Bookmarker tag: inspo/interiority (50 notes)

For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don't see how either of them bore it. I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously comformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued. And were were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.

Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance's outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V's. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child's hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

[...] I hold my liquor enough to hear--from the mouths of poets--work I'm itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.

Maybe that time is so blurry to me--more even than my drinking time--because we remember through a filter of self, and of self I had little, having been flattened like a cartoon coyote by an inner anvil. With no self, experience streams past. Time lags until it's sponged up. [...]

Sophie, in bed, drowsed, and bits of memory came at her in the flashing strobes of predreams. Here's a shiny ice storm, two newlyweds in a new tract house in Cicero. Ice glittering gray in a crunchy March lawn, more wet ice falling out of a sky without color. Solomon watching it out a window, Sophie behind him with her arms around his thick waist, her hair a black waterfall down his arm, her chin on his shoulder, also watching. Pellets of dirty Cicero crystal hitting the hard lawn, beads bouncing and jumping hopping lively skittering ice. Solomon's voice, quiet, full of Silverfish dreams, his breath fogs a rainbow circle on the window as he stares at the jumping beads, whispers to himself grasshoppers grasshoppers grasshoppers. A young man she loves dreams life into ice while she plays with his ear.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.

I think I'm actually starting to understand. I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence still-born there. To understand this you have to become this.

I set out to save lives and have ended up collecting the dead. Somewhere along the line, I lost sight of treating people and became obsessed with my own grandiose ideals of service. But there is no redemption in this. I've worked myself into the ground only to end up doing the very thing my parents begged me to avoid. I've ended up serving myself.

All that is left now is to hold on for that day, sometime after the first snowfall, when my deputy will radio me from the grave with the news that our backhoe has finally hit undisturbed earth at the bottom and the last of the dead are back above ground. When I receive that message, I'll drive out into the stubble of the cornfields, stand alone on the edge, and stare down into that gaping hole one last time. Then I'll get go of this millstone of belief and ideals that's breaking my neck, watch it tumble down and sink slowly into the mud at the bottom. I've had it with our humanitarian hubris. Let the dead bury the dead.

Afterward I'll give the final order of my brief but eventful forensic career, this time to the engineer. Bulldoze in this hole and bury my youthful illusions. Then I'll crack open a beer and drink a toast. Farewell death, you son of a bitch. Here's to the rest of my life.

We actually set out to save the world. That is what was insane — not ten-year-old warlords with bad breath and voodoo fetishes in Liberia, not Matt's assassin, not the boss in Somalia who set us up for an ambush in exchange for a fifteen percent kickback on the judges' salaries, not the Hutu militias who butchered a minority who had repressed them or the Tutsi survivors who executed the suspects — but me, for thinking I could enter a war and personally restore order.

So that's the easy answer: forswear idealism; resign myself to a sad maturity; put away the things of youth; be thankful I survived and move on. But that's horseshit too, a craven capitulation. I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naïve and romantic and idealistic — the part of yourself you treasure most — to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? If everyone resigns themselves to cynicism, isn't that exactly how vulnerable millions end up dead?

When the Cold Was ended, the power of freedom, democracy and hope weren't abstract concepts; they were palpable in the Iraqi desert, across the Berlin Wall, in Tiananmen Square, atop Yeltsin's tank. That hope crescendoed for us in Cambodia. So we piled into Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia — missionaries, mercenaries, and madmen with no understanding of the history, politics, or culture but with Land Cruisers, military-issue radios, malaria pills, and the sure knowledge that we were on the right side of history.

What a feeling. Andrew wanted to bind the wounds of innocent war victims, hoping to find grace. Heidi embraced the freedom-born-of-emergency determined to liberate herself and, in the process, as many women as she could touch. I planned to harness the power of an ascendant America to personally undo the Holocaust. Don't laugh. We were young. We weren't the first, and won't be the last, to venture forth overseas with grand ideas.

