The Paris Review's Blog, page 169

The Commute of the Future

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the Guardian, The New Yorker, and New Scientist. His comic books—Baking with Kafka, Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, and Goliath—are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family.

From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

Redux: Poets on Poets

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Carl Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re closing out National Poetry Month with a celebration of the poets in our archive. Read on for Carl Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview; “Eclogue,” a rare piece of prose from May Swenson; and Nin Andrews’s poem “Poets on Poets.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

Carl Phillips, The Art of Poetry No. 103

Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art. I’m not trained in visual art. I often see things in a museum and don’t know what to make of them, but I still have an experience, a response to what I can see. Likewise, I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives. I think of many of my poems as emotional gestures. Context isn’t always essential—or maybe it’s that I resist context as an absolute. I like what happens when context begins to wobble a bit.

 

 

Eclogue

By May Swenson

Issue no. 10 (Fall 1955)

The property must belong to someone: I come upon berry patches and fruit trees in the general wildness, and tracks of cattle in the boggy grass by a stream, but there are no fences and the last farmhouse I passed was a mile away.

 

 

Poets on Poets

By Nin Andrews

Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000)

………………………notes from AWP

—I’m pretending not to see him so I can eat my lunch.

—But who reads that shit? About as true to life as a

velvet grape.

—I think he judges poetry with his dick. And poets, too.

—What’s the scoop on her? Is that her husband, or is he

just hanging out in her hotel room for the duration?

—Personally I prefer not to think about his dick.

—His latest work, especially the poems about his dead father,

begin to sound human.

—Think of it as a conductor’s baton.

—Granted, she wins all the prizes, but talk about grandiose.

—The latest inductee into the goddess cult. Like back in the

sixties when sex and war were the metaphors for

consciousness-raising.

—I bet they’re really confessional, and she’s a total

pervert too.

—He knows how to network, who to climb, and when.

Timing is everything …

 

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I See the World

© robert / Adobe Stock.

It begins in this way:

It’s as if we are dead and somehow have been given the unheard-of opportunity to see the life we lived, the way we lived it: there we are with friends we had just run into by accident and the surprise on our faces (happy surprise, sour surprise) as we clasp each other (close or not so much) and say things we might mean totally or say things we only mean somewhat, but we never say bad things, we only say bad things when the person we are clasping is completely out of our sight; and everything is out of immediate sight and yet there is everything in immediate sight; the streets so crowded with people from all over the world and why don’t they return from wherever it is they come from and everybody comes from nowhere for nowhere is the name of every place, all places are nowhere, nowhere is where we all come from; the dresses hanging in a store window that are meant for people half my age are so appealing and the waist of this dress is smaller than my upper arm and I walk on; the homeopathic combination of vitamin C and bioflavonoids and zinc are on a shelf in the Brattleboro Co-op and I let them remain there, but in the Brattleboro Co-op are cuts of meat that used to be parts of animals and these animals were treated very well and given the best food to eat and that is why they are on the meat shelf of the Brattleboro Co-op; the blue sky, the blue sky and the white clouds are made less so even, modified really, when I place them next to the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds I know exist in the place where I was born and grew up, St. John’s, Antigua, nowhere, nowhere; the long lines in/at the airport and the people manning the various portals of entry and then exit to allow me to attend my oldest brother’s funeral, though he was nine years younger than I was at the time he was born but how much younger is he now that he is dead, he is dead and I am alive in the time of the dead, the time of the dead being the time in which to be alive is a form of being dead, we are dead right now for we cannot be all our ways that are ways of being alive that is familiar; I can hear Martha and the Vandellas singing back up to Marvin Gaye as he sings, close my eyes at night, though to close my eyes at night does not bring sleep or dreams of being loved, only how it came to be that I thought being dead would come about by nuclear bombs, not from something my eyes cannot even see; that very shaded part along the banks of a small stream, which feeds into a larger stream, which feeds, all ending the Atlantic Ocean, that very shaded area is beginning to be filled up with ramps; there were funerals, there were weddings, there were bar mitzvahs, there were meetings I never attended and was penalized, there were evaluations and I thought hard and did my best to be fair; there were sentences that could not be completed for long periods of time; bells, all kinds of bells, in churches, at dinners, in gardens, when someone was hung at Her Majesty’s Prison at eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning; girls with small bosoms, ladies with large bosoms, men who couldn’t stand up straight, the phone ringing, somebody telling me that my mother had died; the fear of using public toilets because people I didn’t know had used them before; one thing I would have loved: sailing across the southern Atlantic Ocean from Argentina to Cape Town, South Africa, and making a little detour to the Drake Passage; the wonder of this world, the wonder of this world and there are no words for it, every word spoils it; the prison for women on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and in it were women who had violated all sorts of rules: sexual, which were political, and political: Grace Paley and Angela Davis, a writer of one kind and a writer of another but thinkers observing the same thing and not being heard and not being heard is in the land of the dead where I am now; Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina; walking so closely to someone just to hear what they are saying and then telling someone else what was overheard, so I could make fun of it; the joy of ridiculing someone I don’t know and will never meet again; there was that time when I told my best friend that if I got married and had children that he should commit me to an institution for the insane because this meant that I would never be a great writer and I did get married and had children and never became a great writer, that thing, the great writer, now looks so ridiculous, like a clown or something unworthy of human attention, not garbage, not that at all, just something to be but, but, I was young and didn’t understand anything at all, though I knew everything all and danced in the streets while wearing pajamas that had been issued to me by a cancer hospital, where it was found I did not have cancer at all but after I left the hospital I continued to wear the pajamas for they had been so comfortable; and having children, how difficult to see that they were not me and that their comfortable childhood was not mine and my girl daughter, oh how she suffered from my confusion and that world is separated from me, lost forever because of that thing that came from nowhere, like the rest of us it comes from nowhere, China, the United States of America, Antigua, all of that is nowhere, we are all of us from nowhere, and nowhere is where we end up, it is our destiny; alive but dead, dead but alive; a great divide has fallen on our life, on my life certainly and on the way I see the world: in life itself there are lots of dead in it, the kingdoms of mammals, vegetable, mineral, and all the others, are all in the living sometimes but in the dead all times.

