It would not be hard to miss the collapsed stretch of road if you were to drive past it on a vivid mid-autumn day, heading east toward a charming village made up of small white clapboard buildings with black roofs, the names of their resident businesses presented in uniform black lettering, a village roosted atop a hill looking out over a creek wreathed with wetland grasses. Boats nod in the yacht club marina, and there too is the inn and tavern where my mother and father held their wedding reception, and where I visited with Santa Claus at an annual pancake breakfast.

The road fell in when the dam burst during a late summer storm over two years ago. The flood threatened a 17th-century grist mill and destroyed several properties set along the waterway which fed an old mill pond, and the pond itself emptied into the larger body of the harbor. There have been protracted disagreements between governing bodies as to whose jurisdiction the restoration belongs to, as well as disagreements as to whether to prioritize cultural and historic conservation or ecological integrity, and so it remains a site of natural disaster.

As a young adult, I used this road as one of two ways to access a nature preserve. For a time my father worked and lived on its grounds, and it became a place I knew well in all seasons and at all times of day, including late at night. Periodically I trespassed, nervously, with friends, and one night while a group of us loitered in a clearing in the middle of a meadow, we were visited by a black orb that appeared soundlessly, hovered above our heads, and shined a circle of light upon us. It made a noise like the whirring of a camera shutter, went dark, disappeared. Could it be? we asked each other, though we didn’t bring it up much afterward.

This was not the first time I had experienced something mysterious in the place where I grew up. As a child I attended an Episcopal church with my grandmother and grandfather. I wanted very much to be a Christian, to behave properly always. I wanted to believe in God and to be exceptionally good for God. As soon I was old enough, I became an acolyte. I took such satisfaction in donning the robes, preparing each sanctified object, assisting the priest. But I did not relish being up there on the altar in view of the entire congregation—I did not want to be watched. I remember sitting back in the pew and aligning my body with a fellow acolyte’s, hoping theirs would obscure mine.

My parents were not observant, which meant my grandparents would have to drive to our house early every Sunday to pick me up. It was a bit over twenty minutes to the church. The halfway point is marked by a post office and a farm stand, and it was there on the road that one morning I looked up through the rear passenger window and saw in the sky, beyond the clouds, an indescribable vision of Heaven.

At that moment my head would have been aching and my stomach roiling—I have suffered from car sickness all my life—symptoms heightened by the smell of the nubby upholstery and the blare of classical music from the stereo. Often I arrived at church feeling ill. The need to vomit would come on powerfully during the sermon; I would abruptly flee the altar and run down a long hallway to the bathroom. Could it be, I wondered, could it be that this is God’s way of reaching me?

II.

I know I’m not the only one who feels haunted when they return to their own little piece of homeland. We all have our primal scenes. I can’t go anywhere out there without a kaleidoscope of memory turning turning turning, a fractal gyre of scenes from an early life spent against that kingdom of marshes and shopping plazas, of beaches and colossal sport utility vehicles. Here where I was a hopeful girl, here where I was a melancholic teenager.

In her remarkable book In the Eye of the Wild, Nastassja Martin recounts what she was told by a Gwich’in elder she met in Fort Yukon, Alaska: “Everything is being recorded all the time.” Martin elaborates: “The trees, the animals, and the rivers: every aspect of the world remembers all we do and all we say, and even, sometimes what we dream and think. This is why we should take great care with the thoughts we formulate, for the world forgets nothing, and each of the elements within it sees, hears, and knows what has happened, what is occurring now and what lies ahead.”

Despite the distance I have forged between myself and the towns of my youth, when I go to them I do have the feeling that the earth itself contains what I would rather forget but cannot, as if it is full of ghosts and other undead things, and this feeling overwhelms me.

A long time ago, the promise of omniscience may have been what I wanted out of God: to be wholly witnessed, without judgement, by a loving, forgiving Other, and for all of my righteous deeds to be duly noted in some cosmic ledger.

When I was twelve or thirteen my faith faltered and I stopped attending church. I announced myself as an atheist, an identification which would prove useful for a couple of decades. A year or two after, I began to eat differently, which is to say hardly at all; I restricted my intake to dilute soups, soda crackers, apples, vegetables prepared with vanishing amounts of cooking oil.

It strikes me as reductive to tell you that this pattern of restrictive eating—never diagnosed—cropped up out of shame, but it’s true. I had come to believe that there was something unspeakably wrong with me, that I had failed to meet certain standards and expectations, and that I would continue to fail. Perhaps I surmised, unconsciously, that a rejection of organized religion (recognizable to me now as an act of individuation) and other received ideas about the world would be taken as defection from a path of morality and ethics. Or that having my own opinions and moods was not acceptable, or at the very least not preferable.

Whether or not these disappointments were conveyed to me directly is inconsequential. I was possessed by this sub-perceptual phenomena and their attendant shame, and it was up to me to hide all of it, to pretend as if nothing was happening, to control my body even if I was unable to control my unruly mind. Becoming extremely thin, maybe, was a stab at repentance. I did not want to be perceived, to be perceived was to be judged.

When I try to recollect the age at which I began to feel ashamed, a readily available image is that of myself at around nine or ten, when I began growing breasts and pubic hair, changes that I interpreted as hallucinations. My period arrived at eleven. That same year I went to England with my grandparents, where we stayed with my great uncle in his home in Chiswick. I had my period for the fourth or fifth time during that trip, and when I told my mother over the phone, her first concern was whether I had bled on my uncle’s guest room sheets. I adopted this as my primary concern, as well; it wasn’t what was happening internally—physiologically, hormonally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually—it was what I did or did not allow others to see. That’s what mattered. Though in recounting this incident I worry about hurting my mother—I do not want her to feel ashamed.

III.

I notice, again and again, how consuming this association is between my private shame and the place where I grew up, a place I rejected for what I considered its rampant materialism and superficiality, and a place that rejected me for thinking I was better than it.

In his essay “The Simplicity of Shame,” psychoanalyst Adam Phillips cites a 1963 paper entitled “Ego-Ideal and Ideal-Self” in which psychoanalytic researchers Joseph Sandler, Alex Holder, and Dale Meers describe shame as related to the experience of “I cannot see myself as I want to see myself or as I want others to see me.” Yes, yes, I think, every time I read this. Yes, this is the core of it for me. If only, if only, if only: a better daughter, sister, granddaughter, aunt, friend, student, neighbor, wife, mother, teacher, writer. If only I knew how to be good and how to prove my goodness. If only I could be good without having to try. If only I knew how to protect myself, then I wouldn’t have all these feelings and these feelings would not escape me only to trouble others. If only nobody could see how lacking I am. If only nobody could see me.

Is shame learned or heritable? In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud describes shame as a mental dam which is built up through socialization and education while also being “organically determined and fixed by heredity.” Meaning, I take it, that no matter how I struggle to find the locus of my shame, it could be that it’s simply in my blood.

