Bookmarker tag: advice/living (110 notes)

[...] “I was a madly gay little girl,” she writes, though what I noticed most in her description of her childhood wasn’t her happiness but her confidence. She had appalling handwriting (Sartre used to complain about it) and always “made a mess of hems,” but “as soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed of infinite power . . . when I was asleep, the earth disappeared; it had need of me in order to be seen, discovered and understood.” Her confidence, which never left her (“I have almost always felt happy and well adjusted,” she said at sixty-four, “and I have trusted in my star”), is astonishing. I have never known a woman, in person or in print, who talks about herself the way Simone de Beauvoir does. That preternatural conviction makes sense of the teenage Simone rejecting God and the social code of the bourgeoisie she was born into; the woman in her twenties believing that she was her lover’s essential love despite evidence to the contrary; the thirty-something deciding to write a book about the female condition; the fifty-year-old producing a 2,000-page autobiography. One day, while drying the dishes her mother was washing, she caught sight of the wives in the windows opposite doing the same thing, and had a vision of domestic life as a horrifying mise en abyme. “There had been people who had done things,” she said to herself. “I, too, would do things.” [...]

Now, me … if they said I had a year to live, I’ll bet I would just swim out to sea, get it over with. But Sally, it is as if the sentence had been a gift. Maybe it’s because she fell in love with Xavier the week before she found out. She has come alive. She savors everything. She says whatever she wants, does whatever makes her feel good. She laughs. Her walk is sexy, her voice is sexy. She gets mad and throws things, hollers cusswords. Little Sally, always meek and passive, in my shadow as a girl, in her husband’s for most of her life. She is strong, radiant now; her zest is contagious. People stop by the table to greet her, men kiss her hand. The doctor, the architect, the widower.

Jesse made everybody feel important. He wasn’t kind. Kind is a word like charity; it implies an effort. Like that bumper sticker about random acts of kindness. It should mean how someone always is, not an act he chooses to do. Jesse had a compassionate curiosity about everyone. All my life I have felt that I didn’t really exist at all. He saw me. I. He saw who I was. In spite of all the dangerous things we did, being with him was the only time I was ever safe.

Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on a party Lou was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. “Like a baby,” Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.

Every night, my mother ticks off another day I’ve been clean. It’s more than a year, my longest yet. “Jocelyn, you’ve got so much life in front of you,” she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there’s a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.

But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too young and unhappily, but we’d had an accidental child and I was doing the responsible thing. This is me in a nutshell. I am responsible. I am a good man. I always do the right thing. But is doing the right thing the right thing? Or is doing the right thing the cowardly thing? The thing that doesn’t make waves? The thing with which others cannot find fault? If romantic films have taught us anything, it is that by being responsible we are being irresponsible—to ourselves. To the cosmos. To the narrative. Even to those we need to wrong terribly by leaving them. Because is not it better to be honest with her, him, thon? I think perhaps it is. In the end, my marriage fell apart anyway. She became smitten with an art critic, a mediocre one at that. But it was too late. My Concierge to Merge (as we once jokingly referred to each other) also married an art critic. A separate art critic, although equally mediocre. One marvels at the accidental symmetry of life. And she was happy, ecstatically so, she told me, although I always felt she sounded a tad defensive. And my life was ruined. And I aged. And I look unhappy, ecstatically unhappy. And I don’t sleep at night. And I take pills to help me cope. And it’s not only her, although if I had her, I feel certain I would be fine with every other disappointment, but I don’t, so my professional failures come to the fore. In a sense, the same brand of cowardice that kept me from pursuing my true love kept me from pursuing my true chosen profession. Oh, I made one movie. I made it on a shoestring with money I had borrowed from my wealthy-by-marriage sister. It didn’t do for my career what I had imagined it would, what to this day I believe it should have. It is, and I say this as an objective professional critic with a PhD in the cinema of postwar Europe, perhaps the single most brilliant film of the last twenty years. Certainly, there were problems with it. I won’t say there weren’t. For one thing, it was decades ahead of its time. For another, I concede, it was perhaps too emotionally draining for audiences. Most goers are not looking for an experience that unrelentingly intense, that devastatingly heartbreaking, an experience that will change them forever. And then there were the critics, who were, in a word, jealous. They all want to be filmmakers themselves but do not have the talent, so they expressed their rage with a slew of moderately negative reviews. In some cases, they refused to review it at all.

And what of the fascisms in each of us who would be anti-fascist? “Kill the cop inside your head!” goes the anarchist dictum. As philosopher John Protevi noted in his 2000 essay, following Deleuze and Guatarri, “A thousand independent and self-appointed policemen do not make a Gestapo, though they may be a necessary condition for one.” How do we remove ourselves as participants in such a condition? Easier said than done. We cannot simply be anti-fascist; we must also practice and make better habits, forms of life. Rather than as a noun or adjective, anti-fascist as a gerund verb: a constant effort of anti-fascisting against the fascisms that even we ourselves uphold. Working to create nonhierarchical ways of living, working to undo our own privileges and desires for power. The individualized and detached Self, the over-codings of family-unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism—all of them paranoiac sites of micro-fascism in need of anti-fascist care. Again, easier said than done. But better than a faulty approach to anti-fascism that frames it as some pure position, when it is anything but. We act against fascists in the knowledge we need to act against ourselves, too. The strategy is always to create consequences for living a fascist life and seek anti-fascist departures.

All that I know about the relationship between publication and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings, which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach is a four-hundred-pound man who had won a gold in Olympic bobsledding twenty years before but has been a complete loser ever since. The men on his team are desperate to win an Olympic medal, just as half the people in my classes are desperate to get published. But the coach says, "If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it." You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk.

It never occurred to me that there must have been a number of losers that day. Future colleagues whom I would meet a long time later in a tour bus. That we would lightly trade back and forth the young people we once were, with laughter and distance.

Then I only had Grandma. By morning I was with her, and I cried my heart out. Sobbed on a breast which never had harbored the dream that now was crushed within me. In the span of a night everything that was customary and familiar had been stripped away, and I was in the middle of a transition. There was something to be learned from this, something hard to understand: that one carries one’s fate within oneself, one’s fate is not dependent on this kind of failure or success.

To become conscious is a long process, to become open to sorrow, look upon it as part of living, of developing, of changing.

A year in Oslo, where the first few months of loneliness are what I remember best. Where not being able enough, talented enough, was the big sorrow. Months that seemed endless, without any goal or meaning. Carefully jotted down in a blue diary that I still have, written by a young girl who lived long ago. Pains that I no longer recall, joys that are no longer a part of me.

Nora stands in the door and says: “I don’t know what will become of me. I don’t know where I am going. I only know that I can no longer bother about what others say. I must find my own way.”

Is this not where life’s possibilities lie? Not necessarily to arrive, but always to be on the way, in movement.

Also in love.

Also with the same hand in mine—if I am lucky.

I needed to ask, what would a better way of seeing look like? And how do you move forward when uncertainty tempts you towards cynicism? The answers, I think, are in something the author Sheila Heti told me in an interview when I asked her about the question of whether or not to have children. The important thing, she explained, was not to make the ‘right’ or ‘best’ decision, but ‘to closely bind yourself to whatever you’re living’. She said, ‘You make your life meaningful by applying meaning to it – it’s not just inevitably meaningful as a result of the choices you’ve made.’ We were discussing this in the context of choice, but I think it applies to circumstance too. The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.

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.

“Sweetie, I didn’t listen to Him, either. From now on, we’ll have to try to do better. That’s why I want us to pray together every day. I want us to change. I want us to be closer. I want us to experience the joy of God together.”

He shuddered.

“A terrible thing happened, but there can still be joy. I was looking at the birds outside—can’t we still take joy in Creation? Can’t we take joy in each other?”

He gave a cry of pain.

“Shh, shh.”

“I don’t deserve you!”

“Shh. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t deserve joy!”

“No one does. It’s a gift from God.”

So, in every way, Clifford’s life was made simultaneously easier and more complicated. His pleasures were multiplied, while he had less and less time for himself. The flattery never stopped and he couldn’t help eating it up, while at the same time he believed what was said about him less and less and finally not at all.

Here’s the tragic heart of the problem—as I understood it. When the irritations, the problems, and the conflicts that existed before the big success are eased and removed, when the struggle is (apparently) over and one lives behind a permanent Don’t Disturb sign, it soon becomes evident that these troubles, now put behind, were the source and the genesis of the talent that brought on the success. Fame and money were insulating Clifford from the discomforts and challenges of his earlier years but, at the same time, “saving” him from those abrasions that were the source of his “genius.”

There’s a price for everything.