 

The writer, novelist, and professor Jamaica Kincaid’s works include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter, A Small Place, My Brother, and See Now Then. Her first book, the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature.

This essay originally appeared in Swedish in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Quarantine Reads: The Anatomy of Melancholy

In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. 

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it. COVID-19 has prevented the indolence melancholy requires, even as its variants—anxiety, panic, vertigo—have bloomed in quarantine. If one is not already longing for melancholy, surely one has begun longing for the conditions in which it was once possible.

Perhaps this is why I’ve finally chosen to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy after many years of owning it. (I’ve not yet finished it; I’m not sure to what extent anyone can be said to have finished such a book.) “If you will describe melancholy,” Burton writes, “describe a phantasticall conceipt, a corrupt imagination, vaine thoughts and different, which who can doe?” The book sets this pessimism spinning like a top, whirling delightedly over local resentments and cosmic griefs alike. It is a labyrinth of arcane scholarship, obscure quotation, medical ephemera, and earthy shrewdness, all of it tied up with determining the root causes of melancholy. It is not hyperbole to call it one of the primary documents of European culture.

This greatest of medical treatises was written not by a doctor but a reclusive Oxford clergyman. As with Shakespeare, little is known about Burton outside his chief occupation. His contemporary, Anthony Wood, called him “an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro’-pac’d Philologist.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is presented as a frayed patchwork of texts, is the obvious work of a bibliophile, less original conception than inspired collage. (“Tis all mine, and none mine,” Burton wrote. “Only the method is myne owne.”) It proved a remarkable popular success, going through six printings in Burton’s lifetime. After falling out of print for over a century, it was rediscovered by the Romantic poets—John Keats called it his favorite book—and quickly enshrined as a classic: the tract resurrected as literature.

William Gass has written of the book’s “terminological greed,” a phrase that goes some way in preparing the reader for The Anatomy’s extraordinary surfeit. Burton the anatomist reaches us as a thoroughly modern figure, a gathering of vibrant and contradictory energies. He is a model of inconsistency, equally at home in sense and nonsense, science and superstition, asceticism and sensuality. He apologizes for the length of his digressions only to plunge into yet more. The resultant overgrowth of text is a sort of radiant miscellany; an accumulation of conjecture, proof, rumor, and heresy; endless lists of proper names, foods, herbs, symptoms, profligate et ceteras, disputations, and lengthy essays within essays. Though not itself a novel, Burton’s fabulous act of literary excess prefigures the encyclopedic postwar fictions of the twentieth century—Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Underworld—in which poetics and technics came together to approximate the informational density of culture.

It is perhaps the least quotable of great books. One no sooner extracts a sentence than one realizes it was load bearing; the whole structure seems suddenly liable to fall. It is best delivered in great slabs of rueful wisdom, its sermon-like weight leavened by mockery and irascible charm. Consider this, from “Causes of Melancholy from the Whole Body”:

No go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou has in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.

Or the beginning of the wonderful “Digression of Air,” which Holbrook Jackson has called “the first essay on climatology”:

As a long-winged hawk, when he is first whistled off the fist mounts aloft, and for his leisure fetcheth many a circuit in the air, still soaring higher and higher till he be come to his full pitch, and in the and when the game is sprung, comes down again, and stoops upon a sudden: so will I, having now come at last into these ample fields of air, wherein a I may freely expatiate and exercise myself for my recreation, awhile rove, wander round about the world mount aloft to those ethereal orbs and celestial spheres, and so descend to my former elements again.

