# George Saunders Reads “Thursday”  ## About - Author: The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker - Title: George Saunders Reads “Thursday” - Tags: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ea783971-aa84-4cd0-8721-a4e8c6c63aaf ## Highlights > Sounds of the Old Neighborhood: Nostalgia and Promise Transcript: Speaker 1 Then came the lovely sounds of the old neighborhood, yapping sales pad or from a kitchen window perched radio. The car is over on Blair, more blatantly mechanical and clank clank clank than their contemporary counterparts. Distant lawnmowers cross-bellowing like enraged, crew-cut men in dispute, locust buzzing from positively everywhere. All of it was so familiar, utterly dear, and yet was happening for the first time. Something in the quality of the light seemed to be making promises regarding our future. ([Time 0:03:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21a8f1ee-3f34-4f7a-a872-0fa891a157ef)) --- > Denial and the Pummeling Behavior Transcript: Speaker 1 On a second level, perhaps contraterially, denial that this pummeling was odd or indicated any defect in our family. We were that is stretching to see this behavior as a manifestation of our parents enviable lust for life. The other children in their non-pummeling parents were mundane squares, never moved by passion into this higher realm of uncontrollability. We were trying this attitude on for size, one might say. And alas, I saw now we were in the process of being molded. Pummeling would ever after be one of the choices available to us. ([Time 0:08:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33b6731f-6f81-478a-b127-c1274a1e088c)) --- > Pummeling as a Response to Emotional Intensity Transcript: Speaker 1 To Clara and me, henceforth, quite thinkable. We had seen these people we loved and respected and engaged in, and therefore, forevermore, pummeling would be something we ourselves might consider doing should we be placed under sufficient duress. Because this was such a signal family event, a moment of peak emotional intensity, I would often in the years to come a fine man self-waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone. ([Time 0:09:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/da377fe9-221f-40be-bfdd-77be1135cb9a)) --- > A Familial Event Brings Out Violent Tendencies in the Speaker Transcript: Speaker 1 Because this was such a signal family event, a moment of peak emotional intensity, I would often in the years to come a fine man self-waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone. In much the same way that I would imagine a young person raised by a virtuoso musician's might, on first finding an instrument in his hand, feel that the moment had arrived for him to begin pursuing the family business. As for Clara, in the future, she would more than once find herself being pummeled and not ([Time 0:09:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3742f771-7c7f-4093-8482-d08c2259c9ba)) --- > Children sitting before an ancient Chinese checkerboard amidst raining couch cushions Transcript: Speaker 1 I could have wept for those two children, sitting still as bunnies before that ancient long-ago landfill Chinese checkerboard. As the supply of chairs up there having apparently been exhausted, couch cushions began raining down from the deck. Gerard, I heard, and went outside to find Mrs. Dwyer in the yard, sort of, gigantic, nearly as tall as the tallest of the three oaks. A green leaf the size of a dinner plate wafted slowly earthward and landed on her shoe. ([Time 0:10:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1ee89e27-bbea-4c36-868d-ec4134d2c930)) --- > A Memory of Cereal Boxes and Laughter Transcript: Speaker 1 Unbidden, apropos of nothing, like the last shack from a destroyed village that floats back at the end of a flood, came a final memory. In the midst of one of the fierce grinding sessions, the white metal cabinet in the kitchen, in which the cereal boxes were kept, boxes and bluffs was exquisitely colored cartoons of talking tigers and toucans, had come crashing down, causing toddler meat to skedaddle, which elicited howls of tipsy laughter from mom and dad. ([Time 0:26:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f974d920-c921-422d-9db4-d13b03076d16)) ---