Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That’s the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.

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.

I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

We used to call her Little. Little, come here, we’d say. Little, unhand the cat, but then one day she won’t let us. “I am big,” she says and her face is stormy.

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

A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.

What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.

Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. “It hurts. Don’t go,” she said. “What does? What hurts, sweetie?” She paused. “My eyelashes.”

What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.

In Epirus, there is a kind of spider called “the sunless one.” The Cypriots called the viper “the deaf one.” The idea was to give such dangerous creatures a sort of code name, one that is calculated to leave them unaware that they have been mentioned. The fear was that to mention such a creature was to cause it to appear.

I’m hungry. I want to eat something delicious, have a beer and a cigarette. I’ve come back to Earth full of desires. The air tastes good. This is what the Japanese reporter said when he came back from the space station.

What Emily Dickinson said: Existence has overpowered Books. Today I slew a Mushroom.