Burton’s prose is not prettified. He is no phrasemaker. The joy of reading him comes from the conversational warmth his sentences kindle, the strong sense of a voice talking. It’s a gentle, provisional voice, never remote or pedantic, eager to remain at our elbow. It is the voice of a fellow traveler, familiar with the ailments he describes, having envied, desired, eaten too much, read too many books, sunk into depressions, and felt the marbles rolling dangerously.

Burton’s great intuition is that melancholy is the fundament of human nature—indeed, is itself human nature—a universal condition in whose shared suffering we might find both consolation and a case for more equitable relations:

And who is not a Foole, who is free from Melancholy? Who is not touched more or lesse in habit or disposition? … And who is not sick, or ill-disposed, in whom doth not passion, anger, envie, discontent, fear & sorrow raigne? Who labours not of this disease?

Only a laughing pessimist, a skeptic believer like Robert Burton, could have built to code the creaky, towering, impossibly angled edifice of human consciousness. This grand work of melancholy is also a comedy—not of manners but of minds—a celebration of everything addled, besieged, haunted, or endangered within us. One laughs and moans while reading it, in the dread and delight of recognition, the sounds at last too difficult to tell apart.

Dustin Illingworth is a writer in Southern California.

The Scientific Erotica Book Club

For the rest of the week, we’ll publish a strip each day from Tom Gauld’s new collection Department of Mind-Blowing Theories , in which the acclaimed cartoonist and illustrator trains his trademark wit on the wonderful world of science.

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the Guardian, The New Yorker, and New Scientist. His comic books—Baking with Kafka, Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, and Goliath—are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family.

From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

The Art of Distance No. 6

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“In celebration of the warmer days soon to come, this installment of The Art of Distance is devoted to spring—to stories, poems, and other pieces that put us in mind of the season’s hope, bounty, and optimism. Spring has sprung in these pages, at least.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma.

I’m watching spring blossom through the window of my sister’s childhood bedroom; the sun is bright, the breeze is cold, and the birds are louder here than in Manhattan. Reading William Styron’s “Letter to an Editor,” the preface to issue no. 1, I imagine that the spring of 1953 was as crisp and as bright as this one. Styron’s letter is an anti-manifesto manifesto, a critique of criticism itself, its very syntax exuding a biting and springlike energy. He admits that all ideas fall subject to scrutiny when put to paper. He writes, “It’s inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp’s over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2 A.M. becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it’s cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end.” Styron asks, however, that we try to put all that aside, resisting intellectual exercise and simply enjoying the patient work of writing and reading. —Elinor Hitt, Intern 

Spring, to me, inevitably leads to the singsong rhyme “April showers bring May flowers” repeating in my head, and when I think about flowers, I think about this Clarice Lispector short story (translated from the Portuguese by Rachel Klein). “Someone who has never stolen is not going to understand me,” goes the first paragraph. “And someone who has never stolen roses will never be able to understand me. When I was little, I stole roses.” But wait, there are many more roses in the archive, including in the brief poem “In the Storm of Roses” by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated from the German by Mark Anderson): “Wherever we turn in the storm of roses, / thorns illuminate the night.” Though they are separated by an ocean and different languages, there’s something oddly similar about Lispector’s and Bachmann’s writing. —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor

Spring is my least favorite season. It’s too cold to enjoy being outside, yet (most years) one feels wrong staying in. I love how Galway Kinnell’s poem “Last Spring” acknowledges spring’s harshness, like some kind of vengeful seasonal reformer after the long dreamy winter. Spring’s onslaught of light destroys cozy illusions—“It sent up my keepsakes / My inventions in dust / It left me only a life”—and demands that we be here now. I’m grateful to the poem for recognizing how hard that is (in any season, and whether you’re a spring skeptic or not) with the wonderful final line, in which the speaker finds himself “knocking on the instants to let me in.” —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer

Blackberries, an early concern of this long story by W. S. Merwin, won’t be in season until July, but his sensuous language is perennially evocative of life’s springtime stirring: “The limestone upland, the causse, was fragrant too, in whatever season, and its scents changed through the hours as the shadows moved, and the cool patches in the air, the damp currents from under the trees. Beyond the west wall of the garden, in the spring, three big bird cherry trees silently exploded in white flowers, their thick sweetness laced with a rank bitterness like that of almonds.” It’s a story not only long but lingering, asking a patience befitting its pastoral nature. The time is made rich by loamy smells, verdant pastures, and all the decadent flavors of food freshly harvested. —Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor

New Yorkers know this is tulip season: I’ve seen the East River Park abloom in Dutch delights—to say nothing of Tompkins Square and its daffodils. Walking the pooch down petal-laden paths, I’ve been reminded of what a bloom can do, and I think back to the fun we had in issue 228 with sculptor Francesca DiMattio’s amazing ceramics. Her maximalist vases are sculpture in their own right, but they also embrace their vestigial purpose as vessels, standing at the ready for any bouquet. And if we’re looking for floral motifs in TPR’s art, don’t forget Thomas Demand’s cut-paper cherry trees (accompanied in issue 212 by Ben Lerner verse) or Michel Beret’s “fastidious flower fantasies” from issue 4. —Emily Nemens, Editor

At the cold center of Amie Barrodale’s short story “William Wei” is a relationship for our moment: a forged-over-the-phone nondalliance between the narrator and a mysterious woman named Koko, who calls one night as he is eating a Mediterranean salad while lying belly-down like a dog on his army-style cot. Their eventual meeting smolders into an anticlimax perfect for reading as the flames of midspring lick at our windows from the outside, always beyond reach. —Brian Ransom, Assistant Online Editor

 

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What Rousseau Knew about Solitude

Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1766

In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the confines of community: “So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own… [D]etached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.”

After a scandal erupted in 1762 about the unorthodox religion in one of his books, Rousseau spent the next eight years in exile from Paris, wandering around Switzerland, England, and the French provinces. Having previously occupied a place at the center of civilized society—secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, friend of the philosopher Diderot, protected by rich patrons, “acclaimed, made much of, and welcomed with open arms”—Rousseau became gripped by the paranoid belief that he was an object of universal derision. “The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest. With all the ingenuity of hate they have sought out the cruellest torture for my sensitive soul, and have violently broken all the threads that bound me to them.”

By the time he returned to Paris in 1770, Rousseau was one of the most famous men in Europe, known popularly by his first name and revered by many of his contemporaries. In spite of this celebrity, he chose to live quietly with his companion Thérèse in a modest flat near the Palais-Royal, occupying his time with music, botany, and country walks.

“Alone for the rest of my life”—in Rousseau’s eyes, female companionship did not obviate his own special class of solitude—“since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire… Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me.”

Claiming to be no longer concerned about his reputation—“the desire to be better known to men has died in my heart”—Rousseau decided that his next project would be a simple one: he would walk, he would think, he would write down the thoughts that came to him. His Reveries would be nothing less than a faithful record of his friendless perambulations and the daydreams which occupied them. “I will give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature meant me to be.”

In Rousseau’s scheme of things, solitude was the natural human state. By stepping outside of society, by distancing oneself from other voices, one was facilitating a return to oneself. But being with oneself is one thing; writing about the state of being with oneself, another. There are ten walks in the Reveries (“First Walk,” “Second Walk,” et cetera), and although some of them may well record the thoughts that occurred to Rousseau as he ambled around Paris, what they amount to are carefully crafted reflections on his life and earlier writing. The Reveries are not the spontaneous jottings of a dreamer, nor do they attempt to mount an illusion of such spontaneity. Rather, they are the work of a stationary body—a bent back, a cramped wrist, a strained eye, an aching temple—as it worked to broaden and deepen certain fleeting images, particular flashes of insight, into a sustained, intelligible vision.

“I shall content myself with keeping a record of my readings without trying to reduce them to a system. My enterprise is like Montaigne’s, but my motive is entirely different, for he wrote his essays only for others to read, whereas I am writing down my reveries for myself alone. If, as I hope, I retain the same disposition of mind in my old extreme old age, when the time of my departure draws near, I shall recall in reading them the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence.”

I feel it is safe to contradict Rousseau on this: such a sentence—so elaborately constructed, so fine—was not written for the author’s sole benefit. It was not scribbled into his diary and put away. Not enjoyed in private before being burned in his fire. Rather it was turned around. Broken up. Pieced into shape. Tinkered with and worried over. With the expectation, the presumption even, that it would be published and consumed by others. Rousseau’s demands on his sentences were great, as were his demands on his imagined audience. Unable to realize his ideal of true friendship between men, despairing of human incapacity for social harmony, he retreated to his natural state, communed with himself in nature—and what he found there, unvanquished, as vital as ever, was his longing for society. The Reveries are the result of Rousseau’s discovery that the physical state of detachment from community does not erase community from the mind; that, on the contrary, detachment inflates the importance of community in one’s thinking about the self, and fuels the desire to make oneself known to community, even if only to convey one’s condemnation of it.

This is not to say that nature (as opposed to human society) plays an insignificant role in Reveries. On several occasions, Rousseau describes the feelings inspired in him by the landscapes he encounters. He feels happiness and tranquillity when walking through open fields. He expresses delight on noticing specific rare plants. In “Second Walk,” on seeing a star-filled sky, he experiences nothing less than a moment of rapture: “I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, I did not know who I was, nor where I was… I felt through my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.”

Likewise, Rousseau does not fail to produce long passages of philosophizing. Much of “Fourth Walk,” for instance, is devoted to a discussion of truth and falsity. And in “Sixth Walk” he tackles the question of causality in human actions.