According to Freud, the mental dam of shame functions as an inhibitory force, guiding behavior through the internalization of cultural norms. Thought of this way, shame seems like a crucial component of maintaining and enforcing order. In contemporary public discourse there is much said about whether certain authority figures would benefit from more shame, because we attribute their cruelty and recklesslessness to an absence of shame rather than an excess of it.

Or could it be that we are chronically confusing guilt with shame? From an analytic standpoint, guilt is a healthy emotion we feel in the wake of making a mistake or causing harm, and the feeling supports, ideally, a course correction, informing our decision-making in the future. Shame, conversely, is not based in discrete actions or behaviors but in identity. To be ashamed of oneself is to identify as bad, wrong, or untrustworthy. Guilt is a place you pass through on the way to a more refined social-emotional intelligence; shame is a place in which you put down roots.

Although the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy has made significant contributions to our understanding of shame—Freud’s mental dam, Jung’s characterization of it as the soul-eating emotion—when I consult canonical texts by Freud, Jung, Lacan, Carl Rogers, and others, I do not find Shame listed in any of their indexes.

IV.

It is mid-autumn and we are staying in a cottage that was once a one-room schoolhouse and now belongs to friends of my mother’s. Its ceilings are low and its doors groan on their hinges. The outstretched arms of old trees cast cooling shadows over the windows, the inside of the cottage remains dim and chilly even on a brilliant day. The house has been rigged with smart home devices that turn on and off unprovoked. My mother claims that the hook-and-eye latches on the front, back, and bathroom doors are locking on their own.

Our trips out east are rarely long in terms of duration, though I observe that when I am in a vulnerable state the shame comes on quickly like a fever, a symptom of which is a sort of amnesia about the life I actually have and all of its peace and beauty, and it’s as though I do not exist there in the place of my birth and I do not exist anywhere else, I am remade as a changeling, flickering in and out of reality.

We spend a brief two nights and two days in this house. As we are packing up to leave for the city, my husband tells me, out of earshot of our young child, that on the second night he had trouble falling asleep and then could not stay asleep on account of waking up to an intense feeling that someone else was in the room, standing behind the bed.

V.

Two nights before the autumn equinox, I dreamt I was attempting yet repeatedly failing to transfer a bouquet of flowers from one vase to another; the flowers became wilted and slimy and fell apart as soon as I lowered them into the second vase. I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and peed. When I wiped there was a bright red slick on the toilet paper. Could it be, I wondered, is this it? I felt dizzy and nauseous, like when I get car sick. I did not slow down, I did not move gently, I kept going, operating as if it was not happening, thinking then maybe it wouldn’t.

As the day went on the bleeding became so relentless and so heavy I was afraid to stand up or walk, a flood that rendered my body without control or boundary. In a hired car on the way to the hospital, I sat on my feet so as not to bleed onto the seat. In the emergency waiting area, I stood in a corner so as not to bleed on the plastic chair. When I put my hand between my legs to check for leaks, my hand came back covered in a fine sheen of red. In the examination room, I apologized as I bled all over the table while the doctor administered a transvaginal ultrasound to confirm that the pregnancy, just over nine weeks, was no longer viable.

“I remember how dangerous it is to think things might be going well,” writes Emily LaBarge in her inimitable Dog Days. As the probe pressed against the walls of my vagina and cervix, I breathed, I writhed and breathed, I bled, I breathed loudly, I stopped breathing, I kept bleeding, I breathed again, and the nurse held my left hand, and when I put my right hand over my heart to keep from crying, the nurse held that hand too, and tightly.

After the exam, another nurse drew blood and hooked me up to an intravenous drip. I lay there for hours, bleeding and bleeding, bleeding on the paper sheets and the floor, waiting for people to come say things to me, waiting for interpretations of my bloodwork. I continued reading The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan, which is, I assure you, a perfect book to read while miscarrying, because McClanahan is a writer who does not choose between sad and funny.

There is nothing funny about miscarriage, but I’ll tell you what: on my way home, having walked for over an hour like a person who is not in the middle of a crisis, under the erroneous impression that the worst is over, I feel something too big and too shapeless drop down through and out of my body and into my underwear, and my first instinct is to get off the sidewalk so that whatever is about to happen will be seen by as few passersby as possible, which means I have to scurry (like an animal) into the parking lot of a Burger King, a Burger King I see almost every day of my ordinary life because it is located a mere three blocks from my apartment, and it is there in the parking lot of that Burger King, across from the drive-thru window (at that exact moment serving a customer driving a dark gray pick-up truck) that a blood clot the size of my hand tumbles down my pant leg and hits the pavement, and in the abject horror of the sensation and the sound and the sight of this piece of my body collapsing out of my body, I manage to think, is this a joke?

VI.

It is mid-autumn, and before we leave the cottage, I walk to the nature preserve, taking the long way around the ruined and impassable road, beyond the carriage house where my mother once resided. I open a gate and go through it into the woods, toward the meadow where twenty years ago we saw the black orb, and I am gathered into a fecund landscape that is nothing if not divine: the play of light and shadow in the trees and across the ground, the bugs and birds weaving throughout tall grasses and wildflowers, all elements of this gorgeous liminality between the abundance of summer and the coming desolation of winter.

It is there that I begin to think about writing this story about shame, or rather a story about shame that is in fact about loneliness, because this is where the natural disaster of tenacious, instinctive self-recrimination leaves me: in a position of defensiveness and deflection and, above all, solitude.

“Another fear, I think,” Emily LaBarge writes, “is that once you speak the shame, it is all people can see. You are not you; you are the shame interpellated by its receivers as common, depersonalized, universal shame.” I want to complicate this by adding that perhaps the greater fear in my estimation has always been that upon disclosing my shame I will be found out as uniquely and exceptionally deserving of it, and of the isolation that comes with it.

In the weeks following the miscarriage, I handled the experience as something to be concealed. How disciplined could I be about not telling? How long could I go without revealing that I had lost? Who cares? Who would genuinely care? Tell people, my therapist urges. Do the opposite of what you typically do, see what happens. Could it be otherwise?

“To discover that it is not devastating to accept the positive feeling from another, that it does not necessarily end in hurt, that it actually ‘feels good’ to have another person with you in your struggles to meet life—this may be one of the most profound learnings encountered by the individual whether in therapy or not,” Carl Rogers writes in On Becoming a Person. This is the supreme hope: that in ridding oneself of the shame-based conviction that we are imposing upon and burdening others with whatever it is we’re going through, we in fact open up a space in which all parties are free to listen and to speak and to offer unconditional positive regard.