Then eighteen Rangers fell in Somalia and suddenly history started moving in the wrong direction. Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia were all in flames, burning the remains of our innocence. One million civilians we promised to protect died on our watch. There are many competing versions of this story — U.S., UN, NATO, EU. But we were there and capital letters always lie and our version has no meaning if no one renders it.

So I make the conscious choice to believe again: we did not misspend our youth. At least we can bear witness. I did save lives and I did earn my way into Dr. Andrew's club. The act of rendering is therefore mine. l won the right, I am the owner of that privilege.

There is a plaque in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum In Jerusalem, which reads, 'The Jewish people will never forget the righteous among the nations who endangered their lives in order to save Jews from the Nazi murderers and their collaborators. In their praiseworthy deeds they saved the honor of mankind.' I have a copy of these words over my desk and I look at them every day on my way out. Who saved the honor of mankind in Rwanda? Or Bosnia? Or, God help us, Liberia? But I have another quote from the exit of Yed Vashem over my desk, which reads, 'Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny, cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it unto your children and they unto theirs from generation to generation.'

I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me to keep not silent.

There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down.

[...] the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, at it were, draining itself in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. [...]

[...] He had simply never in his life felt so unattractive or been so sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public second's edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in his sty. The Gray Line was of the Green- and Orange-Line trundling-behemoth-type train, and he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut.

[...] 'And I'd bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says 'And soon it would get... improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.' She left her head alone and cocked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?'

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gullwings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. [...]

[...]

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaugh-ter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

There are moments when the mask slips, when his failure to truly engage with the humanity of the victims and survivors shines through. He often appeals to a ‘we’ that is all too clearly a cypher for his own responses to the event. “All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a horrible sense of dread followed by a sense of relief,” he writes, as though it is a matter of public record, a fact as indisputable as the number of 999 calls, or the square-meterage of the building. This slippage reveals the power of O’Hagan’s rhetoric. In an article that purports to be a dispassionate, objective account of events, a speculative statement that is predicated entirely on the (clearly ridiculous) notion that Andrew O’Hagan has unlimited access to the interior worlds of “people all over Britain” passes by almost unnoticed. [...] Reading the piece, I almost fell for it; I doubted myself, I questioned myself, I looked back over last year’s writings to try and re-attune to the person I was back then. And I’m as certain as I can be that Grenfell did not make me feel “alive” or “exhilarated”. It made me feel sad, and angry, and powerless. It made me mourn for days. The summer grew dark. I felt the fear and the sadness in my bones. “No man is an island,” as the poem goes—except, perhaps, for Andrew O’Hagan.

I don't know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind-the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stocking feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.

I find that when I try to write in my "other" voice, I am immediately critical of it. It wobbles, vacillates back and forth, is neither this nor that. The voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar, I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don't even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will. So I have to try. (That is why, you see, this doesn't sound too good. It isn't a practiced performance, it hasn't got a surface. I'm asking you to bear with me while I try, hoping that this, what I write, will express something you yourself have felt or will help you find a part of yourself that you would like to express.)

[...] I woke up on January second, perhaps the dullest and most obligated day of the whole year, a living garbage pile topped by a discarded Christmas tree, and couldn’t breathe through my face. I went to the gym because I didn’t believe myself, and it took me nearly a week of dragging my body around the city, leaking and listing to the side like an old ship with a hole in it, to admit that I actually was sick. Surely I must be faking it. Surely I must want this, this excuse from class, this note that says I can stay home today, under the covers, with a mug of something warm, allowed to sit out this round of doing life, excused from getting up and walking myself to the next thing and the next. Surely I must want the sick day. And worse, some part of me did.

My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to imagine that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life. I find someone moving. Is it me? My chest tightens.

The days were emptiness, a vast, spacious emptiness in which the fact of being alive became almost meaningless. The first fragile beginnings of a personality starting to collect in my twelve-year-old soul were immediately sucked up into the silence and the featureless winter sky. The overbearing, undeniable reality of those empty days! The inescapable fact that everything around me was nonhuman, that in terms of snow and sky and rocks and dormant trees I didn't exist, these things rendered me invisible even to myself. I wasn't conscious of what was happening, I lived it. I became invisible. I lost myself.