But underneath the calm layered over the melancholy, coming after the ecstasy, threaded through the philosophical reasoning, is anxiety. In articulating his new solitude, Rousseau cannot help returning, over and over again, to the old community that he claims to have left behind: “Lonely mediation, the study of nature and the contemplation of the universe lead the solitary to aspire continually to the maker of all things and to seek with a pleasing disquiet for the purpose of all he sees and the cause of all he feels. When my destiny cast me back into the torrent of this world, I found nothing there which could satisfy my heart for a single moment. Regret for the sweet liberty I had lost followed me everywhere and threw a veil of indifference or distaste over everything around me which might have brought me fame and fortune.”

Rousseau’s expressed distaste for fame and fortune masks an obsession with those whom he believes possess the authority to apportion such fame and fortune. His disregard for the opinion of others is actually a susceptibility to those opinions, a susceptibility of an acuteness that today would be called neurotic. Looking at himself through the eyes of society, he is “a monster,” “a poisoner,” “an assassin,” “a horror of the human race,” “a laughingstock.” He imagines passersby spitting on him. He pictures his contemporaries burying him alive. Rumors about him are, he believes, circulating in the highest echelons: “I heard even the King himself and the Queen were talking about it as if there was no doubt about it.” There is simply no one left in society who does not harbor “some secret animosity” toward him, who does not “take part in the universal conspiracy” against him.

Responding to these imagined attacks, in the course of his protestations of innocence, Rousseau makes a second discovery. Human judgments, he realizes, are made not about a thing but about one’s perception of a thing: “[I]nstead of me they will never see anyone but the Jean-Jacques they have created and fashioned for themselves so that they can hate me to their heart’s content. I should be wrong then to be upset by the image they have of me; I ought to take no real interest in it, since it is not me that they are seeing.”

This is Rousseau at his most ingenious. How right he is. Anyone professing to be judging him would, it is true, be judging a figment of their own minds, which they mistake for him. How could they be judging the real Rousseau when it is impossible to subsume a material man, with all his contents, into the immaterial world of thoughts? Close your eyes, torturers, and see where your Rousseau has gone! Yet here Rousseau himself has a blind spot. He fails to see that what is the case for others must also be the case for himself. Rousseau, too, in his judgments of society, has fashioned for himself a figment, which he chooses to hate in the most exquisite mode possible: disdain. “I have regained my peace and tranquillity and lead a quiet and happy life in the midst of them, laughing at the incredible tortures my persecutors are constantly inflicting on themselves while I live in peace, busy with my flowers, stamens and such childish things, and never giving them a moment’s thought… My contemporaries will always be as nothing in my eyes… I feel too much above them to hate them.”

Here Rousseau—man of letters, dedicated to the uncovering of privately reasoned truths to counteract the fraudulent assumptions of society—is being disingenuous. To say one is not thinking of a thing is, in fact, to think about that thing. To call one’s enemies nothing is to call them something. To pity oneself, to assign for oneself the role of victim—“when I reach places where there is no trace of men I breathe freely, as if I were in a refuge where their hate could no longer pursue me”—far from being a diminishment of oneself, is the back route, the concealed pass to the self’s most bountiful feeding grounds.

For Rousseau, solitude is the promise of immunity from the hatred of others. Reveries is his attempt to build a quarantine out of words. Piled around himself are his judgments of society, which he believes society’s own judgments cannot penetrate. But then these self-made walls end up closing in on him, oppressing him just as the society’s walls had once done. In his enclosure, cut off from his tormentors, the one who must be made to suffer is himself. “God is just; his will is that I should suffer, and he knows my innocence… Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and sooner or later my turn will come.”

Enclosed in his self-isolation, Rousseau sets himself the task of conceiving a pure kind of writing, one protected from all contact with society. A writing independent of received opinions. A writing free of “hair-splitting metaphysical subtleties” and “the sophistries of the eloquent,” A writing “adopted by my reason, confirmed by my heart and bearing the seal of my conscience uninfluenced by passion.” A writing made by and meant for himself alone. And in this, Rousseau fails. Not because he does not try hard enough; not because he is not brilliant enough, but rather because the task he sets himself is impossible. His writing, like all writing, must by necessity come contaminated by the writing of others, and it will always already be thus.

Where does writing come from? The answer—for Rousseau, for me, for you, for us—is other writing. This is the problem that Rousseau is really fleeing from; his failure to ever really shake this problem off is what, more than any slander society can fling at him, accounts for his suffering.