Intellectually and philosophically, I hold this up as a worthy ideal and aspiration, I do, and still I treated the miscarriage with tremendous superstition, like a curse, like a contagious illness, like a punishment that I could only endure alone, only alone. Never mind all the women I knew and loved who had miscarried, never mind that I had felt love and tenderness for them, and a desire to be with them in it somehow. But did you really try to reach them in their moment of grief? I interrogate myself, and no, I decide, I had not, and this is another reason why I deserve my loneliness. This is what I get this is what I get this is what get—a looping, spiraling thought going ‘round and ‘round and bashing into me like a malevolent tetherball. Bereft? Alone? Mortified? Angry? This is what I get! But for what, for what, for what—

I was not actually alone, of course. Over the full two weeks of bleeding bleeding bleeding bleeding bleeding and bleeding, I had my husband and my child, I saw people, I met friends for coffee, I maintained routines and followed schedules, I biked and went to the park and shopped for groceries and ran errands, I cooked and cleaned, I even got on a plane and went to another city for a few days. My skin broke out like it hadn’t since my earliest years of menstruation, there I was staring at my softening, aging face in the mirror, not knowing what to do, having forgotten how to hide things like this, not wanting anyone to see what had made itself plain, that an ugliness had invaded me inside and out.

And I did tell people, several, all of whom expressed love and tenderness and a desire to be with me in it somehow, and this is what did it, I think now, this is what helped me see how adrift I was, how fathomless a sea of shame can become, because wherever they were, I could not meet them there.

VII.

It is mid-autumn, and my grandmother invites us to attend the church’s harvest festival. After an hour or so of milling about, we go into the chapel itself. Everything looks and smells the same: the stained glass windows, the wooden pews, the dark red cushions for kneeling in prayer.

As a child I looked forward to the Sign of Peace, during which congregants shake hands with one another and say, “Peace be with you.” After service I would wander in the cemetery, imagining spirits, talking to invisible playmates. I was always a bit afraid but this fear energized me, I ran through the cemetery even knowing it might be considered disrespectful to the dead.

I want to show my husband and child where I attended Sunday school, so we walk into the extension off the west side of the chapel, down the corridor that leads to the classrooms and bathrooms. I have to pee but when we reach the bathrooms at the far end I do not want to go inside. The color of the walls is the same, the sunlight coming in through an opaque window casts a wan yellow hue over the stalls, and just the sight of the space brings on a memory of leaning over the toilet and throwing up blueberries, the acid pulp very nearly detectable at the back of my throat.

VIII.

For a few years my family lived in a house at the top of a steep hill. It was in this house that I got my period for the first time, left my first stains on a pair of underwear. On the second floor of the house were three bedrooms, a small office, a bathroom, and an attic door. Occasionally I would hear the knob on the attic door turn, or footsteps walking back and forth above my bedroom. There was no door on my room for reasons I remain unclear on, and so when my parents left me alone in the house I would sit in the furthest corner of the room so that if anything entered it would not catch me by surprise.

I think it was in this house that I started writing letters to my parents instead of saying aloud what I was feeling. I did not trust myself to say it right with my voice while looking into the face of the person I felt I needed to say things to. I did not trust the other person to hear it. I remember being aflame with anger. Sitting down with a pen and paper. Gripping the pen so hard. Or I remember being very sorry for something I had said or done. Weeping as I wrote my apology. Folding the paper in half, slipping it under their bedroom door. Always with the melodrama.

IX.

Toward the end of Dog Days, LaBarge characterizes autobiographical narrative as the result of “a compulsion to resolve the unresolvable, destined to chase what cannot (should not?) be caught.” I believe this to be true, even if we are taking compulsion literally, as in being forced to do something against one’s will. I do, in meaningful instances, experience writing as akin to possession, and I mean this in a dual sense: I find myself taken over by an idea, a thought, a conflict, I wrestle with it internally for as long as possible, and eventually a drive to sort it out through language emerges, albeit in its time.

Yet we each know according to our own shambolic living that language serves both to unveil and to dissemble. Language is rife with tricks, as is shame—we may think we’re in control, we may act as though we have a grasp on it, and all the while it is doing its profound and consequential work in secret. Alongside this story is a story, or stories, I am not telling, letters I am not writing; somewhere beyond us these narratives are inscribed.

As a young student of psychoanalysis, this was the notion that startled me into a new awareness: that for all of our finely honed articulations and strategic evasions, there is a shadow world of things unsaid and unseen, of double meanings, of unintended revelations, of disorderly bodies, of mental dams rupturing, of apparitions, of hauntings, and every now and then, in moments of suffering and of rapture and of contemplation and of close listening, this world is made known to us.

One week after the miscarriage resolved of its own volition [as yet unresolved: my relationship with eating and food, my orientation toward God], I began bleeding again, in this case a fairly ordinary menstrual cycle if not noticeably heavier and more depleting. I grew resentful toward my body and its insistence upon expulsion, its indifference to how difficult this made the most customary doings. I was exhausted no matter how much I slept, and irritable. I was impatient with my mind and the direction of my thoughts, that I would spend so much energy focused on a future that had collapsed without warning instead of focusing on a present that was full of good fortune. In how many other ways had I been terribly lucky? Feeling badly about feeling badly—the second arrow.

It was mid-autumn by then. Every day was magnificent, I mean the weather, the gentle turn of the season, could it be that the sun and the earth had agreed to give us, all creatures, this mercy before darkness eclipses light and we settle down into the half of the year that belongs to the night? In the meadow in the preserve I find a cluster of decaying tree trunks and squat down to pee, looking around to make sure nobody can see me, and while not a human is in sight still I feel watched. Afterward I walk a little further and then begin running, I am running back to my family, and it isn’t long before I feel the need to pee again, because this need has been persistent since losing the pregnancy. All at once I feel the onus of time in my organs and my limbs. As I run back up onto the street I imagine how pathetic I must look to everyone driving by, how weak and crooked, my soul half-eaten, my head jutting forward and my eyes tense like I’m really really trying, and I am, of course I am, this thing that I am doing is hard for me, I want to go home, and so I am trying, and this is what I find most frightening and most dreadful, that I should be caught trying, trying, trying and trying and trying, and failing, and failing.

Reading Recommendation: Love’s Work by Gillian Rose

Everyone had to help her now. Nobody was dressed for this, for carrying trays of crudité and charcuterie and shellfish over the threshold of the sliding glass doors and into the bare, weakly lit space of the village community center, which had not been prepared in any way for the event. Everything had hinged on the weather holding. A searing embarrassment gripped Flora from within her suprasternal notch, and she heard herself saying, Can’t trust the forecast anymore, can we?, while grinning in a way that would have been upsetting to a child.

A child knows what’s real. There were no children at the fundraiser. There was Gail, Rebecca, Claire, Jim, Drew, Lou, Hank, Jessica, Paula, Gia, Sarah, Luke, Sam, Katrina, and Sally, and a dozen or so other guests who Flora recognized but could not name.