Now came the classic questions: “Suddenly I can do anything I want, so what do I do? I can go any which way; which way will I choose? What do I ask of life? What do I want to do with my years and energy? If I do have the talent they say I have, to what shall I turn it? Now that I have what appear to be unlimited choices, which choices shall I make?”

We hang up, and I go back to my closet to do another hour’s work. I’m looking forward to tonight—I always liked Bud Templeton, though I’ve hardly seen him in years. I still think of him as the tall, wry neurologist I loved to chat with over plastic cups of wine at school plays. We would congratulate each other on our daughters’ performances as orphans or lost boys, one eyebrow raised to show that, unlike some parents, we had this all in perspective. But perspective was what I lacked, it turns out, for my life had felt as permanent as childhood. I’ve even outgrown the clothes I wore as a young wife: summer suits, skirts below the knee, tall black boots—none of it fits; I’ve become a smaller version of myself, distilled from an earlier abundance I was not even aware of. I take unexpected pleasure now in packing these outfits away and stepping into a sleek, narrow dress I bought last week. I carry my wine to the window and wait, my face near the glass. The sky is clear and dark, the lights of the city trembling beneath it. As I watch them, I’m overwhelmed by a feeling I haven’t had in years: a sweet, giddy sense that anything might happen to me.

“Always watching,” Silas says, looking at me. “Those big eyes, always moving.”

I nod, ashamed. “But I never do anything,” I say. And all of a sudden I know, I know why Angel left me.

Silas frowns. “Sure you do. You watch,” he says, “which is what’ll save you.”

I shrug. But the longer we sit, the more I realize he’s right—what I do is watch. I’m like Silas, I think. In twenty years I’ll still be alive.

On one side the sky is getting light, like a lid is being lifted up. I watch it, trying to see the day coming, but I can’t. All of a sudden the sky is just bright.

Yesterday I walked through a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings on shabby streets, and I ate lunch in a lousy restaurant. The bread was hard, and the lettuce was rather stiff as well. But to tell you the truth, the experience wasn’t that bad. I could survive some lousiness, some uncomfortableness, some decline. Back on the street, I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world. We’d have no control over what would happen. We’d let go and fall. How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it’s been great, the life of comfort, good lunches, predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed—I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.

MS: There is only one reason to be envious of the people who write very successful songs with three or four chords, and that is that they earn the kind of money that gives them a kind of freedom that Elliott Carter may not have. So it would be nice for Elliott Carter to go to the restaurants that Elton John can afford. But if the price was that he had to write music exactly like Elton John’s, then he would do without it. And that’s it. If I had to write the kind of sentences that Jacqueline Susann wrote, you know, write the kind of novels that she wrote, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head high anywhere! I’d slink into restaurants—very expensive restaurants—and I’d slink into expensive hotels. And I’d be ashamed to say what it was that I did.

[...] For Dostoevsky--as for such latter-day literary heirs of his as Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, and Michel Houellebecq--the impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever, the inevitable breaking of some bleak and remorse-filled dawn, is the flaw in nihilism through which humane narrative can slip and reassert itself. The end of the binge is the beginning of the story.

Just a lunch to celebrate Chollie and Danica’s upgrade in the Hamptons. Ten thousand square feet, live-in housekeeper, chef, and gardener. Stupid, Mathilde thought, their friends were idiots. With Antoinette gone, Lotto and she could buy this place many times over. Except that later, in the car, Lotto and she would laugh at their friends for this kind of idiotic waste, the kind he was raised within before his father kicked the bucket, the kind they both knew meant nothing but loud pride. Mathilde still cleaned both the country house and the apartment, she took out the garbage, she fixed the toilet, she squeegeed the windows, she paid the bills. She still cooked and washed up from the cooking and ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.

I couldn’t make a decision and she felt it; I was afraid, in fact, that she was betting on that and her calm was due to a calculation. I asked her affectionately, “Do you say that because you think you can’t act otherwise? That you don’t have a choice? There’s always a remedy, at least greater harm can be avoided. You’ve been his lover, right?” I saw her blush violently. “That concerns me alone.” So I lost control again. “Shameless!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed of speaking like that?” “No,” she answered firmly. “And whatever my response, it wouldn’t change anything. You can impose your will on me, even for a few months; you can shut me in a convent or throw me out of the house. You have full rights, and I will obey you. Those are the relations between you and me. The rest concerns me alone.” Annihilated by that coldness, I replied, “So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.” “But what can your judgment be, at twenty?” I exclaimed angrily. “You have to rely on those who have experience, submit.” She smiled. “If things were like that, nothing would ever change, everything would be transmitted intact from generation to generation, without improving, slaves would still be sold in the square, don’t you think? It’s precisely now that I can rebel. At forty, when I’m old, I won’t be able to do much, I’ll want to stay comfortable.” I was about to say that, on the contrary, it’s precisely at forty that one rebels, but I don’t know if it’s true, and then Mirella is so much more educated than I am, she always cites names and books that say I’m wrong. “You’re not religious, Mirella?” I asked her instead.

Anabel only gave me the job because, she said, I was naturally maternal. It had come up after I asked Anabel how she had gotten married in the first place. Anabel said, “Well, darling, it was simple. I had not been in touch with many men at that age, or at least any good men. Anyone who was sweet was surprising. It seemed unbelievable to me. One day he looked at me and said, ‘Anabel, I will never look up or down at you. Let’s get married.’ And we did of course. Things didn’t turn out how either of us thought they would, but we have a beautiful child together, and that’s enough to celebrate from that union. A piece of advice: You’ll come across many people who will want to be with you. People’s imaginations aren’t entirely idle; they can slot you into their futures easily. You have qualities that people wouldn’t mind spending time with, at least for a while. You could be the perfect girl for Anybody. We are conditioned to be obsessed with people falling in love with us. Reaching that point is seen as a success. We’re always asking, ‘Why do they act this way?’ and then morphing, cooing, comforting. By the time you win them over, you don’t know how to really love them in return because we never ask ourselves enough about what we want. Don’t ever forget you have the ability to choose. Never wait to be chosen by someone who came ready to treat you right. I know it may not seem this way in art and literature, but we are not mere vessels for love and admiration. If I said yes to every proposition I was given just because I was flattered by it, well!” What she means is have an idea of what you want and never get talked out of it. I am slowly learning to never accept less than I deserve. Deciding how much I deserve is another matter. I wish someone would say to me, “I will never look up or down at you.”

Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy. You embrace what clinicians call “depressive realism.” It’s what the chorus in Oedipus Rex sings: “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away?” You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and self-delusion of the brave new McWorld. And these insights are the sole legacy of the social novelist who desires to represent the world not simply in its detail but in its essence, to shine light on the morally blind eye of the virtual whirlwind, and who believes that human beings deserve better than the future of attractively priced electronic panderings that is even now being conspired for them. Instead of saying I am depressed, you want to say I am right.

At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges as the story tells itself. I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.

We stood on a slope and watched the moon rise: up it came, round as a drawing. We saw how the stars became brighter, sat deeper in space. M and her friend struggled to philosophise. They laughed, and were excited. ‘I can’t sort of grasp,’ said M, ‘what there is beyond the universe.’ We all played the ukulele when we felt like it. She made up a song called ‘In the Paradise Cafe’. The boy read Tom Sawyer aloud: he couldn’t restrain his laughter. I woke at two in the morning, lay there filled with a kind of shame. Looking out at the moonlit bush, silver by night, grey by day. Don’t be so proud. Accept criticism, accept editing and guidance. No one will think less of you. I got up at dawn. There were tasks and I did them: finding wood, making a fire, boiling water. The sky became more orange and the wind began to stir. The coming light. It creeps across the dull grass and pinkens it, between the thin trunks. My panic left me. The problem becomes merely the work I still have to do, rather than an indictment of my whole personality and talent and social position.

Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape it and in that way I can get control of it.

These two men. I could say ‘I love you’ to each of them. To L in the most direct, old-fashioned and simple way: I know him, I like him, he is like me, we know each other without effort, two greedy, cheerful, sexy, sociable people, takers of foolish risks. To the other, how? A thinker, intellectual, contained, cautious, measured, hard-working, private. And married. This will have to be lived. It can’t be walked away from.

Reading an old diary. I cannot remember, even in the thinnest or most fragmentary moment, how it felt to ‘love’ the man I was in love with, back then. All that hideous torment, everyone suffering, and for WHAT? What would I remember of NOW? This one works, steadily, quietly. His mind does not take the easy way out. I can only live the thing to its fullest extent. This is what life is. It’s not for saying no.

I heard a gospel song in the car and a rush of Christian moral scruples came over me: ‘If I gave him up I would be a more virtuous person, more correct, more calm, more blessed.’ This kind of thing, which attracts me at times, is almost a death wish, a nothing wish, a blankness wish—like wishing that we could all like each other’s work, that there should be no conflict. The LIFE of life. No laws apply.