Like Rousseau, it might appear to us that our writing comes from a realm of experience entirely separate from words on a page: from the world “out there” or from our experience “in here.” But this is an illusion. What happens in life—what we do, what happens to us, what we hear about, what we witness, and how we experience all of that within—does not come to us in a pure state in the present but is mediated through our minds, which orders and interprets the information (which by now has passed into the past) according to stories it has previously constructed to judge and to explain such information. What stories are we telling about the world and our inner experience? They are the world and our inner experience, as our mind knows them. Whatever these stories are, when we come to write them down—as fiction or as nonfiction—we begin to see that we are no longer dealing with “the outer world” or “inner experience,” but have entered negotiations with the way these stories have already been told, with what has already been written (which is how we gain our understanding of the world in the first place).

It is by reading about what has happened to us as a text—images, events, body language, emotions—that we build our life stories. And it is by reading how others have interpreted those texts of their own that we learn how to write.

There is no mystery to creation. To create is to respond. The question is not, What am I writing about?, but rather, What am I responding to? No writing exists that is not a response to something in the past. This is as true for writing set in the so-called present and the so-called future as it is for writing set decades or centuries ago. There is no writing that is not an attempted act of communication: it is alone among art forms in its primary desire to contain transmissible meaning; meaning that, once transmitted, will engender further meaning. What we learn from Rousseau is that, in the act of writing, we are responding not to a thing but to our belief about a thing. A description of a thing is, at base, a statement of belief. And all statements of belief—even those that appear to be deeply personal, like “I love you”—are restatements of the beliefs of others (which is not to say we do not feel love, but that what we name as love, we learn from stories).

Which is all to say: writing, as a pursuit, is less daunting than Rousseau makes it out to be. By letting go of the idea that our writing must be absolutely ours, that it must come exclusively from us, untouched by outside influences, we come closer to seeing writing for what it is, and we stop being so afraid of it.

For really it is quite simple. If we can think of something, it already exists. Other people, in other places, at other times have passed it to us, and now it is ours. How do we know it is ours? Because we are thinking it. And from this thought springs another, and that is ours, too. Join the two thoughts together. Turn them around. Break them up. Splice them. Then we have begun.

We do not need to invent anything. All we have to do is find where to begin, and then to speak, embellishing nothing, denying nothing and without the intent to manipulate anyone. How good the result turns out to be will depend, not only on how much writing we have read, and how closely we have read it, but also how skillfully and confidently we have made that writing our own.

Rousseau writes: “Nothing that comes from the outside can be prolonged within me.” Yet anything that enters his writing from the inside must also have come from the outside (for he was not born with it), and anything that enters his writing from the outside must also have come from the inside (for, in order to understand the writing of others, we seek their reflection within ourselves).

This year—2020—the term “self-isolation” has expanded its meaning for writers: from a voluntary separation intended to protect our writing minds from the distractions of community, to a government-ordered separation for the purpose of protecting the physical health of the community. In the normal course of events, when we, as writers, are kept from our desks, we often dream of being at our desks; now that we have been confined to our bedrooms and studios and sheds, how do we feel in ourselves? Are we longing, all of a sudden, for the community that, just days ago, we had treated as an obstacle to our creativity, an annoyance to cancel out?

To be alone—even when we desire it—necessarily constitutes a loss. When we write, we write for ourselves in order that, one day, our selves might be read by others. This longing for contact, for human society, is apparent in every word we place on the page. As writers, we are in a state of constant agitation to get away, to nature, to silence, to that ideal place that will give us the space to hear ourselves and the time to write it all down. But, at the same time, we will never be able to overcome our longings for closeness, for communion. Contained within writing is a rebellion: against certain systems, against certain ideas, against certain people. And, at the same time, writing is a plea for belonging.

At this moment, I am picturing a woman declaiming poetry from her balcony. A child calling a telephone hotline to hear a bedtime story. A man in a face mask and plastic gloves delivering a book to my neighbor’s door, leaving it on the mat and ringing the doorbell and waiting there, a safe two steps away, until my neighbor appears in her dressing gown and picks it up: hundreds of pages of someone else’s writing sterile under a plastic wrapping.

Now—the wrapping off, the cover opened—that writing is hers; she will recognize much of it; what appears new or strange to her will merely be those things she didn’t know she knew.

When we publish our writing, we are not sending something away from its home; rather, we are sending something back from whence it came. Once we have rehoused it in someone else’s hands; once we have been told it is bad, and once we have been told it is good; once we have gained the attention we have always wanted, and once we have pretended never to have wanted such attention; once all of that is done, and we are satisfied and unsatisfied both, we will be ready, again, to isolate ourselves, of our own volition, as we attempt to commune through words with others.

 

Gavin McCrea is the author of Mrs. Engels. His second novel, The Sisters Mao, will be published in Spring 2021.

Staff Picks: Kentuckis, Kerchiefs, and Choreography

Samanta Schweblin. Photo: © Alejandra López.