Flora had volunteered to organize the annual gathering, she had placed the orders and sent out the invitations, but maybe she should have known something wasn’t right, cosmically speaking, when she’d gone to the fish market that morning to pick up oysters and shrimp, and learned that the young man who had filled the order had doubled the shrimp. There must be a mistake, Flora had said, panicked by the quantity set before her. Nah, he’d said to her, all this shrimp’s for you.

This was wrong. She had no record of the form, which she had submitted through the market’s website, but she knew in her soul that she had not ordered thirty pounds of cooked shrimp for a cocktail fundraiser scheduled from 4pm until 6pm.

Hank was arranging collapsible tables around the room, and Claire, his wife, had begun placing the platters in what was hopefully an appealing formation. This was helpful, but Flora wasn’t sure she wanted the two of them to be the ones assisting in such a visible way; she’d heard Hank was involved in financial trading of a dubious nature, and Claire was—not very smart.

Sally and Rebecca had taken charge of serving wine, Gia had connected her phone to a portable speaker. Some people were already dancing, shyly, to early 2000s Santana. It was out of her hands; control had been wrested from her, everyone having solemnly determined that she was incapable of fulfilling her self-appointed role.

As a girl Flora had watched her mother—a tall, muscular, square-jawed woman with two advanced degrees and a collection of Art Deco jewelry worth insuring—produce baked goods and casseroles for church coffee hour with the attitudinal bearing of a conscripted soldier. She had hoped to be more like her mother in almost every regard.

Flora noticed Lou hedgehogging his way into the shrimp, plucking pieces directly from the tray and discarding tails into a small wastebasket with no bag inside of it. Santana had become early ‘90s Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flora felt nervous. People flowed around her, faces dipping into and out of focus, like Paula, who was wearing a pumpkin orange tunic over turquoise capris. Her hair undulated atop her head like sand dunes.

Hey Flora, Paula said, bouncing her shoulders and shifting her hips to “Suck My Kiss.” Did you happen to get the shrimp at Francesco’s? On Front Street? Flora felt her pupils dilate. They gave me twice what I ordered! Flora said, laughing in the stuttering way her husband and kids found unbearable. Why? she asked, and Paula said, No reason!, and gave her two thumbs up.

The music was getting louder, it seemed, with each song, and now it was Ace of Base, and Flora saw that she was one of the few attendees left who was not yet dancing. Luke and Drew lip synced while making direct eye contact with one another. Katrina’s upper body remained stiff while her lower body entered new dimensions. Many people were nibbling while they danced: soft cheeses, crostini, purple grapes, cured black olives, marinated artichoke hearts, prosciutto, red and yellow bell pepper, baby carrots, oysters, and, yes, shrimp. Shrimp tails were scattered across the floor now, crushed beneath the wild gyrations and articulations of the dancers’ high heels and dress shoes and, in one solitary case, clogs.

Flora went to a window and looked out: the rain had become a thunderstorm. The roads would be flooded, she thought. The power would fail and they would all be stranded there for the night, and they would sleep in piles like sweet, innocent puppies.

She turned and saw Sarah and Sam and someone she didn’t know grinding on each other. There was, in fact, a great deal of grinding all around her. Hank pushed the tables all the way to the wall then twirled his way back to the center of the floor, where he began breakdancing. The whole room throbbed. She felt her heartbeat slow, steady. They would raise all the money they needed, of this she could be sure.

Reading Recommendation: The Hill by Harriet Clark

The Plum

The plum, half-eaten, rolled into the street

and this was a tragedy. Minor

by any measure but right then rightly huge.

We discussed the loss over the next several days.

I still wanted it.

You still wanted it.

It hadn’t fallen due to a dearth of desire

or appetite, it was barely even

carelessness. It was an accident.

I didn’t mean to.

We had been waiting for the bus. We sat there

helpless as the pulpy mass

vanished beneath cars and trucks, two cars

drove right into it and there was worry

regarding the meeting of pit and tire.

That there are other plums elsewhere

did not ease the devastation of seeing

something you were only just holding suddenly free

to endure anything the world might loose upon it.

Nehalem

We watch elk, a mother

and babies, graze

on a hillside above

the sea. We are all, elk and people,

wet with water carried in the wind.

Where do gods live?

A simple question,

to say nothing

of its answers.

Maybe underground,

maybe.

Later, still damp, I stand in the kitchen of a beach house,

a rental, culling raspberries,

mind like a flashlight clicking on,

a flashlight clicking on.

The sun parades toward the edge of the earth finding

in its path diurnal creatures

in attitudes of supplication

before drowning itself.

Fire Gong

Just beyond the gates

suspended like a steel enso

is a rare Fire Gong

fashioned from the wheel

of an old locomotive.

Ring it. No one

will come.

This relic lives in the town where I was born.

Back here I notice the ubiquity of flat-screen televisions.

I notice the way people do not look

like themselves and do not look

at one another.

It means the world

has changed some

since I was a child. It means the technocrats

have been hard at work

building new kinds of hell.

But the circle is open: an opening

means freedom, movement: change

keeps on changing.

When I stood before the Fire Gong

I thought of the Ten Ox Herding Pictures

and also of my teacher

who signs her e-mails not with xo but with ox,

like love and strength are interchangeable.

Reading Recommendation: Fights! by Scott McClanahan

I used to keep pristine handwritten notes for the sake of posterity and aesthetics. I wanted everything to look right. For me, for myself. If I made errors, I’d rip the page clean out and start over. All of my notebooks were once subject to this scrupulosity. For nearly a decade I taught yoga to teenagers and adults, and throughout those years I wrote out every one of my sequences by hand, in Sanskrit and English. I prepared thoroughly for each class and practiced each planned sequence multiple times, and if through this process I found that the sequence needed to change, I would gladly excise the page from my teaching journal and write it fresh, leaving no trace of the first draft.

Misspellings, strikethroughs, a crooked line, a sentence revised, subtractions, additions: these markings represent a process animated through the movements of a living mind and a changing body. When I see archival documents belonging to great writers, every scribble looks like pure art to me. Because human imperfection is interesting, and because I don’t want to live like machines in a lubricated world of simulations and surfaces. Then I look at my own jots, and I itch to erase and perfect.

I admire rigor, precision, refinement; these are useful and, when applied wisely, in service of beauty. But these are points of arrival, not departure. I wonder about the impulse to expunge that which is unruly, and the twin desire to put forth a polished work with no evidence of its evolution, if only for an audience of one.

I’m still easily seduced by the illusion of control, but I do not in this season of my life possess the wherewithal to be unforgivingly precious. What matters is that my brain and my left hand manage to coordinate effort for long enough that the immaterial thought makes it onto the page, where it becomes a whisper more than nothing.