Each time I go to see Three Sisters at Anthill the same thing happens: when Masha makes her confession of love and asks rhetorically, ‘Is it wrong?’ the audience holds its breath. Everyone wants an answer to this question—even perhaps an absolution—but Chekhov won’t give one. There isn’t one. ‘These things cannot be legislated.’

Women can endure things and keep going because our lives are made up of small practical physical tasks, and no matter how lonely or sad or humiliated you are you do the dishes, or wash the clothes, and you come to the end of a small task and see a small result.

The harbour. I can hardly comprehend its constant differentness from itself. Today wide slow ridges, ten feet apart, move towards me at a slant and softly collapse against the low stone wall. Taking notes—this little discipline—is a defence against the blank wordlessness that overcomes me when I stand at the window and look at the water. Why do I feel I have to conquer this state, subdue it, flail away at it with my vocabulary? In fact it is a tremendous gift. A chance at the soul.

‘Where life immures, the intelligence cuts a way out…The intelligence knows nothing of those closed situations of life from which there is no escape…Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.’ —Proust, The Captive

Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”

The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.

“Here.” Chen retrieved the book offered as a gift, searched the pages. “This is one of my favorite paintings. Twin peaches in a small basket. Peaches represent long life, but as you know they are delicate, bruise easily. If the tree lives long, the fruit is ephemeral. Picked ripe from a tree, there is nothing sweeter or more succulent. Here twin peaches sit together, sweetly and exaggeratedly red in color for a lifetime.” Chen reached up to touch the soft fuzz of the young man’s felt fedora and tugged it down in jest.

If we felt confused, it was also the young man’s turn to look with questioning, as well as sheepish, eyes.

Chen sighed. “Revolution is old, but older yet is the sentiment of this painting, of love and of poetry.”

1.1 Ben San Pablo was named after this father, Bienvenido San Pablo, Sr., a strong muscular man of broad shoulders and deep voice, a tough, bold exterior fortified nightly by the golden flame lit within an amber bottle of whiskey. There was no earthly weight that Bienvenido Senior could not lift, no woman he could not charm, no comrade from whom he did not receive respect. And yet a great weight surrounded his heart like a lead suitcase, an unattainable woman sneered blue cat eyes in his dreams, a great white father reminded him constantly of his place. Thus a great man was a cripple in his own mind, uncontrollably jealous of the woman with whom he became attached such that his paranoia and self-doubt eventually drove each of them away, and though a respected foreman at his job, he spent all his additional pay buying drinks and loaning money to his working crew to assure himself of their friendship and continued loyalty.

1.2 A man's self-worth can only be measured by himself.

Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The jokes just wrote themselves, folks. Onstage, Mailer, who had a weirdly affected Brahmin (was it?) accent, held forth about God, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity as if he alone had the special wisdom monopoly on these topics—and all others. It seemed to me even then dangerous for a writer to come to regard himself as grandee; the writer’s concern should always be getting to the truth—and how can you get to the truth of the story if you are the story, not the one standing outside of it? (In his irritatingly excellent book The Spooky Art, Mailer in fact acknowledges his early fame as the central tragedy of his career.) Never get too comfortable in the temple: this was another message in a bottle I’d send my future self.

[...] '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.

She looks up at him now, and he’s looking back at her, an intense silent look. She tries to laugh, and her laughter has a helpless sound. Margaret, he says, can I kiss you? She doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh again, or start crying. Okay, she says. He comes over to where she’s standing against the fridge and kisses her on the mouth. She feels his tongue move between her lips. Drawing away slightly he murmurs: Sorry about my braces, I hate them so much. She tells him not to apologise. Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her. Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

[...] At least their marriage isn’t a secret, Margaret said. Ivan shrugged his shoulders. If it bothers you to keep secrets, you can tell people, he replied. But I think the only reason you’re not telling is because you think people would react stupidly. That has nothing to do with right and wrong. Margaret said that in fact she sincerely feared the judgement of others, and Ivan said that to fear judgement was not the same thing as believing that the judgement was valid. You’re making yourself anxious, he remarked. What’s the point? We have a nice time together, no one is getting hurt. Margaret fell silent then for some time, thinking. And finally she said: I suppose I’m afraid that someone will get hurt, in the end. Ivan gave no sign of shock or distress at this, he just went on refilling his coffee cup. Yeah, obviously, he answered. I mean, it’s possible. It’s probable, if you want to put it that way. But you still have to live your life, in my view. He swallowed a mouthful of the coffee then and put the cup back down. And if it’s any consolation, if someone does get hurt, it will definitely be me, he said. Getting my heart broken in the end, let’s be honest, it won’t be you. With a horrified laugh Margaret said that was no consolation at all, and that it made her feel terrible. Ivan smiled then, looking at her, and replied: Oh, well, okay. Maybe it will be you. I doubt it, but you can think that if you prefer. She put her hands in her hair, and her head was shaking. I think you’re going to meet a nice girl your own age, she said. Some beautiful nineteen-year-old, and she’ll be able to play chess with you. He started laughing at that. Hm, he said. I was about to say that nineteen seems a little young for me. But maybe that wouldn’t be tactful. They looked at each other, and they were both laughing, sheepishly, flushed. [...]

[...] Ivan said he could come and see her during the week sometimes, if she wanted. Work at her house in the daytime, while she went into the office. Dinner together in the evening, maybe watch a film afterwards, his arm around her shoulders. All the unhappiness that life has visited on them both: dissolved however briefly in that feeling, shared image of that quiet contentment. Maybe, she said. Light and silvery high the music feathers through the air around her, sadly soft. And why not after all. Why not accept wholeheartedly life’s offerings. [...]

In the beginning was defeat. Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of contemporary critical thinking must start from this fact.

From the second half of the 1970s, the protest movements born in the late 1950s, but which were inheritors of much older movements, went into decline. The reasons are various: the oil shock of 1973 and the reversal of the ‘long wave’ of the trente glorieuses; the neo-liberal offensive with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980; the capitalist turn in China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping; the decline of old forms of working-class solidarity; the Left’s ascension to power in France in 1981 and, with it, ministerial prospects encouraging the conversion of leftist militants who had distinguished themselves in May 1968; the definitive loss of credibility of the Soviet and Chinese blocs; and so on and so forth. [...]

[...] Lucien never returned home till morning, and rose in the middle of the day; Coralie was always at his side, he could not forego a single pleasure. Sometimes he saw his real position, and made good resolutions, but they came to nothing in his idle, easy life; and the mainspring of will grew slack, and only responded to the heaviest pressure of necessity.

Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list—And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend?—and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.

First there was Socrates, then Jesus, then Oscar Wilde, and now me. We're a select few. And while I'm at it, there was also Spinoza: “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; The Lord will not spare him.” You just don't get that kind of writing from the Judicial Court of Paris these days. No great life is complete without a trial, you have to ruffle a few feathers, you can't just be a good little child all your life.

I took the first apartment I could find, 500 euros for 100ft2 just behind the Pantheon. There's a little square downstairs, a few cafes, students everywhere, a kebab shop called With Or Without Fries, a Lebanese restaurant opposite that sells chicken kebab for 4.90 euro, the swimming pool isn't far, I have a fridge that I have to unplug at night because of the noise, a plastic plant on the windowsill, a mattress on wooden slats, two drawers, a shower in the corner of the room, a laundromat just downstairs, the place gets no natural light in the day but there's a bright light coming from a spotlight just beneath the window at night, the phone doesn't work, it's a bit like a cave, I'm stealing WiFi from the neighbors. 100ft2 is the size of a prison cell or a monk's cell. It's very Ignatius of Loyola, very spiritual retreat. There's a certain joy that comes from doing things you didn't think yourself capable of.

If I'd have settled for just liking women, it would've been fine, I think. Lesbian lawyer, same life, same income, same appearance, same opinions, same ideals, same relationship to work, money, love, family, society, the material world, the body. If I still had the same relationship to the world, it would've been much less hassle. But that wasn't an option, that's not how it works, I didn't go through all this just for more of the same. I did it for a new life, for the adventure. I think that's what makes them so mad, Laurent, the judges, all the people who don't speak to me anymore. As if they'd never felt it themselves, the temptation to just chuck it all in. As if it were that big a deal, as if they were the ones stealing food from Franprix, walking a tightrope.

I might have given up everything but I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. I go to bed early, I get up early, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, I don't spend my Sunday afternoons doing BDSM, I'm not fighting any battles, I'm not part of any community, I don't have any particular affinities. Swimming, reading, writing, and seeing girls, like an ascetic. If it weren't for the cigarettes and the sex, I'd be practically straight edge, hardcore in my own way. Of course it'd be total anarchy if everyone lived like I do. I'll pay for it, there's no doubt about it, just give me the check, la cuenta por favor, no problemo, you always have to pay in the end.

