The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

Nowadays she is shocked by the fraudulence of words. Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object.

In English we can place events quite precisely on this continuum: it had rained, it rained, it has rained, it rains, it is raining, it will rain, it will have rained. The Pirahã can only say whether the rain is proximate (here) or not.

If something doesn’t exist in a language, does it also not exist in the minds of those who speak the language?

When I taught the sentence I have eaten I got blank looks, incomprehension. Why not just say I ate? Why say I have been to Europe when you could just say I went to Europe?

The Japanese view.

Time is the thing that breaks apart life from death, eases apart their embrace. Time, not life, is what we live. Time, not life, is what runs out. Time pushes death over there, where we can see it, and then offers itself as finite protection. Time is the breeding ground of fear and despair.

What can I rely on? I was always a worrier, but I didn’t used to be anxious in this

Fish swim in shoals, birds fly in flocks.

Shoals? She means schools I think.

And he petitions his congregation to think of Paul in Romans 8: ‘Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God.’

This is in Philippians, not in Romans. Gotcha!

I’m angry that the week we gained Donald Trump as a world leader we lost Leonard Cohen, in some deal that even the Devil must have flinched at.

Who’s next?