Over the last seven months or so I have copied down many lines and passages that I find remarkable for one reason or another; I’d like to share some of those transcriptions with you here. Perhaps this gathering of prose will pique your curiosity in the books from which they derive or the authors through whom they were borne. Below the excerpts are reading lists of past, present, and future, as well as a playlist I assembled for a recent road trip.

As always, please feel welcome to write back and tell me what you’ve been reading, listening to, watching, mulling over.

“These days, my two youngest grandchildren have a habit of biting their mothers, and in some instances, other children. My daughter and my daughter-in-law texted me photos of the bite marks, some taken by themselves and some by concerned daycare workers. My daughters are worried about the biting, but also worried because babies who bite are not allowed to attend daycare. And if that were to happen, my daughters would lose their fucking minds.

When I saw the photos, I texted back that it was good to know my grandkids were biting other kids, not themselves. I’ve received no response.” (page unknown)

Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace

“My head was full of a very loud clanging. Nothing expert, nothing trained or intellectual. Just a shit-detector going off, that was all. The alarm bells of a woman who had been in the world for more than sixty years, knowing men, sometimes hearing them say true things, sometimes being told lies.” (page unknown)

Helen Garner, This House of Grief

“You don’t need money when you’re rich. You don’t need anything when you’re rich. It’s a question of shame, and we never feel shame. Poor people are right to hate us.” p. 66

Constance Debre, Playboy

“Charles caught himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, returning to him suddenly, sobered him. They brought in the coffee; he stopped thinking about her.” p. 19

“Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love.” p. 37

“[None] of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.” p. 167

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It’s a bad day for me. I’m feeling fat and lonely, and trapped in my lousy life.” p. 31

“Our exchange was not exactly conversation. Carried on at a high level of speed and noise, it consisted of a series of rapid-motion confrontations. Assertion, denial, defense was the way we understood talking. And the more urgent the facedown—that is, the more volatile and explosive—the more stimulated and reassured, I think, each of us was. This appetite we had for arguing the point right down to the ground was a measure of how fundamental a weapon we both conceived the articulating intelligence to be. If we could each persuade the other to see the truth as we saw it, the world would somehow turn on its axis and all that thwarted us would be emptied out into harmless space.” p. 168

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Mine is a large, a generous nature, and it’s therefore not like me to notice how base practically everyone is.” p. 71

Iris Owens, After Claude

“The water we use for washing and clearing is managed by the municipal government. They send over one large bucket each day and that’s it. So when we bathe, we can’t wash our clothes. If we wash our clothes, then we can’t do the dishes or mop the floor. To manage all these things, you have to keep careful track of how much water is left in the bucket on the roof. The bucket of water on the roof is very salty and can’t be drunk. You have to buy drinking water separately from the store. Water is very precious around here.” p. 111

Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara

“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” p. 8

“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God.” p. 24

“As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.” p. 49

“[For] here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience.” p. 163

“But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything, he said; at least he did.” p. 193

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The more conscious I was of the good and of all this ‘beautiful and lofty,’ the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it.” p. 7

“I’m bored, and I constantly do nothing.” p. 41

“He knew me by heart. It infuriated me that he knew me by heart.” p. 65

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“The cover story of all time, that’s what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves.” p. 12

Heather Lewis, Notice

“I was not bowing to you, I was bowing to all human suffering.” p. 337

“Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone…They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good.” p. 576

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Once after seeing an emotional French movie, Sundays and Cybèle, the kind only a young person can love, Jim and I were so excited we ran and ran through the nearby empty midnight streets. We crossed over to the East River by an overpass on the Upper East Side and kept running. I was so full of nameless emotion; that must have been the happiest moment of my life. An ecstasy of just feeling young and alive that I shared with Jim. Of course at the time someone doesn’t think, I’m young and alive. I thought I would be this happy and energetic forever, that only morally compromised people got old.” (page unknown)

Edmund White, The Loves of My Life

“I said I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything.” (page unknown)

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book II)

“He could never hear enough about the inadequacy of people who weren’t him. And as with his boasting about his past, these things didn’t need to have actually happened for him to enjoy them. The fact that he enjoyed them somehow brought them into being, with each innocuous piece of news you shared with him somehow always ending up as a perfect illustration of some risible misstep.” p. 22

Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms

“Donald has gray hair, the color of faded newspapers. You’d never know he had been a blond as a child; you’d never have known he had been a child. His eyes show leadership, are fibrous as salad olives. Green.” p. 110

“I know the way Beal’s beard spreads over the sheet. He don’t never cut it. It’s like one of those dinky houseplants you get with good intentions, but it takes over, needs a bigger and bigger pot every time you look. The beard fills our bed at night, lies between us, and sometimes I feel it try to grip me.” p. 215

Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine

“A tall young man came by. He was carrying a tiny baby in a sling against his chest. The mother walked behind, smooth-faced and long-haired, holding by the hand a fat-nappied toddler. But the man was the one in love with the baby. His head was bowed so he could gaze into its face. His whole being was adoring it.” p. 149

Helen Garner, “Civilisation and Its Discontents,” Stories

“Sometimes I think that compassion is not innate to the heart, that it has to enter us with each childhood scrape and hurt, like tiny bacteria.” p. 48

“Lenny was a homely man with a salesman’s hyperbolic patter and a cult leader’s unyielding stare.” p. 89

Jill Ciment, Half a Life

“And even the charmed days of plundering its pixelled vistas have passed. That wild landscape has already been disinherited by swaths of the public, weary of its antagonism to the mysteries of life. It’s been decided. It’s better not to know everything, to reduce real knowledge to the dumb sourcing and recitation of facts. I agree with that. Now people wax of it like long-sober addicts, like veterans of unfashionable wars, whose valiance has lapsed, whose achievements lose purchase with each passing day like coral sublimated by invisible acids.” p. 37

Jack Paradise, Greenhouse

“We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.” p. 158

“The last line about passing the torch of life is stolen from the poet Lucretius. He has been dead for years but he is still alive.” p. 166

Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of Place

Other Books Read (January-July 2026)

Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

Big Chief by Jon Hickey

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Things by Georges Perec

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene

Muscle Man by Jordan Castro

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

The Guest by Emma Cline

Clutch by Emily Nemens

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Perfection by Vincenzo Lautronico

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Strangers by Belle Burden

Transcription by Ben Lerner

Still Talking by Lore Segal

A Hymn to Life by Gisele Pelicot

Flesh by David Szalay

Euphoria by Lily King

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Vigil by George Saunders

The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

Notes to John by Joan Didion

Firstborn by Lauren Christensen

Consent by Jill Ciment

In Progress

Wifey by Judy Blume

Playworld by Adam Ross

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment

Practicing Dying by Charlotte Northall

Coming Up (on shuffle)

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette

Country People by Daniel Mason

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Élisabeth by Éric Rohmer

The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel

On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle

Pilgrimage (Volume I) by Dorothy Richardson

Dog Days by Emily LaBarge

The Hill by Harriet Clark

Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Fights! by Scott McClanahan

The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Snow Man by Carolyn Chute

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin

The School on Heart’s Content Road by Carolyn Chute

Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer

Dopamine Kids by Michaeleen Ducloff

Famesick by Lena Dunham

Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

Nile walked six blocks to the nearest subway station. Under other circumstances he would have cycled—the office was only nine miles northwest—but he needed to arrive appearing well-kempt. This would be his sixth interview in as many months. It was for a clinical internship at a private psychotherapy group practice in a neighborhood so wealthy the air there was redolent with Kentucky yellowwoods and cardamom buns.

