This is cleaner, with fewer human troubles and troubling humans to snag on.
Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction" ("E Pluribus Unam").
All that angst, anger and conflict might sound terrible as a spoken sentence, but when transformed into soaring melodies, human troubles can change into timeless art.
At the same time, it pushes past Wallace's interest in "plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions" into an area of sometimes desperate feeling.
I find I can bypass all the awkward, embarrassing social barriers, that I can apprehend my subjects as regular people who share human troubles.
"The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels... who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction.
The question then becomes whether the extra human accuracy is worth the extra human trouble.
All stories -- all fiction, you might say -- are about human trouble, instances of which animate and provoke the writer.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye.
One student brought to the discussion a passage from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time: "Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have".
