Swann

by Carol Shields

lucent

negritude

outré

quotidian

Dailiness. The diurnal unit, cloudless and soluble. No wonder the first people on earth worshipped heavenly bodies; between the rising and the setting of the sun their little lives sprouted all manner of shadows and possibilities. Whenever I meet anyone new, I don’t say, “Tell me about your belief system.” I say, “Tell me about your average day.”

Habit is the flywheel of society, conserving and preserving and dishing up tidy, edible slices of the cosmos. And there’s much to be said for a steady diet. Those

About this time I start to feel a small but measurable buzzing in the brain that makes my legs move along in double time. There I am, a determined piece of human matter, but adrift on a busy street that has suddenly become a conduit – a pipeline possessing the power of suction. Something, a force more than weariness, is drawing me home.

Letters

Tubingen,

poseurs.

now, for a few months longer, until January, please forgive me (yawn), Mary Swann’s notebook is mine.

Happiness is not my greatest need. My greatest need is to feel that every part of me is fully in use, or engagé as people used to say a mere ten years ago, and that all my sensory equipment is stretched as nervously as possible between a state of apprehension and a posture of pounce. I want my brain to be all sinew and thrum, chime and clerestory, crouch and attack.

As in her previous exhibitions, the drawings were all titled – for which, being part of the word culture, I thanked God. Images can speak, yes, but some of us need to be directed toward the port of entry. Yet

dolorous

Like a spider who eats her mate, she has absorbed the sadness of the world into her heavy bones and bloodstream. It’s always there, like a low-grade fever.

Ennui.

But existential anxiety is what she has, a bad case, a suspicion – she would never acknowledge it – of emptiness at the heart of life.

crepuscular

roman-à-clef.

blanquette de

suppliant,

escutcheon

ebullient

Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace

This reinforces one of my life theories: that women carry with them the full freight of their mothers’ words. It’s the one part of us that can never be erased or revised.

“The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and

sits hard upon.”

He’s going to see Mary’s notebook eventually, at least a photocopy of it, and what he’s sure to feel when he examines its pages is a profound sense of disappointment.

People who work in libraries, like those in bakeshops, ought to be made peaceful and happy by their surroundings, but they almost never are.

Half the people in Palo Alto seemed to drift about dressed as characters out of a play. Yesterday, crossing

He needs the letters more than ever now that he has been uprooted; they stabilize him, keeping away that drifting sadness that comes upon him late in the evening, eleven, eleven-thirty, when the density of the earth seems to empty out.

hubris.)

was just a matter of time before the theoreticians got to Mary Swann and tore her limb from limb in a grotesque parody of her bodily death. But he could not think about that now; now was not the time.

orotund

in

apostasy.

elegaic

aperçu

manqué.

Apotheosis?

execrable

Ellmanesque,

pensées.

vasculum

ellipsis

pyrotechnics,

When he thought of the revolution of planets, the emergence of species, the balance of mathematics, he could not see that any of these was more amazing than the impertinent human wish to reach into the sea of common language and extract from it

rich dark beautiful words that could be arranged in such a way that the unsayable might be said.

nascent

solipsism.