On the train Nile sat across from a vandalized advertisement for Van Cleef & Arpels. CLASS WAR was scrawled across it in acid green. The other passengers in the car were two teenagers huddled together looking into their respective phones; a wizened man stretched out and sleeping beneath what appeared to be a thin airline-issued blanket; a middle-aged woman and her young child, each entranced by their own sources of digital entertainment; and a young man who, with his backpack and an unopened ornithology textbook in his lap, appeared to be a student.

Nile took out his phone, checked text messages and e-mail and news headlines, rolled through a bevy of social media apps. He slid his phone back into his bag, could not recall what he had just seen or read, and retrieved the phone, this time intent on focusing.

After a few minutes he again deposited the phone in the bag, trading it for a handful of almonds, a handful of beans, and the orange folder. Inside the folder was his resume. He had already submitted the document through the clinic’s online application system, but he’d printed it too for his own preparation. He quickly reviewed the sheet of paper. It still looked fine.

Nile still preferred this, a thing to be touched and held, a thing to be looked at all the way around. He remembered the satisfaction he’d felt, as a schoolboy, in handing in completed worksheets and exam booklets, and the pride he’d taken in his carefully honed penmanship. He had enjoyed studying, had taken his responsibility toward his own intellectual development seriously, even when his efforts garnered mostly Bs.

Thirteen years before meandering toward graduate studies in psychology, Nile had attended a weird little undergraduate institution called Somerset, where he’d earned a degree in Dance and Choreography. Somerset had produced, over its modest fifty years, a number of talented and industrious graduates who tried very hard to turn creative practice into livelihood. Somerset had recently gone bankrupt. When the closure was announced, Nile texted fellow alums, Oona and Alexander, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He could have texted anyone, but it was the two of them he’d immediately thought of.

They met at a bar in Gowanus. Alexander arrived wearing immaculate lilac scrubs. Oona was dressed like her high school self but somehow also dressed the way current high schoolers dressed: a long floral skirt, a white crop-top, black lace-up Doc Martens. She had cut her graying hair into a pixie cut and dyed it platinum blonde. Her brow bones and crow’s feet shimmered with soft silver highlighter. Nile wore jeans and a t-shirt with a screen-printed image of a cow on it, an outfit that suggested his humble status as a graduate student while also showcasing his steadfast dedication to fitness.

They drank Boulevardiers and ate herbed olives and freshly made pita with warm hummus. They invoked people they had danced with: Yves, a classically trained dynamo who still performed internationally; Gigi, the coltish daughter of aristocratic lawyers from coastal Maine; Beth, obsessed with ugliness, now an acupuncturist; Eionn, the sweetest, brawniest, most naive of the group, dead from an accidental overdose within months of graduation. They remembered professors and teaching artists, and thesis shows that confirmed that what they were doing there together was significant. They talked about how intellectually leaden everyone, themselves included, had since become. Gone were the days of earnest, heady philosophizing. Nobody wanted to talk about avant-garde depictions of the relationship between the body and consciousness in modernist literature. Nobody wanted to talk about ethnochoreology.

“I’m just glad I found a profession I actually like, that, like, aligns with my actual values,” Alexander had said. “Nothing about our education really prepared us for the real world. But,” he paused to take a drink, “for those four years the world we inhabited felt real, and it was heaven.” Nile and Oona had nodded emphatically. “Yes, thank you,” Nile had said, “that is so well-said.”

“I feel orphaned,” Oona had sighed. “I feel like there was, like, an umbilical link between me and that place and all the people I met there and all the thinking I did there, and it sustained me somehow, it helped me feel like no matter how average my life becomes or how feeble my career, I would still have that world. But it’s gone, that world is gone, and I’m just, like, homeless.”

In response, Nile and Alexander had each offered validation and sympathy; what Oona described was recognizable to them. Then they’d moved on to gossip, restaurant recommendations, film reviews, relationship updates. Mostly they drank. By the end of the night the three of them had spilled into a frenzy of affection for one another. Their friendships, while integral to their respective college experiences, took on a radically enhanced splendor, and when they parted ways each left with the drunken conviction that from now on every high and every low, every milestone, every grief and every joy, would be shared within the fold of their honorable triad.

And then, on the cab ride home, Oona posted a revised and abridged iteration of her mournful utterances—I am orphaned. I am homeless. RIP Somerset.—across several social media platforms and was promptly, savagely demolished.

Much of the heat emanated from other alums. There are actual orphans, someone responded. Sorry, but you don’t get to claim homelessness, posted another. An anonymous user curated and shared an album of photographs of children, presumably orphaned children, from around the world, and paired the album with a long, somber message addressed not only to Oona but to anyone who failed to develop a more highly evolved moral operating system.

Oona was ignorant. Oona was selfish. Oona was gross. Oona lacked compassion. Oona lacked empathy. Oona was delusional. Oona was ugly. Oona was a typical American. Oona was vapid. Oona was mentally ill. Oona was the worst kind of overeducated leftist woman. Oona was an embarrassment to her alma mater. And on and on.

The backlash further diminished the school’s already dwindling legacy. Look! the normies and conservatives said. This is why progressive liberal arts education is endangered: they eat each other alive.

For a time, things were quite bad for Oona. She was shunned. She was forced to create a new personal e-mail account, unable to cope with the incoming wrath. Over the years Oona had posted innumerable images of herself on various websites, it was easy to learn what she looked like, and so she suffered public humiliation offline, as well. She took to wearing sunglasses and baseball caps while running errands on her block in Crown Heights. She stopped riding the subway. She transitioned from working on-site for a downtown arts foundation to working from her studio apartment. Her parents flew in from Washington to console her; she was their only child.

When Nile had first seen the post he himself had rolled his eyes and marveled at Oona’s flair for melodrama. Then he’d caught on to the tsunami of vitriol crashing down on her, and it occurred to him that both he and Alexander were in a position to openly defend her, to provide context for her misstep, to testify to her basically good character. They had been there. They had understood what she meant. What she’d expressed, they’d felt it, too. He mentioned this to Alexander, via text.

