nathan > Recent Status Updates

Are you carrying soil in your Jacquemus handbag? Heirloom seeds in the heel of your sneakers? The entry fee is the first lie you told that set you free. It’s better to see this as an open casting to play the role of main character.

this is what I want for you, a soft landing into the right arms – isn’t that what it feels like? hearing a song for the first time realising that it’s always been playing in the background of your life?

And yet, it was equally clear that their very insufficiencies—the moments at which they strain to meet our depths of confusion and despair and perhaps acknowledge their own failures—are sometimes exactly what we need.

And in that moment, not knowing how to move on and no longer even knowing how to start to find out, I needed a text that met me where I was: at a point where it was painfully clear that books and stories are not enough.

The Last Samurai is not a book that tries to make sense of life. It is a book that seeks answers but knows that explanations are impossible—and to attempt to give them, as Sibylla does to many a nonplussed stranger, only leads to frustration.

Of course, it is impossible to keep people from rereading and rereading and rereading a life that ends in this kind of violence, wondering if they could have been more supportive secondary characters, and to torture themselves wondering if they could have done anything—anything—to change the plot. How could I not have understood this? How could I not have known better?

The fact that I could only think of myself as a text and my friends as readers in an enclosed, safe network of narrative theoretical concepts—that is also madness.

I feel truly bad about, looking back at this whole period. The idea that killing myself would offer any kind of firm narrative closure, and therefore an opportunity for interpretation..

As the philosopher Simon Critchley writes in his Notes on Suicide, “Suicide produces a peculiar inversion of biography, where all of one’s acts are read backwards through the lens of one’s last moment.” Read through my death, I was sure that my life’s trajectory would eventually make sense to everyone else, if not to me.

Books that play upon the reader’s yearning hope that more meaning can be extracted or even produced after the supposed end of a story.

Altogether, denarrative desire is basically the idea that sometimes, when you reach the end of a book, all you want to do is turn back to the first page and read it over again—but differently.

We know that our pleasure in the book and the lives we’re living through it will end at the last page, but we are compelled to move forward anyway, driven by the certainty that the only thing that ultimately bestows meaning and resonance upon a narrative is closure—the death knell of “The End.”

Perhaps I have only ever been my own ghost, my own spectral reader. If that’s true, by finally writing my own book, can I summon myself back to life?

This is a part of the book that I have not yet lived because I have not yet had these conversations with the people I know.

I’m interested in Li’s account of talking to people she knows about suicide. She relates the words that people have used to dissuade her: “a suicide attempt is selfish. Someone close to me said it was irresponsible; another said manipulative. Yes, I know what you mean, I said to each of them.”

This shame is not unrelated to the way I think about suicide. As Li writes, “People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body.”

Identification, as I’ve observed it in friends and students, can be an assertion of selfness through sympathetic attachment.

As Esmé Weijun Wang writes, “a diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure.” I like her use of the word “lineage,” which suggests the intimate affiliation of illness, stretching back into time and across the globe; my usual, tired sense of small-scale familial estrangement gives way to a timid feeling of belonging

. As my craving for this feeling increases, so does my fear of becoming a ghost of someone else’s book forever, with no words—and thus no life!—of my own.

And now, inhabiting words that I wish I had written—or, in sublime, alarming moments of entranced reading, that I experience writing—is what makes me a spectral presence, not a living body. This is yet another manifestation of my bibliophobia, and like all the others it is so obviously laced with desire.

This item of mortality spoke with a voice that kept shifting, from the unnamed storyteller, to the ghost of the critic, perhaps to Ali Smith herself or someone like her, and in each form,

I thought of Virginia’s note to Leonard: “I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”

The too-much is part of life, I tell myself now. The too-much is life, and so is the nothing. (I have to keep telling myself this.)

There was no controlling the too-muchness of real life. It would invariably overflow and drown you from the inside out; Ruth and Nao could only survive it and make it work for them because they were characters, novelistic contrivances that, despite how much Ruth looked like Ozeki, would never have to live our terrible, overspilling lives. The word was not the world and it never had been.

Morrison didn’t write The Bluest Eye for me, or even someone like me. It is always foolishness to think that someone has written any book for you, though it is a foolishness that can be hard to resist, especially when you’re lonely. But still, I wish I could have run into her just once, so I could have told her how important it was for The Bluest Eye to ruin my life.

My central flaw is a sadness that comes from nowhere and cannot be stopped from spreading and corrupting everything it touches; the faults spread out beyond me and reached deep into the foundations of every house I’ve lived in. It’s a sadness that so often feels like it is mine and only mine. But I’ve come to see that it also belonged to my father, and perhaps to parts of his family that I won’t ever know.

As a reader, I am always diffusing into the world of fiction. As a writer, I cannot solidify into direct statements. As a person, I cannot solidify into someone who makes anything happen. In my most lost moments, I see myself disintegrating and drifting into everything and everyone else, floating unseen and dispersed through the world the way I wanted to float unseen through the worlds of books when I was young.

The kind of reader I wanted to be then was, like Flaubert’s description of the author of fictions, “like God in the universe, present everywhere, visible nowhere.” This is exactly how I wanted to feel in a book, minus the God part.

I liked being able to be in it without having to hide from its gaze.

I went to books because I wanted to be—nothing, nobody. I wanted nothing so much as to be a kind of sociable air, circulating invisibly in the room, necessary but never noticed.