More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
GNOSSIENNE the awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life
semaphorism n. a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic “I know the feeling”—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: an unexploded bomb, a sacred burial ground, or a high-voltage cable that secretly powers your house.
heartworm n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
routwash n. a moment of panic that you’ll end up looking back on years of labor with little to show for it, that despite all the time you’ve spent gathering skills and connections and experiences, many of them will prove to have been worth almost nothing in the long run, redeemable for petty cash, a line on a résumé, a few compliments, or a handful of magic beans.
xeno n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a warm smile, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
You have no way of knowing how insecure their footing might be, how malleable they really are. How many years of effort might’ve gone into shaping their persona into something acceptable.
siso n. a solitary experience you wish you could have shared with someone else—having dinner in a romantic setting, reaching the summit after an arduous climb, having a run-in with a crazy stranger that nobody’s going to believe—which makes you look around for confirmation that it even happened at all.
anechosis n. a state of exhaustion with continually being told what you want to hear, whether by marketers pandering to you or acquaintances afraid of causing offense; the longing for someone to have the heart to finally call you out on your bullshit, challenge your long-held assumptions, and push you to become a better person—which would be a far deeper kindness than trying to live and let live.
ledsome adj. feeling lonely in a crowd; drifting along in a sea of anonymous faces but unable to communicate with or confide in any of them.
scrough v. intr. to mindlessly perform a tedious task that nobody will ever notice, required by a bureaucracy that nobody fully owns, in pursuit of outcomes that nobody really wants. From scrow, to work hard + scroff, useless bits of leftover material + cog, a tiny forgettable element in a complicated machine. Pronounced “skrawg.”
You’re free to break out on your own, but you’ll never feel all that free: as the sole protector and navigator, you’ll find yourself perpetually looking over your shoulder, wondering if there’s a good reason this particular road is the one less traveled.
echthesia n. a state of confusion when your own internal sense of time doesn’t seem to match that of the calendar—knowing that something just happened though it apparently took place seven years ago, or that you somehow built up a decade of memories in the span of only a year and a half. Greek εχθές (echthés), yesterday + αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), sensation. Pronounced “ek-thee-zhuh.”
If our houses ever feel haunted, it’ll be because we’re haunting them ourselves, trying to revisit all the places we once knew. As if there were something still there for us, something we forgot.
inerrata n. a kind of mistake you wouldn’t take back even if you could; the reluctance to disown a broken relationship or agonizing experience that has since become part of who you are, and trying to disown it would mean you’re trying to live some other life. Latin in-, not + errata, mistakes in a printed work. Pronounced “in-eh-rah-tuh.”
solla, solla, solla n. an incantation whispered privately to yourself to celebrate the loss of something or someone you loved, which almost makes it feel like a deliberate renunciation, consciously deciding to relinquish them to an earlier part of your life.
énouement n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.
YU YI the longing to feel things intensely again
galagog n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.
ellipsism n. the sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punch line, which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
NODUS TOLLENS the sense that your life doesn’t fit into a story
kadot n. fear of the prospect of not existing one day, feeling like a student about to graduate from the universe, on the cusp of a transition you don’t feel ready for.
craxis n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.
winnewaw n. an unexpected burst of good news that only makes you skeptical, believing that every sudden rise in your fortunes must inevitably be accompanied by an impending fall, which leaves you feeling uneasy at the end of a really good day, waiting around for the punch line.
grayshift n. the tendency for future goals and benchmarks to feel huge when viewed in advance, only to fade into banality as soon as you’ve achieved them—finally reaching the top of the ladder, only to notice it circling back around like a hamster wheel.
moriturism n. a tiny jolt of awareness that someday you will die, which leaves you lying awake in bed whispering silently to yourself, Oh, right, this is it; an unsettling reminder that your life is not just a game you’re playing or a story you’ll be telling later, but your one and only glimpse of what the universe has to offer, like a kid waking up in the back seat of the family car at night, having just pulled into a bright neon gas station, looking around for a moment or two, before settling back in for the long road trip, sleeping for miles and miles off into the dark.
caucic adj. afraid that the rest of your life is already laid out in front of you, that you’re being swept inexorably along a series of predictable milestones—from school to graduation to career to marriage to kids to retirement to death—which makes you wish you could pull off to the side of the road for a little while, to stretch your legs and spread out the map so you can double-check that you’re headed the right way.
karanoia n. the terror of the blank page, which can feel both liberating and confining, in both the limitlessness of its potential and the looseness of its boundaries.
TIRIS the bittersweet awareness that all things must end
Just the act of putting something into words can give you the impression that everything is under control.