Nile typed, We could help her.

Oh, Alexander typed back.

Cringe emoji.

Oh no.

No. That isn’t done.

Nile watched the mother and child leave the train. He watched the mother maneuver the stroller down the aisle and through the doors and onto the platform without taking her eyes off her screen. The sleeping man sat up then and stretched his arms overhead, and the blanket slipped, revealing a threadbare Alice In Chains t-shirt. He yawned and farted loudly, laid back down, covered his head, began to snore.

This was what Nile loved about the city: being surrounded by other people in moments of organic adaptation. As a student Nile had designed anthropological projects dedicated to observing quotidian human movement, and made dances inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Rudy Perez, Paul Taylor. He liked to look at how bodies shaped and were shaped by the space and objects around them. If he had to make a dance today, he thought, he would explore the way bodies had become enmeshed with contemporary technology. But he could see how that might be boring, as a uniformity of posture had settled over the populace: bowed head, collapsed thyroid, rounded back, the protrusion of the seventh cervical spinous process, thickened palms, swollen thumb tendons.

At the next stop the ornithology student and the teens disembarked, and a dozen or so new passengers entered. A woman wearing kitten-print pajama pants, an oversized baby blue sweatshirt, and enormous red rubber pool sandals boarded the train and sat against Nile, so close he could smell her shampoo. She navigated to a social media video app and began to scroll rapidly with the volume up. Nile calmly, discreetly pulled his headphones from his bag and put them on. He selected OK Computer.

He ate the fig bar, the banana, and the beef jerky one after the other, taking care not to chew loudly or to open his mouth too widely with each bite. He could feel the woman eyeing him sideways with disgust as he ate, but he had to, his blood sugar was dropping. He considered eating the yogurt but thought better of it. In order to create more of a forcefield around himself—the woman’s right foot was now out of her sandal and resting against his own shoe, her elbow poked at his waist—he took out his book. Coming into the high room again after years / after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies / after losses and feet on stairs—1

He couldn’t concentrate. He held the open book against his chest. His vision blurred as he gazed at the image of a $14,000 18-karat rose gold Frivole ring. The tiny emeralds and rubies. CLASS WAR. He was thinking about Oona again, wondering how she was doing, whether she was still in the city at all. She had called him, texted him, sent e-mails illustrating the stress she was under and the lengths she had to go to in order to function. She’d lost friends, nobody invited her out anymore. All of her messages were harried. The voicemails—unbearable! He’d deleted them without listening all the way through.

But she’d stopped short of asking him for anything. It wasn’t really his business, anyway, he reminded himself. He hadn’t returned her calls or her e-mails, though he had answered one or two texts, he was sure of that, he’d said something neutral, maybe something mildly encouraging, and yet he couldn’t recall exactly what.

Nile surfed across a handful of sites, searching her name. He found no profiles or accounts belonging to her. He did find, of course, a smattering of posts and articles about her. How silly, he thought, what a silly mess. Nobody would have seen the post, he was sure, if hundreds—thousands?—of people hadn’t amplified it. It could have just as easily disappeared, been absorbed into infinity.

It was possible that the whole thing had had a profound effect on Oona. It was possible that she had fully recovered. More than recovered—was thriving. The tragedy—probably, hopefully—was that there was no tragedy: what she had said, what others had said back to her, the animus, the shame—none of it mattered, not at all, not even a bit. It had been months now. Some trace of Oona’s mistake would live on, yes, because that was the curse of the internet. But a new outrage was manufactured every other minute. A new calamity erupted every other day. Who would remember a small, clumsy thing like that?

Nile opened his Messages to look for his thread with Oona, but it was gone. Ah, right. He had deleted it, along with her Contact file. There had been that night, not too long ago, when he’d worried that his affiliation with her would threaten his prospects as a mental health professional. These situations tended to be sticky and indiscriminate.

The train pulled into his station. He removed his headphones and popped two sticks of gum into his mouth, hopped out onto the platform, moved through the turnstile and up the stairs. Streams of people rushed past him in all directions. The weather had been forecasted to be unseasonably hot, but Nile found the wind was dramatic enough to cut through the humidity.

The air moved around his body, his body moved through the air. Strength, rhythm, grace, dignity. Right, dignity, Nile thought, the most important thing. He walked taller now, with his shoulders back and his chest forward and his neck long, he breathed gently, and in doing so his form took on an internal lightness, and he was momentarily cleansed of certain feelings, the ones that arose now and then, when he had a little too much time to reflect. It hasn’t rained in a long time, Nile thought, looking at the sky, which was blue and only blue.

Reading Recommendation: My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

Image: Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College

In the hours before dusk we walk up a narrow road, traversed mostly by farmers’ trucks and ATVs, and cross over into the unruly seaside hills, weave through copses of slender thistle, gather sticks and peer at tufts of radiant wildflowers. The air is pure: breathing in does not feel like a compromise. Back in the rental cottage we eat a simple meal and listen to Irish public radio. The sun will not set until near 9 p.m. It is April.

We wake up early, eat, bathe, dress. We drive down serpentine roads to the nearest town and a national park. We climb a mountain. We visit its neighbor, a Benedictine abbey. The nuns make honey, jam, chocolate, and soap. They tend the gardens and hold daily services. Work and Pray: a life in totality.

A week ago we went on a boat tour in Howth harbor, trying to get a closer look at Ireland’s Eye and what remains of a chapel built in the 8th century and maintained by monks for over 500 years. Upon castoff the chief engineer explained to his passengers that it would likely be too dangerous that day to circle the island, and that we’d go only so far as he deemed safe. Then he crossed himself, held his hands up, and said, “You’re with God.”

I wonder over this relaxed gesture of renunciation. The way the man’s competence was not diminished by his willingness to acknowledge the limitations of his power. No anxiety. Whereas it almost always seems to me that it’s my duty and mine alone to make sure the sky doesn’t fall.

I’ve brought three books: Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, and Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears by László Földényi. Weeks ago I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time and thereafter learned, almost by accident, that Virginia Woolf considered Dostoyevsky to be the greatest writer to have ever lived. “To be overly conscious is a sickness,” Dostoyevsky writes in the first pages of Notes from Underground. This may be the only statement in the whole book that I come close to comprehending. When I’ve finished it, I read László’s essay. It is difficult and exciting. Woolf said a good work of literature should be difficult: it’s meant to make the mind work.

I underline: “Never has humanity been so satisfied with its own self—like a spoiled and careless child, left to itself, allowed to do whatever it wishes. But that same child, when evening descends, having no idea of what to do with its freedom and fearful, is suddenly filled with anguish.”

And: “We have murdered God with our ambition…And it is none other than our drive to find an answer for everything. When we began to seek solutions for things for which there are clearly no solutions, this ambition became transformed into hubris. In other words, it occurred when even transcendence itself turned into a practical question.”