There has always been art that appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient—Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction of “fifteen minutes of fame,” say, or Umberto Romano’s 1937 painting of a figure checking their smartphone. Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, published in the original Spanish in 2018 and due out from Riverhead in Megan McDowell’s translation May 5, is this kind of visionary: a novel of a near-future dystopia that has suddenly, in the months before its U.S. publication, become nearer still. Unraveling the premise is the pleasure of this book, but in briefest summary: a new toy called a kentuki appears on the market. Consumers can choose to own these stuffed animals, who move around on wheels and have cameras for eyes, or to “dwell” in them—purchasing a connection that allows users, from their computers or tablets, to control the toy’s movements and see what it sees. Each kentuki can form only a single connection, randomly assigned to people around the world, and when it is disconnected, the object becomes disposable. Indeed, the entire pleasure of the toy is built not on its possibilities but on its limitations: the dwellers cannot speak to the owners, though they can hear what is said to them. From within these confines, a global obsession emerges. Dwellers remain at home in front of their screens for days, hypnotized by their kentukis’ quotidian lives on the other side of the planet. Society divides into watchers and those who desire to be watched. The seemingly simple technology is inevitably bent to hold all of human nature—it becomes a cure against modern loneliness, a political tool, an entrepreneurial possibility (an industry of kentuki accessories springs up), a tool for blackmail, and, of course, a way to fulfill our basest desires (on the black market, pedophiles purchase connections to kentukis that dwell in homes with children). Each chapter is headed by the name of a city—Oaxaca, Zagreb, Vancouver, Lima—and the reader flits in and out of lives around the world, forced to confront the voyeurism that is the essence of fiction. At a time when most of us are indoors, reaching for one another through our screens, I can think of no book that more clearly illustrates how close, yet far, that still leaves us. —Nadja Spiegelman 

I have to admit that I am obsessed with Dua Lipa’s new album Future Nostalgia. It is, frankly, a perfect pop record—but how could it not be? Stuart Price is a producer on it, and surely that’s where some of the Kylie Minogue–esque disco sheen comes from. When I first listened, more than a month ago (the very beginning of quarantine!), I laughed in delight as “Love Again” started, a song that samples the one-hit wonder White Town’s 1997 claim to fame, “Your Woman,” which has given me more than a few sardonic smiles through breakups over the years (“So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways / Just use me up and then you walk away”). But there’s also the sheer joy of “Hallucinate,” which I can’t wait to bop to in public someday when the coronavirus is a thing of the past, and the squelchy pleasure of the title track, which includes the unexpected line “Like modern architecture, John Lautner coming your way.” It’s a fun album! And don’t we all need some fun right now? —Rhian Sasseen

 

Winona Ryder in The Plot against America. Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO.

 

My advice is to save The Plot against America for days when you’re feeling relatively okay about things; you need a strong psychological starting position to watch the television adaptation of Philip Roth’s alternate history, in which FDR loses the 1940 election to the noted aviator and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh keeps America out of the war, invites Nazis into the White House, and begins to forcibly relocate urban Jewish families to rural areas to “Americanize” them. As in reality, the horror, shown through the eyes of nine-year-old Philip Levin and his family, unfolds quickly and yet not. In early episodes, even as new policies are pronounced, the family is still debating what to do or whether they need to do anything. Some are ready to emigrate to Canada, while others see no danger at all—America First is no problem; we’re American! Of course it all goes to hell—burning, looting, shooting, and a smooth-coiffed, seemingly poreless Mrs. Lindbergh quietly asking the citizenry to please stop and go back to normal, as if that were an option for those murdered, bereft, and scarred by what has happened. The role played by Americans in World War II is so mythologized and revered that it’s easy not to think about who Americans actually were in those days, beyond Rosie the Riveters and D-Day heroes. The Plot against America sheds light on the precariousness of American identity and pluralism, both in that era and, with eerily familiar scenes and character types, our own. —Jane Breakell

Since my teen years at the School of American Ballet, which shares a building with Film at Lincoln Center, the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival has heralded spring. The annual roundup of contemporary French films provided me an entrée to the arts beyond New York City, and the institution’s commitment to dance on camera likewise incited a curiosity about how my own art form could interact with others. This year, highlights of Rendez-Vous streamed online and included Damien Manivel’s 2019 dance film Isadora’s Children. This conceptual work depicts four women independently reconstructing the same solo: Isadora Duncan’s La mère, which was choreographed around 1923 in response to the tragic drowning of her first two children. The solo is a slow procession, the dancer gliding from stage right to stage left in simple, gestural steps, like a mother shepherding her children into life and toward death. It’s set to Alexander Scriabin’s Étude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 2, No. 1, a piece for piano that recalls Chopin, though more heavily weighted with a sense of solitude and loss. To match, the film is sparse, each woman’s efforts accompanied only by this somber melody. Manivel allows dance to do most of the talking, but what little dialogue he includes is both organic and profound. —Elinor Hitt