Not having any money gives a sharp clarity to everything. 100ft2, two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, an old leather jacket and my old Rolex, just for a laugh, a single espresso to go, a baguette, a packet of cigarettes, my swimming pool pass. The world is turning into a skeleton without any flesh. I'm getting stronger, more focused. It's important to have limits so you don't lose yourself in the chaos. I've been stealing from Franprix and Bio c’ Bon, I don't pay my train fare, I jump the barrier, I've learned to ask my friends for a hundred euros, let them pay for my drinks, thank you friends, there are thousands of things I can do without, the doctor for example (but not cigarettes), I'm living on nothing, learning the techniques, getting through the days. Sometimes I steal to eat, sometimes it's just for the sake of it, for the beauty of the gesture. I'm training myself to be indestructible, I need to know that I am.

It wouldn't be the same if I had a safety net, a family to rely on, an inheritance stashed away somewhere, a piece of something or perhaps someone. But I don't have anything. And I don't really have anyone, either. Apart from my dad, who doesn't have a cent to his name, and a few friends, I don't talk to anyone. The conditions are perfect. I'm doing this for real. That's all that matters. It has to be real. There has to be a risk. That's the only thing that counts. I've seen what happened to my parents, to all the clients I've defended, I know it's a slippery slope. I haven't been wrapped in cotton wool like people always think, because of my family name, or because they're morons making lazy assumptions about things that are none of their business. As if the borders were sealed off, as if violence, death and poverty were non-existent among the bourgeoisie. So yes, walking along the rooftops without a safety net, that's the way I like it. I think this is what I've always wanted. It's the kind of life I imagined as a child, when I'd climb the trees and think about the future. Maybe my lousy romanticism doesn't count for anything. But that's the way it is. A life of convenience, a full fridge, the thought makes me want to die.

I don't flirt, I never flirt, I often say no and sometimes say yes. It doesn't really have anything to do with sex, let alone love. I'm starting to realize I can have just about anyone. You just need to have the guts, because everyone's so bored, everyone's waiting so desperately for something to happen.

The person who emerges in this brief autobiography is fierce, difficult, vulnerable, and unrelenting in her will to hope and in her devotion to what she calls “the shared cares of the finite world.” When she writes, thinking of Proust (“les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”), that “the only paradises cannot be those that are lost but those that are unlocked as a result of coercion, reluctance, cajolery and humiliation,” she is saying paradise is not a gift or an effect of grace but the end of a plan of work, and although no one works to get into an inferno, one might need to stay there for some time to perform various necessary labors.

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in his ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation. There can only be that twin passion—the passion of faith.

Dante’s poem is called The Divine Comedy. Sacrilegious poet! He usurped the impassible sceptre of Godhead to assign his friend and foe to the eternal terraces of the paradiso and the inferno. Does not all writing, even if it aims at Gelassenheit—to let things be—arrogate such illegitimate authority?

Philosophy provides a humbler definition of comedy, which eludes the hubris of the medieval poet: “The comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.” This is Hegel’s version of the divine comedy. No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, “sure” only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. This is not love of suffering, but the work, the power of love, which may curse, but abides. It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.

Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

“In my dream I knew I was going to die soon,” she said. “And it ’s a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick before you go.’ ”

The next day they would not let him in to see her.

What, you might reasonably sputter at this point, has any of that got to do with politics? But if you've got this far, you've patiently waded through relatively ordinary observations about the anthropocene, guilt and genocide. So stick with it. We're almost there. The point I'm making is that, in political discussions it is increasingly the worst thing in the world to be wrong. Indeed, it's often hard to separate being wrong from being a loser, thick, malevolent, or bigoted.

There's something about social media, in particular, but also the wider culture, that favours zero-sum, win-lose arguments. I often find myself responding to this pressure on social media, but you can also see it in television 'debates'. Not to be precious about this, some arguments are actually win-lose in their essence; sometimes those are the stakes. But it is in the nature of such arguments that we can't encounter other people being wrong without gleefully strutting and clucking over the grave of their rectitude, the tattered remains of their dignity. Logically, that also entails that we can't stand to be wrong about anything ourselves. Which means, we can't stand to learn anything, because in any conversation like that, pedagogy is only ever one-way and takes the form of a punishment beating.

This gleeful grave-dancing of the victors in argument, moreover, looks uncomfortably close to the kind of prideful cock-walking that you might expect from some of the victors of the neoliberal game. At times, dare I say, this form of communication looks a little fascistic, as through difference could be settled through group humiliation. Which brings me back to what I was saying earlier. “Humanity rocks” usually, in practice, means that “humans like me rock hardest”.

If, however, we start from the premise that humanity isn't all that neat, that it doesn't always 'rock', that there is a lot to be wary and frightened of in ourselves, that there are things to be guilty about, that there are failures that are understandable but not okay, that we don't and can't know it all, then we might find the gleeful grave-dancing of the victors (in whatever domain) far more ridiculous and repulsive than the losers. Indeed, we might acknowledge the losers, whether or not we personally like them or their politics, with a certain rueful solidarity, a certain recognition of their predicament. It’s the egalitarianism of universal failure. That’s the sort of pessimism I’m talking about.

12/11/42

Sometimes I have the strange belief that there is a remedy for every sensation of discomfort, physical or mental. When I drink water after long thirst, eat food after hungering, or once every five years take bicarbonate of soda for a digestive ailment (nervous indigestion) and when the pain passes in two or three minutes, the dull ache inside of me lifting and disappearing, keep on at my books with the fathomless ingratitude of a young person who has always been healthy, when such things occur then I think one may always make arrangements to stay comfortable all one’s life. And yet this is the very opposite of what I have always believed (since I began believing anything, around the age of fourteen) and what is in my blood to believe. I believe in constant discomfort, varied equally like the ups and downs of a business chart about its line of normalcy, as the natural state of mankind. Therefore these happy, blind, animallike “insights” disturb me.

1/8/45

To live one’s life in the best way possible, one must live and move always with a sense of unreality, of drama in the smallest things, as though one lived a poem or a novel, attaching the greatest importance to the route one takes to a favorite restaurant, believing oneself while browsing in a bookshop, capable of being unmade or made, destroyed or reborn, by the choice of literature one makes. In one’s room alone, one should be Dante, Robinson Crusoe, Luther, Jesus Christ, Baudelaire, and in short should be a poet at all times, regarding oneself objectively and the outer world subjectively, compared to which state of mind the reality of the sorrow of a lost love is destructively real and brutal.

4/30/55

The irking dissatisfaction of living with someone whom one is not thoroughly in love with, does not love thoroughly and unquestioningly. Ah, that nagging inner question, that defiant exclamation: “Surely I am not fated to live with her the rest of my life! I can’t believe I am fated to live this!” What irks the honest man and the honest artist (a redundant term!) is that inevitably, if he is human and kind, the world—for him will be seen through the eyes of the person whom he does not entirely trust, and whose imperfections (nothing but dishonesties) he has already tried hundreds of times to correct and explain away, without success. To be bound to a warped and dishonest person, to be emotionally bound, is like being compelled to wear distorting glasses the rest of one’s life. An unbearable fate for an artist! The world is difficult enough to bring into perspective, even seen purely!

7/13/56

Life—existence—getting along with people—or even getting along totally with oneself—is a matter of compromise. A platitude. But the wisdom (or the stupidity) depends on the things one compromises with, and also one’s sense of humor, or detachment, or earnestness, in compromising. It is the most important and the most difficult art in the world. But it is for people who have chosen happiness, alone. It is not really for artists, though they have to compromise, too (e.g. when they greet their cranky landladies; or do they always? No). One must either know instinctively when and how much to compromise, or one must have an intellectual system worked out about it. One must compromise the whole way, with a sense of humor and an absolute, beautiful conviction that one is not compromising oneself in doing so; or else one must be grim and equally well defined, saying basically I shall not compromise any more than is necessary for me to keep myself out of jail. But there are times when one should go to jail, prefers to go to jail. This is really the Endless Circle, the rat-race of Twentieth Century America.

There is a passage in the work of the contemporary novelist Dorothy Allison which may help explain what I have in mind. Towards the beginning of a remarkable essay called 'Believing in Literature', Allison says that 'literature, and my own dream of writing, has shaped my own system of belief - a kind of atheist's religion ... the backbone of my convictions has been a belief in the progress of human society as demonstrated in its fiction'. She ends the essay as follows:

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto - God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

What I like best about this passage is Allison's suggestion that all these may be the same, that it does not greatly matter whether we state our reason to believe - our insistence that some or all finite, mortal humans can be far more than they have yet become - in religious, political, philosophical, literary, sexual or familial terms. What matters is the insistence itself - the romance, the ability to experience overpowering hope, or faith, or love (or, sometimes, rage).

