility in his fate. He was a bystander at a party where a knife fight broke out. That not only doesn’t mean anything “these days,” but it’s never meant anything.
But Ann doesn’t quite hear the message. I think Carver shows us how she misses it quite deliberately. In making the family African-American, and giving them (especially her counterpart, Franklin’s mother) characteristics that the neat and orderly suburban housewife Ann finds repulsive, she doesn’t see that the real message the “universe” is trying to give her is that death is a universal leveler that doesn’t particularly care if you’re the one who started the knife fight or not. Tragedy strikes the culpable and the innocent, and believing that you can control it only makes you grate against truth. As the Roman general Marcus Aurelius put it, you can control the circumstances of battle. You can equip your troops, gain the higher ground, and study effective battle tactics. But once the battle begins, the die is cast and you must accept your lack of control over the outcome. Ann could give her son a safe life and a birthday celebration, but she couldn’t change the fact that he stepped off a curb in front of a careless driver. She has not yet become enough of a citizen of the world to realize that she is in the same position as Franklin’s family. Her tragedy still feels at least partially unique and targeted at her.
When she goes home, and gets the same strange phone calls that her husband did when he returned home briefly, which are hard to understand because of machinery operating in the background, she calls the hospital in a panic to find out if anything’s happened to Scotty. Howard assures her that there’s no change in Scotty’s condition. Ann stubbornly continues to sleuth, though, and Howard speculates that it’s “maybe the driver of the car, maybe he’s a psychopath and found out about Scotty somehow.”
As Ann heads back to the hospital, she thinks again about Franklin and his family, especially his teenaged sister. This is always the story’s low point and/or crisis for me. Ann thinks at the girl, “"Don't have children…For God’s sake, don’t,” little realizing that her son is about to die. When she’s back at the hospital, after briefly checking in at the nurse’s station and finding out that Franklin died on the operating table, Ann finds out that her own son is being prepped for surgery. The doctors have realized that something abnormal is happening with Scotty. Then, briefly, he wakes up. He looks at his parents “with no sign of recognition,” screams, and dies.
Ann and Howard find out that he had an extremely rare condition, a “one-in-a-million circumstance” that, if it had been understood right away, might have been able to be cured. But it wasn’t. As Ann and Howard are ushered out of the hospital, a sudden image occurs to Ann:
"No, no," she said. "I can't leave him here, no." She heard herself say that and thought how unfair it was that the only words that came out were the sort of words used on TV shows where people were stunned by violent or sudden deaths. She wanted her words to be her own. "No," she said, and for some reason the memory of the Negro woman's head lollying on the woman's shoulder came to her. "No," she said again.
Ann is still resisting the truth that the death that just tore apart her life isn’t something uniquely horrible. It happened to someone else in the same hospital the very night before. She’s beginning to see how she’s the same as Franklin’s mother. That’s the “some reason” that the image of the woman comes to her at the very moment when she’s resisting the universal experience of death. For my part, and through the story, I’m beginning to see that these distinctions—which almost every civilization in the world has made—are a kind of coping device. “Those people are more likely to die than I am, because they engage in dangerous behaviors/hang out with a bad crowd/are hated by the gods for their skin color.” We tell ourselves these things because they comfort us that we’re not like them, and so we and our children are safe.
But these sureties are beginning to break down for Ann. She knows, on some level, that she’s no different—that she truly is a citizen of the world, and to accept that truth is to understand that immunity doesn’t extend to her because she’s white and middle class. The universe doesn’t hate her—or at least, it doesn’t hate her any more than it hated Franklin’s family. It hates us all equally.
What’s left is for Ann and Howard to give up that final delusion and that final persecution narrative. When they go home, they receive another one of the phone calls. Finally, Ann realizes what is happening—it’s the baker. He’s telling them, over the roar of the machines in the background, that they never picked up their son’s birthday cake. In a final burst of righteous and impotent fury about what’s happened to them, and in the very early hours of the morning, Ann and Howard march over to the bakery in full “I must speak to the manager” mode. Ann calls him a bastard. Howard shakes his head and intones, “Shame, shame.”
The baker could respond in kind, but he doesn’t. Instead, he throws down his apron, and pulls up three chairs. Then he gives a truly remarkable speech:
"Let me say how sorry I am," the baker said, putting his elbows on the table. "God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a baker. I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure. But I'm not any longer, if I ever was. Now I'm just a baker. that don't excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I'm deeply sorry. I'm sorry for your son, and sorry for my part in this," the baker said. He spread his palms. "I don't have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I'm sorry. Forgive me, if you can," the baker said. "I'm not an evil man, I don't think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don't know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please," the man said, "let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?"
The irony, of course, is that the baker is the only one who truly does know how to act. He comforts these grieving parents the only way he knows how: by giving them food, and a place to sit that isn’t their house, surrounded by their son’s toys. But he gives them something else, too:
He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.
Remember that Ann’s view in the middle of the story was that her grief made her wish that she’d never had children at all. This is what grief over losing something can make us feel: that we wish we’d never bothered to love at all. When I lost the teaching job I loved, my first thought was, “I wish I’d never heard of St. John’s College.”
And this, I think, is what Epictetus and the other Stoics got about our attachments (although perhaps didn’t explain adequately), especially our most important and fervent ones: their cruel little irony is that they get in the way of truly loving and experiencing a thing in the moment. When we love something so much that we’re afraid of losing it—when losing it becomes not the nature of the world but an exception, contrary to reason—we focus on the losing, instead of the having. “It is returned” is not counsel against loving your children, but an invitation to appreciate what they are in the moment. To understand that loss is the nature of the world and not a plot formulated against you is to look around you right now and understand that you could lose everything at any moment, as Ann and Howard do. But that’s not advice to stop loving. It’s advice to start loving more. And to stop distracting yourself with taking unreasonable and irrational remedies against loss.
As I said, I think Epictetus doesn’t quite explain this, and so his advice looks wrong on a casual read. But experiencing the Carver story inside the heads of these parents makes it clearer. It also makes it clear to me how quickly we fall into these unhelpful thought patterns, especially when we lose sight of the dichotomy of control. Stories and literature can do this for us. We get to experience a little bit of loss alongside Ann and Howard, but also—even in the midst of sympathizing deeply with their plight—recognizing that they’re going off track. Ann’s magical thinking is understandable, but wrong. Howard’s supposition about the phone calls sends them down an unhelpful path towards feeling personally persecuted. When Ann finally gets to the breaking point—wishing that she’d never had children—we know in our hearts that something’s gone horribly wrong with their way of thinking. Then the story gives us the truth in the form of the baker: it wouldn’t have been better for Ann and Howard if they’d never had Scotty. To wish so because their son has been returned is to believe that all of those birthdays with him weren’t meaningful at all because he died.
And we get to practice, when we read a book or a story. We get to see the seductiveness of believing in control over the uncontrollable. It’s easy enough to think, “Don’t do that,” without finding yourself in a place where you’re truly tested. But maybe, when we find ourselves in places where we are tested, we’ll remember a little bit about how “A Small, Good Thing” felt. Maybe we’ll remember the description of the smell of the bread. And maybe we’ll remember that it is so easy to fall into error, and have compassion for those who do—and respect for those who, like Ann and Howard, will make their way out again.
In high 18th-century style, Smith calls them insolent coxcombs, a phrase I love and plan to employ on a regular basis.