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INTERVIEWER
I’m continually baffled by this. If the sentences don’t work—in their unexpected exactitudes, in their rhythms and freshness, in their allusiveness and connotative complexity—how does the story work? Is the story not being told with sentences?
GURGANUS
Exactly. And then there are writers whose sentences always surprise with their inevitable loving precision. Henry Green, early Evelyn Waugh, Walt Whitman, Toni Morrison, Chekhov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, Nabokov, Montaigne, Dickinson, Agee, Beckett, Melville, Günter Grass, George Eliot, García Márquez, our lists go on and differ year by year. I keep the works of my current deities in easy reach. Scanning even one of their living sentences can resurrect me like CPR. People talk of plot and character, but too few genuflect to the beauty and power of the actual single sentence itself.
<3
Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.
<3
APPIAH
People didn’t argue with the main claims because those were footnoted to articles in biology journals, which they didn’t feel equipped to disagree with. But I think what they felt was, in saying that there were no races, you were denying what the social constructionists were asserting, which was that, of course, in everyday life, in a country like ours, people have experiences as if there were races. People are treated as if races existed, and if you take that away, it sounds as though you are denying that you yourself are a Black person. Now, of course, I was saying that, as a claim about biology, there aren’t any White people either.
INTERVIEWER
But that means what?
APPIAH
What I was denying was the thought that these social cleavages mapped onto interesting biological ones. I was denying that once you’d classified people in those ways you could then say powerful and interesting things about their other properties, how smart they would be, or how honest, or whatever. And that’s part of a package of ideas that was put together in the nineteenth century. I was not denying that people thought there were races—that’s obviously true—nor was I denying there was racism. Racism doesn’t require races, it just requires people to believe in races.
My students are debating the nature of the woman in Klimt’s The Kiss. Why, you ask, are students learning about The Kiss in Landscape Design and Management at the local community college? Because, according to my extremely rough quant research, their future clients will probably be the type of people who fucking love Klimt. Or, at least, the aesthetic of Klimt. We can infer that their clients will want to exude an aura of knowing and appreciating Klimt.
There are about ten minutes left in class, so most of the students have tuned out and are waiting for the conversation to find a natural conclusion. I’m waiting, too, my mind having drifted to climbing palm trees with a saw, the breeze in my hair, and then tonight, maybe some cheap wine or a couple beers with Liz before bed—such a good life.
Max, my favorite worst student, signals that it’s time to pack up by playing, aloud from his phone, a Sonic Youth song, the one that inspired K to record her first demo. Now it feels heavier on pick scrapes than I remember. And as it turns out, this song is also on the playlist K sent me.
“Max,” I say. “Not now. I hate that band.”
“But you’re wearing their shirt,” Max says, shaking his head.
I point to the Klimt again. “Now listen, one last question before we wrap. You walk into the prospective client’s house and you see this hanging above a white marble table in the foyer. Klimt’s aesthetic. How might it inform the imaginary lines your client desires outside their home? Like, for example, azaleas or no azaleas?”
this is so funny
It’s as if they’ve all figured out exactly what they want in life. It’s fucking great. I bang on the window. They stop and look. I give them the thumbs-up. “Bravo! I’m very happy for y’all!” I yell.
Rob shakes his head and points at his ear. I don’t think they can hear me. They go right back at it.
Then, just like that, my indulgence in this, all this that is apparently life now, is interrupted by thoughts of my sister, and how she wasn’t scared of anything. Or was it that she didn’t care about anything? Why didn’t she call me when Heather died? Or even years later when I met Liz and we got married?
I try to sink these thoughts. My life has somehow turned out too good, and I worry that it might get even better, and then, after it gets as good as it can get, somehow it will all be taken from me. This is a reminder that some grief and some fears that I pretend are no longer alive are very much alive in me, alive as much as my sister might not be alive very soon. Wrap your head around that and walk straight through the fucking day.
But here are all of my students, kissing each other in the quad. I know they can’t hear me, but I bang on the glass and yell anyway, “Does this mean I’m doing a good job?”
By the time the window defogs, they have disappeared.
Meredith is staring out her office window, looking across the expanse of the quad, the students laughing and milling about, celebrating the end of the semester.
Meredith turns to me. She’s crying. She has an expression that is the absolute dead-on representation of dread.
“Is everything okay?” I say.
“The grass, Sack, it’s so long all of the sudden. Didn’t you just cut it?”
“Yes, just a few days ago. It looks like it’s growing faster than usual. I wanted to ask actually if we could switch to a different landscape design, a wild design? Also, I wanted to ask for this Friday and next Monday, and maybe Tuesday, off. For a family matter.”
“Sure. Whatever.” She turns back to the window.
“Okay, thanks,” I say. That was too easy. “Wait, to which one, the new landscape or the days off?”
“They seem synergistic to me, Sack.”
“Right.” I’m not sure I know what that means.
I have gone through my own practice and tried to identify the things I tend to do. The first is recurrences. I’m sort of an auteur critic in the sense that if I find a writer interesting, I try to read all their work. I do the same thing with musicians and painters. And when you do that, what you begin to notice are recurrences. As I say, I began with style studies, where one paid close attention to tics—not themes but peculiarities, eccentricities, recurrent expressions in a writer’s style. And from there one began to deduce a Weltanschauung. Spitzer calls it a kind of hermeneutic circle. Doesn’t matter what you call it, but Spitzer’s idea is that you find some stylistic peculiarity in a writer and then you begin to find other ones, and when you connect them they form a distinctive worldview. I take style as the central thing. Style meaning precisely this recurrence of certain forms and certain idioms—idiolects, if you like.
<3 a treasure
In fact, another maxim I have offered myself at certain moments is that ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself. Making critiques from the outside is like reading books you don’t like because you want to denounce them. Sometimes that can be politically important, and I would never knock that. There are political things one has to do, judgments one has to make, quarrels one has to have. But with literature, it’s much better to deal with things that you like, that you associate yourself with. And then, if there are ideological nuances to that association, it becomes a self-judgment. That is to say, you recognize the role of the ideology in yourself, your own racism or something, and then, from that, you evolve a judgment, if you like.
Gemma doesn’t note the wariness in his voice, because her own words are repeating in her head: “since we moved” as opposed to “moved back.” Which would have made it sound like she and Des had been an item in Ireland originally. But they hadn’t been. They don’t actually know how to be in their country of origin together. They stand around their breakfast bar, swirling espressi. They squirm palely, unsexily on their oversoft mattress, both appalled by Ireland’s lack of bidets. They wear waterproofs in the rain, or carry umbrellas, which once prompted a passing car to roll down the window and shout: “Gay!” In an effort to retrieve a social life, they’ve been leaving jaunty voice memos for school-era friends, inviting them to hang out—friends whose weddings they missed and whose children and health conditions they don’t know the names of. In the messages, Gemma hears her own accent separate out from her, like she’s been dubbed.
On Friday, they’d gone to the best restaurant in the county (something they’d planned for as soon as Gemma was able to belly laugh without wincing), but Desmond had shaken the bread basket on their table and commented: “These weren’t cut from the same baguette. This is the ends of other people’s breads.” The dismay in his voice stopped Gemma from finding it funny.
In the rearview mirror, Gemma sees her husband’s face hued gray by his phone. He’s checking where sempre dritto leads on Google Maps, scanning the next few minutes of their lives for junctions. That wanting to know had often inspired and even aroused her. But his wanting to know had lately tipped over into needing, his curiosity oxidizing into something altogether less shiny.