What is distinctive about this state is that it carries us beyond argument, because beyond presendy used language. It thereby carries us beyond the imagination of the present age of the world. [...]

In past ages of the world, things were so bad that 'a reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat' was hard to get except by looking to a power not ourselves. In those days, there was little choice but to sacrifice the intellect in order to grasp hold of the premises of practical syllogisms - premises concerning the after-death consequences of baptism, pilgrimage or participation in holy wars. To be imaginative and to be religious, in those dark times, came to almost the same thing - for this world was too wretched to lift up the heart. But things are different now, because of human beings' gradual success in making their lives, and their world, less wretched. Nonreligious forms of romance have flourished - if only in those lucky parts of the world where wealth, leisure, literacy and democracy have worked together to prolong our lives and fill our libraries. Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural, and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future.

"A great job and a family doesn't sound so bad to me."

"You should do something better with the guts you've got."

Now in my forties, I have changed in ways that reach far beyond the limits of my concussion recovery. I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me. I know to listen to my body, but not so much that I convince myself I can’t do things or that I can’t push myself; not so much that I can use the concept of listening to my body as a weapon against my vitality. I do the highway drive I’m nervous about doing. I prepare to make a film. I write the book I’ve always wanted to write. “Run towards the danger” is a way of being that I have taken into my life with me; a treasure, a spell, a sword.

He comes, every night. He doesn’t text me during the day or give me any notice. I text him if it’s not a good night. If David is in town. He always comes even if just to tell me he can’t come, that Clémentine is staying home. Usually this is just after she has come over herself, so I already know, and he’s come straight from work. I don’t want to ask too many questions, about how this works for him, or for them, lest I should lean on it too heavily, and make it collapse. I try to remain open, open to whatever there is, in this strange parabola in my life, this pocket, in which so much is held.

The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation or friendship was itself reserved; “One loved her,” Mendelson said, “without there being a centre of herself that one loved. One loved her attributes—generosity, her sweetness, her learning, her sense that you were better than you were.” She also had “an absence of irrational hatreds and passions,” a commitment to “see in everyone the best they have.” She made a similar observation herself about her friend the poet James Merrill: “He had the generous talent of bringing out the best in his friends; one rose to his articulate occasion.” There was also a sense of serenity about her own place in the world, Mendelson felt: “She didn’t seem to care if you admired her work or not … She didn’t want anything from you. She wanted a sense of being part of your world of excellence … It was not that she felt ‘I am a famous person and I am being generous to you,’ she was absolutely at peace with herself.” That serenity embraced a notable reserve; despite her loquacity and her generosity, it was clear that there were things she chose not to disclose. The writer Matthew Specktor recalled her as “very very well defended” and described her use of conversation, admiringly—“she spoke in arias”—as a form of filibuster. Amanda Vaill, one of her editors at Viking, saw some of The Transit of Venus’s Caro Bell in her, a quality not exactly of reserve or aloofness but more of “being able to hold herself apart from a discussion … It was observant … She wasted nothing. She didn’t throw things away. She kept them.” And, Alec Wilkinson noted, she made judgments: “There was something so avid about her intellect; an intelligence that couldn’t help but take the measure of all it saw.”

The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation or friendship was itself reserved; “One loved her,” Mendelson said, “without there being a centre of herself that one loved. One loved her attributes—generosity, her sweetness, her learning, her sense that you were better than you were.” She also had “an absence of irrational hatreds and passions,” a commitment to “see in everyone the best they have.” She made a similar observation herself about her friend the poet James Merrill: “He had the generous talent of bringing out the best in his friends; one rose to his articulate occasion.” There was also a sense of serenity about her own place in the world, Mendelson felt: “She didn’t seem to care if you admired her work or not … She didn’t want anything from you. She wanted a sense of being part of your world of excellence … It was not that she felt ‘I am a famous person and I am being generous to you,’ she was absolutely at peace with herself.” That serenity embraced a notable reserve; despite her loquacity and her generosity, it was clear that there were things she chose not to disclose. The writer Matthew Specktor recalled her as “very very well defended” and described her use of conversation, admiringly—“she spoke in arias”—as a form of filibuster. Amanda Vaill, one of her editors at Viking, saw some of The Transit of Venus’s Caro Bell in her, a quality not exactly of reserve or aloofness but more of “being able to hold herself apart from a discussion … It was observant … She wasted nothing. She didn’t throw things away. She kept them.” And, Alec Wilkinson noted, she made judgments: “There was something so avid about her intellect; an intelligence that couldn’t help but take the measure of all it saw.”

After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, nonillustrated descriptions I had worshiped for several seasons. And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gemlike moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!

But she hadn’t said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.

In my firehouse days, a friend told me that surviving divorce isn’t about getting what you want, because you won’t. It’s about making the best life you can, with what you get.

We live uneasily the only way we know how, ever more anxious that the earth under our feet is turning to quicksand, while a fierce wind howls at the horizon. Hauling oneself out of one’s elemental presence-ism and presentism is nearly impossible: all the institutions, structures, and systems we live within are predicated on the indefinite persistence of the present. These are the structures and systems and institutions that give our choices meaning, connect us with each other, allow us to see our lives not as transient, atomistic accidents but as coherent, organic parts of a greater whole. Yet as the world changes around us, we are increasingly aware that something is wrong: the future isn’t what it used to be, and the temporal stability we depend on to give our present reality the illusion of persistence seems less and less reliable. We begin to wonder whether thinking fifty, thirty, twenty, or even five years into the future makes any sense, since the global transformation that seems to be steadily approaching—whether for good or for ill, through revolution or through collapse—will overturn everything we hold dear. We find ourselves existentially threatened by ecological collapse and climate change not only in the material sense that it will lead to vast human suffering and billions of deaths but also in a philosophical or psychological sense, in that the promise of imminent catastrophe—or revolution—threatens to make our present day-to-day life meaningless.

This essay on the loss of grace in tennis speaks then to the passing of a writer's first ecstatic access to creation. Wallace mourns the loss and maps a paradox that would become the seed idea of later work. The paradox is that although we need to live in peaks, these hypostatic highs of sex, success, religion, love, creation, conception, childbirth, or yes sports, we can only fully appreciate the peaks when they are passed and passing. Why? Because ecstasy's power lies in its wordlessness, its ability to make of us a happy holy blank. Because appreciation is a branch of thought, it is only in falling, in coming down from ecstasy, that we can know that we have briefly touched the ultimate. It is only in the falling too that we try to find words for the sublime [...]

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?

How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner’s death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage — what was courage? She had never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on, others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever?

To die was merely to go on in another direction.

Still later, Fred Ottenburg, the rich man who loves her but, like all the men in this book, wants Thea to have her life, says to her,

Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? . . . A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learned the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. . . . You are not that sort of person. . . . You will always break through into the realities.

It is from passages like these -- vivid, sustained, dominating -- that The Song of the Lark draws its power. Cather makes a great romance of the loneliness of the artist's vocation, into which she pours her own defiant necessity, but that is not her subject at all. Her subject is the conviction that in pursuit of the deepest self there is glory, and in the absence of that pursuit there is emptiness.

At this time, a friend wrote me a letter. He addressed me with the word “Dearest.” But however often I looked at the word “Dearest” and my name, I could not keep the two words together, because they did not seem related. He closed the letter by telling me to “have courage,” and I found, to my surprise, that if I simply looked at the words “have courage” there on the page, I had courage that I had not had a moment before.

A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it is how much you can bear.

No date, no name attached.

She smiled at Danny, this ancient crone, alone and weak, nuts if she thought she could operate a battering ram on her own. She was powerless any way you sliced it, but she thought she was strong and that made it true in a way. This astounded Danny. He’d never seen it before.

[...] Danny had a creepy feeling of watching himself: a gimping, head-injured guy with a right foot full of big white toes anyone could reach out and grab, stumbling through a rotten garden outside a castle full of strangers in a country he didn’t know the name of. A guy at the end of the line is what Danny saw, with no options left. A guy with nothing, or why would he be here?

Another squirt of cold. Danny talked to himself: Get it together. Get. It. Together.

This was how the worm got in. You opened yourself to that kind of thinking and the worm crawled inside you and started to eat and didn’t stop until nothing was left. You saw yourself as a weak powerless guy and it was only a matter of time before everyone agreed you were that guy. Danny had seen it happen. The worm ate people up the way years had eaten away this castle: caving in ceilings, chewing through walls, tunneling under floorboards until even a perfectly renovated hallway with varnished doors and fake candles on the walls had a thousand bugs crawling around a few floors underneath it.

