If Only The Great Thinker Knew it Wasn’t that Bad
by Michael Mark
He’d read in college the author of The Stranger swerved around a squirrel that darted in front of the car and crashed into a Plane tree and died. Ever since, he fixated on not avoiding any small animal should it be in front of him on the road. He’d have to hit it. Images of running over varied creatures repeated in his mind whether he was driving or not. He’d be walking and see a bird, and then himself behind the wheel running over that bird. He was haunted, and shared in detail what he saw in his head, even at parties. It never happened until a pigeon, probably lame, because it didn’t fly away as they all had before. The next time he hit a squirrel, like the one Camus successfully avoided. It hardly made a thud, more like a sigh.
Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook prize. His poems appear in Copper Nickel, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Southern Review, The Sun, 32 Poems. His two books of stories are Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). His piece, “House Story,” originally published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2024. He was included in Best New Poets 2024 and awarded a Pushcart Prize, 2026. michaeljmark.com
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “If Only The Great Thinker Knew it Wasn’t that Bad”? This piece was written with a stoic’s calm. More I witnessed than wrote it. As if I were documenting what I was seeing: in this case my mind, Camus, road, car, squirrel, tree, and me. And the computer keys with my fingers depressing them, finally. There was no sense of uncertainty or surprise.
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