Charulata (1964) opens with the eponymous figure embroidering the letter B on a handkerchief. Though the initial is for Bhupati, the name of her husband, Charu will later thread a future for her cousin-in-law, Amal, through the letter B. Bardhaman, then Britain, she supposes. Bardhaman, betrothal, Britain, Amal corrects, and then he imagines a return: Bristol, barrister, back to Bengal. Satyajit Ray’s film, set in the late nineteenth century, is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novella The Broken Nest. It is the rare film that engages deeply with writing, that is dense with allusion and keenly observant on the spurs and perils of reading. Charu and Amal bond over their love of Bengali literature. Amal writes poems with lines about “the path of memory’s gilded pebbles”; Charu sighs, knowing the clichés, but she sees, in how he engages with what he loves, a way ahead. When she presents Bhupati with the handkerchief, he wonders how she ever had the time to complete it; yet her days slip by, barely marked. Charu sports opera glasses and peers at the world from afar, her eyes rarely met. Innocence is its own isolation, but as desire finds its object, as Charu comes to see her vision has sway, the mood turns. She begins to write, and that writing astounds. Amal senses her gaze. One is certain that before long the handkerchief will be damp with tears. The true revelation, however, is that within the world of this film, the pain of growth, of nascent feeling, is never resented. There is an image I cannot shake: Charu on a swing in the garden, the camera fixed on her face. Her expression turns bleak, thoughts roil with pain, and she smiles, singing Tagore’s “Phule Phule Dhole Dhole.” Longing for someone is also longing to become someone. —Chris Littlewood

 

Still from Satyajit Ray’s Charulata.

Poets on Couches: Major Jackson

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“Coral”

by Kamau Brathwaite

Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

 

Major Jackson is University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Vermont. His most recent volume of poetry is The Absurd Man (Norton, 2020).

Our Motto

© Maira Kalman

I am upstate with my son, Alex, and his wife, also named Alex.

Like everyone else on planet earth, we are thinking nonstop about the future.

The economy. The forces of good and evil. About the meaning of time and, of course, life and death.

There is also another subject on my mind: paper towels.

Specifically Bounty Select-A-Size paper towels.

This is not a new interest for me. I have loved Bounty Select-A-Size for a long time.

I have always been impressed and dazzled by this bit of American language and American ingenuity. You can choose the size of the paper towel you need. Not too much, not too little. How did we function before this?

The promises, slogans, and jingles of American products have populated my life since I arrived in this country in 1954.

Every one of us has their favorites.

PLOP PLOP FIZZ FIZZ OH WHAT A RELIEF IT IS; YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO LOVE LEVY’S;

I KNOW YOU HAVE A HEADACHE, BUT DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON HER; LIKE A GAL NEEDS A GUY, LIKE AN X NEEDS A Y, LIKE ALMOST ANY FOOD NEED RITZ.

I want to know who invented Select-A-Size? When? Why?

And when did Brawny come up with their competitive Tear-A-Square? Which is not bad. Poetry in motion.

Last night, with a lull in my schedule, I wrote an email to Procter & Gamble, the parent company of Bounty.

I acknowledged that in such dismal times my question might seem frivolous, but asked if they could supply the answer. I received an immediate auto-response.

If I was a journalist with an urgent deadline… but if not…

Since I was in the latter category, I did not expect a response.

But still I woke up in the middle of the night to check my email, just in case they had written back.

I imagined a P&G archivist/historian of all paper products, alone in a huge building, responding with precision and thoughtfulness to my query. Alas, still no reply.

Consumerism is one of the glories and curses of capitalism.

We have so much. Too much. Not a new concern. Impossible to tackle now.

It is clear that if we are smart, we will live with less.

But what is less and for who?

Where am I left?

Clinging to hope. Is that a new product?

One of our family mottos is

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF.

Another is

FROM BAD COMES GOOD.

In case you think we are simplistically naive, the end of the slogan is:

FROM GOOD COMES BAD.

Same as it ever was.

Wait! I am amazed to report that I have just heard back from the family-care communications manager.

Her emails were very congenial. She wrote, “Our Bounty Select-A-Size product was introduced in 1991/1992 in an effort to meet consumer demand for a better product. This improved product enabled consumers to use a smaller sheet to get the job done.”

A team worked on it, she did not know who came up with the name (though was happy to hear I liked it), and diplomatically declined to answer the question about Brawny, the competition.

So the consumers demanded. No one foisted it upon us. Now I understand why it is so brilliant.

The brain is a little like the paper towel roll, selecting a size to get the job done. Sometimes I can select a big problem and tackle that. And other times, I select a smaller-size problem and wipe that up in no time.

 

Maira Kalman is an illustrator, author, and designer. She has created many covers for The New Yorker, including the famous map of Newyorkistan (created with Rick Meyerowitz). Ms. Kalman’s thirteen children’s books include Max Makes a Million, Stay Up Late, Swami on Rye, and What Pete Ate. Her most recent book for adults is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Illustrated.