The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one’s desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These reflections are trite, but there they are.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, I began. Although really I should say ‘I continued’, since I’ve decided to use the small amount I wrote in January too. It’s been happening for a while now that when I get into bed, I work on the text in my head, or rather I work on the images, or the mood, of what I want to write, and often I find myself mentally putting it into words. Early yesterday morning I was outlining yet again how I’d continue the story I began in January, when I saw quite clearly that I was going round in circles and getting nowhere; that I was forever thinking, ‘I’ll write it tomorrow,’ the way you might think about beginning a diet or a plan to quit smoking. But today I said: ‘Tomorrow doesn’t exist and it never will. The project won’t happen at this rate. I need to write down what I’m thinking this instant, because when I wake up tomorrow I’ll get tangled up in the thousand things I get tangled up in every day and the text will go on being postponed until it’s time to go to bed and … ’ And although I was already wearing the clothes I sleep in, I turned the computer on – configured to the user who’s a writer – and started to type. I don’t know how it turned out, but when I went to bed seventy minutes later I’d stopped feeling guilty.

Before that, I moved through the city like a sleepwalker; although my eyes were open, I saw no more than the bare minimum I needed in order to get where I had to go. But then, in the time opened up by the green-eyed gaze, the city filled all three, or four, of its dimensions; I lived in it, breathed in it and breathed it in, coming to know its pleasant and not-so-pleasant smells. I began to pick up on the slight sadness of particular neon lights glimmering on particular pavements, or the fleeting joy of an unexpected reflection – the red of a car in a torrent of water, traffic lights on rainy nights (the jubilation of the brilliant red or the gentle purity of the green, wet from the rain and bouncing off the asphalt; marble walls or the shiny surfaces of cars, which contrasted with the sweet, infinite sadness of those meek, tireless March and April showers that fell endlessly onto a city carpeted by the plane trees’ yellowish-brown leaves). Yes, there are happy autumns, just as there is happiness in sadness and even in despair: the point is to be alive and to know it, to feel it – and I curse and curse the dull fear of these long years, when all our lives are gradually drying out, dwindling, reducing, with never any place for sadness: nothing but fear, nothing but hatred, nothing but that long-lost, oft-hidden morsel of hope, worn out from so much manhandling, from our longing to squeeze just a few more drops from it, a few more drops to get us through the present with its shrinking horizons and impenetrable lead roof; and oh, how I also came to hate this city, which was falling to pieces, which was burying us under ever-higher walls and rubble and dust and noise and silence and shame.

To have been a Party member in Russia in 1930 wasn't a mistake,' Dubreuilh said.

'If you have no right to make a mistake, it was a crime.'

'It's not a question of right,' Dubreuilh replied.

'How dare you set yourselves up as judges?' Scriassine said, without listening to him. 'Do you know Volange's reasons, his explanations? Are you sure that all the people you accept on your team are better men than he?'

'We don't judge,' Henri said. 'We choose sides. There's a big difference.'

'Being a war correspondent is more or less defensible. But a "peace" correspondent — I can't see it,' Lambert said, adding spiritedly, 'Yes, it's well worth it, being the kind of journalist you are; it's a real adventure. But being an editor, even with L'Espoir, wouldn't mean anything to me unless I had to earn my living by it. On the other hand, living off my income would give me a bad conscience.' He hesitated and then continued, 'My mother left me too damned much money; no matter what, I'll have a bad conscience.'

'And so does everyone else,' Henri said.

'But everything you have, you earn. There's no question about that.'

'No one ever has a perfectly clear conscience,' Henri said. 'For example, it's utterly childish for me to be eating here when I refuse to go to black-market restaurants. All of us have our little tricks. Dubreuilh pretends to look upon money as a natural element. He has a hell of a lot of it, but he does nothing to earn it, never refuses anyone a loan, and leaves it up. to Anne to manage it. And as for Anne, she puts her mind at rest by not considering it as her own; she tells herself she's spending it for her husband and her daughter, making a comfortable life for them which she, by chance, happens to profit from. The thing that helps me is that I have a devil of a time balancing my budget; it gives me the feeling that I don't have anything to spare. But that's just another way of cheating, too.'

'Still there's a difference.'

Henri shook his head. 'When conditions are unfair, you can't very well live a blameless life. And that's the real reason for going into politics — to try to change conditions.'

'He's a monster,' Anne said. 'He'd work in the ruins of Hiroshima.'

'He is working in the ruins of Hiroshima.'

'Why not?' Dubreuilh asked. 'There have always been ruins somewhere.'

All the next day, Henri kept thinking about the conversation he had had with Dubreuilh, a conversation that had continued late into the night. The only question, Dubreuilh declared, was to choose, among existing things, those you preferred. It wasn't a question of resignation; you resign yourself when, between two real things, you accept the one which is worth less. But there was nothing above humanity, even such as it was. Yes, on certain levels, Henri agreed. Preferring emptiness to fullness was what he had blamed Paula for; she had clung steadfastly to old myths instead of taking him as he was. Conversely, he had never sought 'the ideal woman' in Nadine; he had chosen to live with her in spite of knowing her faults. It was especially when you thought of books and works of art that Dubreuilh's attitude seemed justified. The books you want to write are never written, and you can amuse yourself by seeing a defeat in every masterpiece. And yet, we don't dream of a superterrestrial art; the works we prefer command our absolute love. On the political level, however, Henri felt less convinced — because evil intervenes there. And it isn't always just a lesser good; it can be the absolutes of misery, of death. But then again, if you attach importance to misery, to death, to individual men, it isn't enough to say to yourself, 'Anyhow, it's a sad business,' to feel authorized to wash your hands of it. It is essential that it be more or less sad. Evening was falling and Henri was musing under the linden tree when Anne appeared in the doorway.

She began going through the press clippings, and Henri opened a letter, a very amiable letter from a young man. There were a lot of amiable letters, and usually they pleased him. But that night, without quite knowing why, it irritated him to think that in the eyes of certain people he passed for a splendid specimen of humanity. The clock struck ten. Dubreuilh was speaking out against war, but Henri suddenly wished he were in his place. He had often said to himself, 'War is like death: there's no use preparing for it.' But when an aeroplane starts into a nose-dive, it's better to be the pilot who's trying to pull out of it than a terrorized passenger. Doing something, even though it were only speaking, was better than sitting by himself in a corner with that dark weight on his heart. Henri pictured the hall filled with people, their faces upturned towards Dubreuilh, Dubreuilh bent towards them, throwing out words. There was no room in them for fear, for anguish; together, they were hoping. After it was over, Dubreuilh would go to a bistro, a very ordinary bistro, and eat sausages and drink wine. No one would have very much to say, but they would feel good. Henri lit a cigarette. You don't prevent a war with words. But speaking was not necessarily a way of changing history; it was also a certain way of living it. In the silence of that study, given over to his innermost nightmares, Henri felt he was living it poorly.

Apparently Seneca believed widows should be permitted to mourn their husbands for ten months maximum, a precept meant to counteract the stubbornness of female grief, but what had any ancient man ever really known about any female anything? How could any of them have been so sure that it wasn’t all an act, that she wasn’t a bit pleased, that it wasn’t just relief that led a widow to dwell in her black? What says leave me alone better than a veil?

Still, sure, I could see how there might be value in putting time limits—though not prohibitions—on mourning:

For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.

[...] Yes, my own personal brain chemistry is something I must reckon with, but doing so while navigating a cruel health care system, with the goal of remaining healthy enough to face a laughably uncertain financial future, all in service to surviving a world that is everywhere immiserating, hardly seems a good way to answer “how do I live.”

The best answer I’ve managed to come up with is that you live with intention of making that question easier for other people to answer. For me, the worst aspect of chronic depression (besides the boredom of it all) is the urge to be alone. If you’ve read my previous columns, you’ll notice that I almost always find a way to bring up our beholdenness to others. This is because I’m a lazy writer, but also because the fact of mutual obligation is what gives me the motivation to write at all. It’s also what animates any politics worth having.

I’m not sure if that’s an answer, really, and maybe we all need to fumble towards our own. All I know is that my occasional inability to bear the world is, in meaningful ways, a response to living in a world made unbearable. This can bring you to despair or it can bring you to purpose — today I chose the latter, and I hope I do again tomorrow.

Twenty years ago when I moved to Washington and went to Don Giovanni starring Erwin Schrott, I did not know that I was destined for a decade of increasing heartaches culminating in a bonanza of heartache that ultimately calibrated my soul with insight my soul had been waiting for its whole life. Till then I never understood the adage that failure and despair can be elucidating and strengthening. All that was unbeknownst to me twenty years ago.

