Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it.

America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. “Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

I feel like that now: tired of the Me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. “You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?

George saunders the braindead megaphone