I believed I was intelligent. For a long time that thought had been important to me. At the school I felt for the first time that my intelligence was worth something to someone else besides myself. Here was a huge organization, an immense, powerful world existing for the inmate, but existing for me as well. It was the other extreme! At last I'd found someplace where my only possession would be relevant! [...]

The five-minute warning bell had rung. I sat with my ankles on the railing reading a novel about the Second World War. I should have used the time to do my homework, but the appeal of Nazis, K rations, and sunlight slanting through the forest while men attempted to kill one another was too great. I read four or five hours every night at home, but it was never quite as sweet as in school, when even a snatch read as I climbed the stairs seemed to protect me from my surroundings with an efficacy that bordered on the magical. And if the story dealt with questions of life and death, so much the better. How could I be seriously worried about having nothing to hand in at Math when I was pinned in a shallow foxhole, under a mortar barrage, a dead man across my back and a hysterical young lieutenant weeping for his mother by my side? I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.

[...] I stared at the meaningless stream of cars going by, my brain as empty and silent as the house around me. Within me sadness had given way to hopelessness. And I mean genuine hopelessness, when faith had evaporated and the imagination is dead, when life seems to have come finally and irrevocably to a standstill.

Haas wore leather pants when he performed. He was tall and rail-thin with large hands and an obsession with bebop and hard bop music of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — Charlie Parker especially. When we arrived for that first class he handed out a transcription of the solo from Parker’s tune “Koko” and played the recording from which it came. It was a revelatory experience. I saw the genius of Parker’s instant composition — the nuances, the harmonic development — all over the course of a two-minute piece. The recording ended and I looked up from the paper transformed — I was almost crying. Up until that moment jazz was a blur of notes, an approximation of a form I wasn’t able to grasp, but that recording with the notation unlocked the form for me.

I became possessed and was made despondent by the music. Possessed because there was an infinite reserve of recordings to mine and only a few weeks of concentrated study to crack the surface, and despondent because I was 20 years old and still a mediocre musician.

My son tells me you're ignoring his phone calls, Lorraine added.

Marianne paused, and the silence in the kitchen was loud in her ears, like the white noise of rushing water. Yes, she said. I am, I suppose.

Good for you, said Lorraine. He doesn't deserve you.

Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic. She put the orange juice on the counter and closed the fridge.

[...] Lately Marianne walks around Carricklea and thinks how beautiful it is in sunny weather, white clouds like chalk dust over the library, long avenues lined with trees. The arc of a tennis ball through blue air. Cars slowing at traffic lights with their windows rolled down, music bleating from the speakers. Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, and not somewhere else far away.

[...] He only had sex with her twice, neither time enjoyable, and when they lay in bed together he felt a constricting pain in his chest and throat that made it difficult to breathe. He had thought that being with her would make him feel less lonely, but it only gave his loneliness a new stubborn quality, like it was planted down inside him and impossible to kill.

His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child. Instead he opened his eyes again.

Marianne leans the whole weight of her body against the door, her hands firmly grasping the handle, eyes screwed shut. From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. [...]

[...] smiling and remembering details about their work. I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn't have a "real personality", but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am.

Throughout Melissa's reading, Nick watched her face very attentively and laughed in the right places. My discover that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealously toward Melissa. I couldn't believe that he went home to her every evening, or that they ate dinner together and sometimes watched films on their TV. What did they talk about? Did they amuse each other? Did they discuss their emotional lives, did they confide in one another? Did he respect Melissa more than me? Did he like her more? If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn't he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have so much sex with someone who you would alter allow to burn to death.

[...] I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would. [...]

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.

I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.

I didn't think it had to be, I said.

You know, you're saying that, but you obviously weren't happy that I loved someone else. It's okay, it doesn't make a bad person.

But I loved someone else.

Yeah, I know, he said. But you didn't want me to.

I wouldn't have minded, if ...

I tried to think of a way to finish this sentence without saying: if I were different, if I were the person I wanted to be. Instead I just let it fall off into silence. I was so cold.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.

Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway — my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.

You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.

One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people.

And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.

[...] She had nothing of him at all except his name written on the folder. She hadn’t kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn’t think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck with that...

Dualizing again. “She” and “it.” Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It’s not me, it’s not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.

To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you. but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it — Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?

On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden—patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.

In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing. As I carried it homeward, still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper’s flesh, I did not doubt that my mother would greet my achievement with glad tears of pride. The possibility of her being much too engrossed, that particular night, in other events to listen to verse did not enter my mind at all. Never in my life had I craved more for her praise. Never had I been more vulnerable. My nerves were on edge because of the darkness of the earth, which I had not noticed muffling itself up, and the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had not noticed either. Overhead, between the formless trees bordering my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment.

[...] the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set loose in an alien zone, at the wrong altitude, among an unfamiliar flora.

My wife moved toward the house, picking her way through the wet, shaggy grass in her high heels. She opened the front door and went inside. I could see her moving behind the lighted windows, and something came to me then. I might never see her again. That's what crossed my mind, and it staggered me.

[...] Probably her husband had his own dull map of roads not traveled. You grow conventional in middle life. Choices made over time present themselves as branches running off the solid oaks that line the overground route to Kensal Rise. You grow gray, and thick in the hips. Yet, on happier days, she saw the same small, high breasts, the same powerful long legs, the familiar and delicious brown animal looking back at her, almost never ill and very strong. How much of this was reality? How much delusion? This was the question of the age, as far as she could tell. And the difference between now and being twenty was she was never sure, not from one moment to the next. Next step Canonbury. Next stop menopause and no more denim. Or was it? Blind worms churning mud through their bodies is a better metaphor for what happens than road not taken or branches unsprouted. But no metaphor will cover it really. It's hopeless.

Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

[...] After the war, walking to school in Brera, Sandro and Roberto were pelted with rocks. Their father moved them back up to Bellagio, where the boys were pelted with cow chips, and once misled into a swarm of angry bees that stung and restung them more times than Sandro had thought possible. Was he stung because he lacked natural virtues, ones the children who pushed them into the bee swarm possessed? Had those children stood up to Mussolini? No. Did it matter who possessed natural virtues? No. A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.

RAY NIBBLES ON DINNER—pistachios and an apple. Reading is slow, and all things distract him. Staring at the bottom of the apple’s core, he realizes that the calyx—a word he’ll never know in this life—is nothing less than the leftover bits of a withered apple flower. He looks up from the thicket of words three times a minute, waiting for truth to hit like a falling oak smashing through the house’s roof. Nothing comes to kill him. Nothing at all happens, and it keeps on happening with great force and patience. Nothing happens so completely that when he checks his watch to see why Dorothy isn’t home yet, he’s stunned to discover that less than half an hour has passed.

He bows his head and fixes on the page. The article stokes his distress. Should trees have standing? This time last month, it would have been his evening’s great sport to test the ingenious argument. What can be owned and who can do the owning? What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

But tonight the words swim. Eight thirty-seven. Everything that was his is going down, and he doesn’t even know what brought on disaster. The terrible logic of the essay begins to wear him down. Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn’t trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? The whole idea is a holy nightmare, a death dance of justice like the one he now lives through, watching the second hand of his watch refuse to move. His entire career until this moment—protecting the property of those with a right to grow—begins to seem like one long war crime, like something he’ll be imprisoned for, come the revolution.

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

Eight forty-two, and he’s desperate. He’ll do anything now, to deceive her, to make her think he has no idea. Her fit of craziness will run its course. The fever that has turned her into someone he can’t recognize will burn away and leave her well again. Shame will bring her back to herself, and she’ll remember everything. The years. The time they went to Italy. The time they jumped from the plane. The time she ran the car into a tree while reading his anniversary letter and almost killed herself. The amateur theatrics. The things they planted together, in the backyard they made.

It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.

The key thing is for her never to learn that he knows. He must be cheerful, smart, funny. The minute she suspects, it’ll destroy them both. She might live with anything except being forgiven.