There’s a real closeness between imagination and forgiveness. I mean that in a phenomenological way. If you notice where you go when you have to forgive someone, it’s the place of supply, the place of extra. I think it’s worth spending a lot of time attending to that, so that when chance or fate or whatever it is knocks a poem your way, you’re ready. That’s why I’m quite often driven to say that it’s more important to do the work on one’s character than on the words. Don’t surround yourself with dictionaries. What really is nauseating in a poem is when you smell somebody trying to be a poet, and when it’s yourself, that’s just the worst of all. But a voice is such an incredible thing. When you think of how each person resonates differently and their physical voice comes out of this space that is tuned by tension and confidence and generosity—that’s the best thing you have.

I want to look, really look, at the world—but I find I do not want to look at it as an explanation for what is wrong with me. I don’t want to be forgiven. I want unkindness, from myself and from the world, because it is unkindness that has to be reckoned with, that makes me feel awake. I want to be punished; I want the stimulation of struggle. But it seems in order to do this I have to consider that the world does not owe me anything. I want to look at the world because despite the fact that it is unkind, it is also interesting, and full, and endlessly entertaining.

I forget this, during my worst winter and my most unmotivated months; I forget that there are stories to be chased that have nothing to do with me. I ask my therapist to help me remember these stories, these reasons to get out of bed in the morning. I ask her to help me re-want to learn about the world again—about literature, and philosophy, and ideas that continue to exist and exhilarate no matter how much money I have or will ever have, no matter how overworked I am and will certainly continue to be forever. She says that I am focusing on other things because I do not want to talk about myself: about how the boy I loved that winter had disappeared, about why I am fighting with my mother or about the fact that I am drowning in job applications. I need to do something nice for myself, she says, over and over again.

So should we just reject the “idea of harmony”? Adorno said not. The idea that a good work of art “embodies the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure” doesn’t mean that it should contain contradiction as a general principle. True, good art doesn’t blithely lie about the continuing existence of disharmony by creating, as most pop music does, a naïvely harmonious tune. But nor does good art simply mirror our disharmonious society by creating irrationally dissonant works, as Shields seems sometimes to recommend. That’s just bad art, like my country cover of a metal song.

In between these two bad options, the best works of modern art express the broken relationship between individual and world by embodying the specific contradiction of our society: economic ends have taken precedence over human ones. So Adorno’s preference was for works constructed with painstaking care; such works (e.g., Beckett, Berg), perhaps despite themselves, hold onto the idea, the final goal, of social harmony. No matter how depressing their content, the forms of Endgame and Wozzeck are utopian. They’re internally inconsistent, but not in a capricious or random way; rather, their contradictions are an image of our own. They’re also moving and effective, incredible artistic achievements—and that achievement in itself is an imperfect image of what we could do, if our interests and our society matched up. Whether such works should take the form of fiction or nonfiction is an irrelevant and even an uninteresting question, from this perspective. Adorno’s continual plea was: don’t replicate the world by acting the way the world acts, because then you’ll just be a part of a bad society; but don’t lie about it, either, because change will only come when we understand the problem

As it happens, I borrowed How Literature Saved My Life from the Los Angeles Public Library. A previous reader had left a post-it in the book. S/he’d written on it something that sounds like a thought David Shields would quote: “In a universe so indifferent to our fate—how best to endure—to go on.” My first thought was that the universe isn’t indifferent to our fate, any more than my desk is indifferent to my fate: the universe is not the kind of thing that could be interested or indifferent. My second thought was that I have a family and friends, none of whom are indifferent to my fate.

My third thought was to look up the sponsor of the Post-It, Kaletra. It’s a brand of AIDS medication.

There really are some people for whom life is a daily struggle. I’m pretty sure that the point and meaning of life is to ensure that as few as possible have to exist in that way. And that’s only possible if we stop assuming that we all do.

I wanted to hear more about Laura’s experience, but I noticed that my own attitude toward the visit was one of cynicism. Not only was I treating the cadaver as a mere curiosity, but there was a hint of self-satisfaction in my conviction that its sight would not affect me—I think it derived from a leftover tomboyish belief that invulnerability is always preferable to fear. I envisioned the piece I would write (the organs gleaming like gemstones), as though the visit itself were a formality. Yet such irreverence troubled me. The notion of going to see a cadaver with the prior knowledge I would write about it struck me as manipulative. If I described the lab scene to a trusting reader, but while in the lab had thought only of its literary potential, must a truthful rendering of that scene thus include admission of my mindset? And what of the poor cadaver, whose former occupant had decided to bequeath her body to the medical school, but had likely not foreseen an outcome such as this? Finally I wondered about the repercussions of undergoing certain “significant” experiences simply because they might provide fodder for one’s stories. In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard asks her students which of them want to be writers, and then she tells them what the decision must mean: “You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax…” The line had long appealed to me—Dillard’s vision of the artist, whom she later describes as a kind of sacrificial flame, is flattering, particularly if, as she asserts, “the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.” But until I visited Laura’s cadaver, I had always assumed it was one’s past one must attack. It had never occurred to me that one must “go at” one’s present and future as well.

What Paul says about having children seems to me to ring equally true of marriage. Until you have spent a lifetime in the company of another person, you can't possibly know what it's like to do so. When we get married, there is an important sense in which we really don't know what we're doing. This doesn't make marriage a complete leap into the dark, of course you can be pretty sure that another person is well-suited to you, that you have similar goals, that you love each other, and so on. Even so, no matter how much you know about another person on the day of your marriage, you still don't really know what yourte doing in marrying them. This doesn't make you wrong or irrational to do it anyway; it's just part of what it is to be human. Living as a finite being means projecting oneself toward the unknown.

—Damn it, it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s a question of . . . it’s being surrounded by people who don’t have any sense of . . . no sense that what they’re doing means anything. Don’t you understand that? That there’s any sense of necessity about their work, that it has to be done, that it’s theirs. And if they feel that way how can they see anything necessary in anyone else’s? And it . . . every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.

—Where’d you read that?

—I didn’t read it. That’s what it . . . has to be, that’s all. And if everyone else’s life, everyone else’s work around you can be interchanged and nobody can stop and say, This is mine, this is what I must do, this is my work . . . then how can they see it in mine, this sense of inevitableness, that this is the way it must be. In the middle of all this how can I feel that . . . damn it, when you paint you don’t just paint, you don’t just put lines down where you want to, you have to know, you have to know that every line you put down couldn’t go any other place, couldn’t be any different . . . But in the midst of all this . . . rootlessness, how can you . . . damn it, do you talk to people? Do you listen to them?

—After what he did, and he learned only through her suffering, Stephen brought out more loudly, —Now . . . If she comes to him carrying lilies that turn to fire? And the fire, what do you think it is? If that was the only way he could learn? So now do you see why he sends me on? If somewhere I’ve . . . done the same thing? And something’s come out of it, something . . . like . . . he has. While I’ve been crowding the work alone. To end there, or almost end running up to the doors there, to pound on the doors of the church, do you see why he sent me on? Look back, if once you’re started in living, you’re born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it’s possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder, how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? . . . how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it’s possible and pretend to avoid it? Or . . . or to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.

Diana rises from the couch and walks across the room to pour herself another drink. She stands in silence with her back to me. Then she turns around, leans against the mahogany bar, and says: “I was vain, shallow, pretty, and energetic. Mad for sexual success and popularity, and yes, secretly wanting bourgeois comfort and bourgeois success. But,” her head goes back, the dark helmet-like hair swinging out in a graceful, defiant arc, “I was a Communist. And being a Communist made me better than I was. It was the great moral adventure of my life. I wouldn’t—not then, not now—have traded it for anything. There’s been nothing else in my life of which I can say that.”

When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that. What’s better? Money? Position? Are you kidding?”

"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."

"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said, "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."

Eight or seven years ago,
before my back
began to scream at night,
we worked a rusted freighter
held together by forgotten screws.

The cargo was burlap bags of coffee
and the lingering heat of Latin suns.
Spilled beans became
ball bearings beneath our feet
as we swung the sacks
into bulging stacks on pallet boards.

The talk was of other lives
and private selves
with dreams of suburbs
and hard-fought football games.

An older brother heard something
in my own embroidered tale
and said, What's
a nice, educated boy like you
doing in a job like this?
I said then,
and pray it can be said at the end,
I sold my body
to save my mind.

He went out again, and again I stayed a long while on the balcony. I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the Boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson: it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement. When he was sixty Andersen was astonished at being able to cross Sweden in less than twenty-four hours, whereas in his youth the journey had taken a week. I have experienced wonders like that. Moscow in three and a half hours from Paris!

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked.

