Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound. It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching. The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

The wife tells her about the husband. About how he may or may not love someone else. About how she may or may not leave him. She tells her that they viciously whisper-fight at night when her daughter is in bed. She does not say, Last night, I pulled his hair. Last night I tried to pull his hair out of his head. It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official. She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it. Why would you ruin my best thing? Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?” Get?

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

inscrutable

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

scrim

What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.

The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention. The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?” So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now. Attention. Attention.

What the rabbi said: Three things have a flavor of the world to come: the Sabbath, the sun, and married love.