But concealment is killing him. He never could play anyone but an earnest Macduff. Eight forty-eight. He tries to concentrate. The evening stretches out ahead like two consecutive life sentences. He has only this essay to keep him company and torture him.

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?

The essay flickers under his fingers. He can’t follow it, can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or rubbish. His whole self is dissolving. All his rights and privileges, everything he owns. A great gift that has been his since birth is being taken away. It’s a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant’s: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

In the morning, with both boys still sleeping, I got my coat and headed out. In the past, I would have made breakfast for my husband and son, done the dishes, the laundry - a good wife, until I couldn't anymore, because it felt like a pillow was pressed on my face, cutting off my oxygen. The sun was out, turning the world brilliant, and I didn't want to miss any of it. I stopped at Java Cafe and talked to one of the regulars who was reading a book about a woman who loved the characters in a book so much that reality began to fade for her. I wrote down the title. [...]

Throughout the day, the thought of Ben's mother tugged at me. It wasn't abandonment. After all, Ben was in high school, soon off to college. But it was something. Part of me envied her - how she could empty herself of her son, give herself over exclusively to herself again, like a young girl without a care in the world. Her attention, energy, time, mental space, she reclaimed it - it was all hers. She'd trusted the universe to provide, which, in fact, it did.

I'd had a long day at work, teaching three classes, with finger-wringing students filing in my office, worrying about their stories. I loved their stories, loved puzzling over them with my students, but I was tired. Sun from the spring day hung low in the sky, as if it wanted one long look at the world before it disappeared. Thomas had basketball practice and wouldn't be home for another two hours. Solitude luxuriously stretched out in front of me, like an empty sugar-sand beach. I'd soak in a hot bath, let my mind become my own again. I'd write something. I'd been working on it in my mind, though it was inchoate.

He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.

The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.

But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

[...] Then there is live music played by an energetic group of men in their midtwenties to late thirties, including Rob on bass. But it turns out I hate the music, which is mostly screaming and loud drums. It reminds me of high school. For a moment, I feel sad for them, these grown men holding on to their teenage years, but then I feel sad for myself, because I don’t have anything that I am as excited about as they are about their band and its ear-piercing music. Carrying this sadness, which feels both delicate and heavy, like a big glass mirror, I decide it’s time for me to go.

No, I told not a soul. I may have been only ten years of age, but even I knew that confessing to being spied upon by a snazzily dressed senior citizen who flitted into and out of reality was not a clever move. My adolescence came and went, but still I felt no need to 'explain' the Watcher to myself. Lots of things in the world we don't understand. Endocrinology. Airline ticket pricing. Spousal intentions. Life trundles on regardless. The Watcher was just an occasional blip in my otherwise normal existence. Very occasional, very normal. [...]

Wondering whether she ought to stop and scoop up the wrapper, Alice glances at Min, only to find her bunching up her chewing gum in a paper napkin, preparing to throw it out of the window.

‘Oh, don’t,’ Alice says, regretting it almost immediately – the mumsy tone. Min raises an eyebrow at her, though she does withdraw her hand from the open window, throwing the napkin instead in the cupholder beside the gearstick.

‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’

It can be like this, sometimes. A sudden quirk of the lip. Alice biting back the wrong words. Sitting together in History, passing notes until Alice writes something stupid or uncool, underlines the wrong thing, and Min crumples the note in her fist.

‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.

I was in no condition to talk about plans or think about them, and yet an hour later there I was thinking as I sat in an RER train car rumbling toward a northern suburb. While I stared out at the grim prison blocks of apartment buildings and tried to hold myself together, I wondered if it was true, if the Eiffel Tower was just a Gallic erection thrusting forth from the supine French body, shooting off bursts of clouds, seen and invisible at the same time.

Was it so obvious that it was not obvious?

Was the French empire simply exposing itself for all to see?

Was the Eiffel Tower any different from the Washington Monument, the white missile erupting from the American capital, foreshadowing all the nuclear missiles buried in silos across the American landscape?

[...]

My neighbor got up and moved to another seat.