Cleo (to both men): Yes, if there's roads, I'll take them. I'll go up all those roads till I find what I want. I want a love that uses me, that needs me. Don't you think there's a world of joyful men and women? Must all men live afraid to laugh and sing? Can't we sing at work and love our work? It's getting late to play at life; I want to live it. Something has to feel real for me, more than both of you. You see? I don't ask for much ...

Prince: Miss Cleo, believe me, life is lonely, life is empty. Love isn't everything. A dear true friend is more than love -- the serge outlasts the silk. Give me a chance. I know your needs. I love your needs ... What do you have to lose?

Cleo: (immobile): Everything that's me.

The ongoing proletarianization of intellectuals prompts any number of further questions. Should we abandon the corporate publishers before they abandon us? So far we haven’t done so, but we’ve tried — as have many others — to fill the gaps left by the industry’s consolidation and caution. In our own work, should we tend toward more “accessible” language and popular forms — or take the increasing hopelessness of making a living from writing as license to experiment? In search of cheaper rents and fertile ground for new institutions, should we leave Brooklyn and make for the provinces? (Will we cross our displaced academic friends fleeing the other way?) Or do we stay and fight for rent control and the right to the city? And how to reply to the familiar reproach: If you want to change and not just interpret the world, why not give up writing and become an organizer or activist? Part of the answer, at least, is that learning to organize, like learning to write, takes years, and you can’t just substitute one job for the other — we will have to be amateur activists. Another part is that if activists are indispensable, so are intellectuals. The words of Adorno in “Sociology and Empirical Research” (1957), arguing for the Frankfurt School’s own version of critical sociology, come to mind: “Not only theory but also its absence becomes a material force when it seizes the masses.” Just this — for theorists and the masses alike — has been our problem.

These tentative answers to the whole perplex of culture and politics can also be taxed with vagueness and no doubt confusion. We’re trying to figure what to do from an unstable position amid crumbling institutions and generalized crisis. More than one variety of brave and honest, necessarily incomplete response to the dilemma can surely be offered, and still more varieties of evasive bullshit: a good ear will know the difference. We can’t bring ourselves to cheer the failure of institutions that have sustained us — but we can at least be grateful that the collapsing structures are carrying out a sort of structural rescue of meaningful individual choice, in politics and culture. Bobo or ProBo? Siege mentality (“We writers are in this together!”) or sorties beyond the walls: “We’re in this with almost everyone!”? Reform existing institutions, or replace them, or cultivate your own garden, or retire to your Unabomber cabin? Join the traditional intellectuals and seek patronage among think tanks, foundations, rich individuals, and multinational corporations, or do something for cultural revolution? Not that the old Marxist jargon matters too much, adopted or abandoned. What counts is history asking us a question — about our content or purpose in a society of accelerating insecurity, including our own — that one way or another we need to formulate as sharply as possible, since we answer it with our lives.

I realize now that I was trying to undo by writing what could only be undone by action, not alone but with others—and through connections that incantation alone would not conjure. Words, it turned out, did not have all the performative powers that 1990s book-learning sometimes seemed to suggest. In the strange and wonderful final book of Leviathan, “On the Kingdom of Darkness,” Thomas Hobbes describes the job of thinking as untying superstitious knots that enmesh the mind. The superstition I recognized was neoliberal realism, which sets and polices the boundaries of the possible while pretending to map them objectively. But an equal and opposite superstition is the thought that language, style, and invocation could disperse those constraints, as if their being discourse meant they were only words, set to be scattered by other words.

Such a political practice ought to terrify its participants as they embark on it, and discomfit those with whom they seek to engage. Like all stigmatized relationships, political engagements adequate to this moment are as likely to feel confusing or frightening as ecstatic or liberating. Affective struggle has to entail becoming connected to the people who can’t see past their confusion or fear, and building solidarity where there is none by insisting on a form of relationship to which few are accustomed and that the mainstream neoliberal subject sees as genuinely queer: camaraderie. What’s more, the willingness to generate discomfort will require insistence on connection even through multiple rounds of rejection. To lose heart at the first refusal — whether to join a union, attend a protest, or just talk about politics — is one of the indulgences of left melancholy, with its grim satisfaction in defeat. I’ve been sent scurrying from the slammed doors of many people whom I’ve tried to recruit to join my union, including countless people who are today members and leaders of the organization. I doubt this process is nearly as painful or costly as coming out of the closet. (Though being queer in America and being a trade unionist may not be so far apart in stigma as they once were.) Still, it does seem to me that the affective kernel at its core — attempting to form new relationships that violate and undermine the collective norm — is essentially the same.

[...] can the political impulses that Harris represents, the ones that come out of our generation’s distinctive experience, mature into potent collectivity? Or are they individualist from the root, bound to decay into posture and then a racket—absent the guidance of more seasoned activists, or without connection to struggles more deeply historically or socially grounded?

[...] What is the proper relationship to the past for those of us who want to make a new future?

The more traditional socialist left argues for continuity. We’ve been doing occupations since forever, Maisano said; let’s rebuild social-democratic institutions like CUNY, Henwood said. Socialism may be embraced by the young now, but in this version it still looks and sounds like Bernie Sanders—still a project of recuperation as much as invention, resuming an effort interrupted by the neoliberal caesura. In some guises, such historical continuity is humbling and useful. In others, it’s boomer narcissism run amok, reducing every left-wing proposition from a young person to an opportunity to force the past into the present. “Don’t repeat my mistakes,” cries the old socialist to the new one. The result can be formally radical but quite often conservative in affect and mood, dabbling soberly in the far-fetched notion that you can change the structure of society while everyone stays the same kind of people. This is one way of understanding why whiteness and masculinity continue to bedevil the socialist left, even in its committed antiracist and feminist quarters. A left that maintains a tether to a usable past is bound more tightly to the historical American nightmare. It can’t rush toward utopia, because it’s committed to engaging with people as they are and nudging them along.

The insurrectionary left, on the other hand, wants year zero. The power of the occupation, Lennard pointed out, is that when you step into it, you become someone else. The problem with becoming someone else, though, is that you’re disinherited from your history, so you can’t wield it effectively to understand the present or get ready for the future. It’s life in a permanent now, a condition reflected in anarchism’s traditional weakness when it comes to strategic calculation and engagement with state institutions—those durable, blunt objects. What was predictable about Occupy’s destruction—in fact, what was predicted at Bluestockings that night—was for this reason hard to prepare for until it was already under way.

It is, in its way, a generational question. If you kill your parents, you won’t hear their warnings, and then you’ll eventually just become them without realizing it. If you listen to them, you’ll become them on purpose. The question is how to become new and stay that way, how to be a stable point moving steadily from past into future without a neurotic relation to either—neither clinging nor leaping. This is the existential core of the strategic question on the left. It’s a question about growing up.

It was hegemony, Stuart Hall argued in 1983, that was key to understanding the disappointment of his own generation — why Thatcher and the new right had triumphed in remaking common sense after a decade of labor union revolt. Hegemony shaped how people acted when they weren’t thinking about it, what they thought was right and wrong, what they imagined the good life to be. A hegemonic project had to “occupy each and every front” of life, “to insert itself into the pores of the practical consciousness of human beings.” Thatcherism had understood this better than the left. It had “entered the struggle on every single front on which it calculated it could advance itself,” put forth a “theory for every single arena of human life,” from economics to language, morality to culture. The domains the left dismissed as bourgeois were simply the ones where the ruling class was winning. Yet creating hegemony was “difficult work,” Hall reminded us. Never fully settled, “it always has to be won.”

In other words, there is no economic deus ex machina that will bring the revolution. There are still people, in their stubborn, contradictory particularities, as they exist in concrete space and time. It is up to you to figure out how to act together, or not; how to find common ground, or not. Gramsci and Hall insist that you must look relentlessly at things and people as they are, face your prospects with brutal honesty, and act in ways that you think can have an effect. In these ways they are an organizer’s theorists.

It’s not easy to be the site of a battle for hegemony. It’s not a beatific Whitmanesque “I contain multitudes”; it’s an often painful struggle among your competing selves for dominance. You have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now. You may not like your own answer. Your inner Thatcherite will raise its voice. You can’t kill it off entirely; you will almost certainly find that it’s a bigger part of you than you thought. But organizing burrows into the pores of your practical consciousness and asks you to choose the part of yourself that wants something other than common sense. It’s unsettling. It can be alienating. And yet I also often felt I was finally reconciling parts of myself I’d tried to keep separate — what I thought, what I said, what I did. To organize, and to be organized, you have to keep in mind Hall’s lesson: there is no true or false consciousness, no true self that organizing discovers or undoes. You too, Hall reminds us, were made by this world you hope to change. The more distant the world you want to live in is from the world that exists, the more deeply you yourself will feel this disjuncture. “I’m not cut out for this,” people often say when they struggle with organizing. No one is: one isn’t born an organizer, but becomes one.