And: “When the entirety of existence, the cosmic whole is reduced to a world that can be technically manipulated—this is hell.”

The next day and the next day and the next, we pack picnics and venture into a realm of soft fascinations. The cerulean waters of Mannin Bay, Connemara Bay, Dog’s Bay, and Gurteen. Beaches of coralline algae. Rampant, vivid, blistering gorse. Fog coming down like a gown from summit to valley. A brief suspension of vanity in my own heart. Sea thrift, mountain everlasting, rock stonecrop, St. Patrick’s cabbage, wild garlic. A half-collapsed castle on a hill. Monastic settlements in ruin. Basking sharks circling, fins up. Flocks of sheep spray-painted neon pink, neon blue. Bow-legged lambs. A hint of a sliver of a possibility that all my resentments will die before I do. It’s all real.

I begin Crime and Punishment in bed, I stay up too late with it. The following afternoon, after my son and I witness horses and their riders moving in formation through shallow dunes, I sit on the house’s slate patio with a glass of water and a cup of espresso. It is quiet but for the shush of the washing machine inside and the shush of the waves on the far side of the cliffs. A strangeness takes shape between this safety and Raskolnikov’s world of abjection and madness, which is our world, too. “Suffering,” Dostoyevsky wrote, “is the sole cause of consciousness.” There is no amount of rationalizing or historicizing that will lend a just and final order to the mess we’ve made.

On our last evening in the west we ramble along the property line set by an old stone wall. We see a flock of whimbrels, and enormous hares galloping into the sunset. In the morning, through the big north-facing windows, I watch as the marine layer parts to reveal mountains, an eternity. As we begin packing the car we notice that a number of snails have appeared in the grass near the front door. We are very careful to harm not a one.

My husband drives absolutely perfectly from one end of the country to the other, back east to my beautiful mother in her tumbledown castle. In preparation for our return she has filled several bowls with lemons, apples, clementines, kiwis, bananas, mango, and melon. Eggs and salad greens and small wheels of cheese in the refrigerator, fresh bread and butter on the countertop, vegetable lentil soup in the crockpot. My mother was born generous or the vicissitudes of existence have made her that way. She gives the minutes of her life, all she has, to others. I don’t praise her enough, I never have, but if there is anything worth praising, it is this, and if there is anyone worth praising, it is her.

After dinner we drink lemongrass and ginger tea with honey. A fox slinks over the field just beyond the ha-ha, and the moon is nearly full, ascending slowly to sit heavy as a guru in the firmament. In our time we are so interested in knowing our sorrow, in claiming our anger and our disappointment, that we risk ignoring our own happiness.

My bedside light is a salt lamp, pink and dim enough not to disturb my dreaming son and bright enough to see the words: Environment is everything, and man himself is nothing. I read Raskolnikov as a cipher, understood by no one, least of all himself. What is meaning in the absence of rationality? I write in the margin. Is freedom/free will more or less possible in a world interpreted through faith or through technology and science? I close the book and turn off the light, I lie still in the dark.

Reading Recommendation: A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

None of the Rio de la Plata or Andean switchbacks, the brawling dogs of Tigre, the incandescent walls of Colonia, the painted hills of Valparaiso.

Of that time I have only an internal picture book, synaptically arranged and delicate as lace.

A baby, safe and quiet, nestled between her mother and father on a twenty-four hour bus ride across the continent. Rainwater leaking through broken windows; desert, farmland, vineyard.

A pot of black bean soup left on the stovetop long enough for the air in the three-room apartment to become polluted, thickly, with the stench of putrefaction.

A darkroom in which I could not read the words of all the books I had gone there to study, and the tall, unsteady stool upon which I sat slouched over and silently waiting.

A plate of melon sliced into slender crescents. A cocktail glass on a bedside table. A train yard, shelters made of boxcars. A square white table, a typewriter, a full-length mirror.

Ribbons of sensory data floating along the tributaries of my fluid body.

Stomachaches: berries, wine, Cuban rum, large bottles of Quilmes, undercooked favas, heaps of fresh pasta, hot sugared mate, boats of curry and rice, chocolate-covered espresso beans, quarts of mint chocolate chip ice cream, small cups of dense coffee.

The roaring burn of a urinary tract infection.

But the magnificence of jacaranda trees in bloom—no external record.

No photographs of Puerto Madero, Palermo, or San Telmo. None of the plazas, the cemeteries, the monuments to those who were taken and never given back, never found, never laid to rest.

My statement of purpose: an intensive multidisciplinary exploration of literature, memory, and place, undertaken through focused textual analysis and experiential research.

The country’s great literary tradition, and the dictatorship, and the war.

Trauma, state violence, and the collective unconscious.

The country’s devotion to psychoanalysis, and the relationship between psychological and political repression.

The simultaneity of language’s revelations and evasions.

How all that is not said is still, somehow, inscribed. How history is held in silences and absences, in sites of secret remembrance and of official erasure.

I drifted. I squandered. I failed. I misspent my time in that grand and haunted place. I was not alone there—this was a mistake that has expanded into a regret. There with me was someone who could herein be named, and is not; who could appear in these psychic images, and does not. A blur at the edge of the frame, a phantom and a thief.

Reading Recommendation: Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick

Why is it that when I was young, when the potential for and frequency of embarrassing mistakes were much greater, I valued privacy so little? Why did I feel compelled then to broadcast crudely formed opinions, to share such delicate intimacies? Now I value restraint and discretion. A sign of maturity? An acceptance of my own insignificance? A symptom of cumulative shame? A weakening of moral certitude?

February 4

Today I realized that the things that I think I should be able to write about but can’t are actually the things that I most want to discuss with friends, but what is there to say?

February 5

Every year around this time my neck and shoulders begin to ache. I am tired of winter vegetables. I am tired of the low-hanging sky. I am tired of all the dog shit—mustard brown, charcoal black, tawny green—left to rot on the sidewalk. As the snow melts, the shit merges with leaves and pine needles and trash. The sight of other people’s dogs’ shit inspires enough rage to rouse me momentarily from my tiredness.

But what about all the shit that isn’t there, says the sonorous self-help voice in my head. Ohh. What about all the shit that you will never know existed because it was plucked up, bagged, contained, and disposed of properly? Just think about that. Just focus on all the shit that isn’t there, stop complaining, be happy.

February 8

Today I met P. for lunch. It was nice to be with him, to trade gossip, but I worry he’s beginning to be affected by his own success. There were moments in our conversation where it seemed like he was looking past me to address an unseen audience of followers. Like he was dictating a post. But I’m happy for him. I paid for our tacos. I didn’t want him to feel weird, now that he makes much more money than I do.

February 11

From time to time I dream of people I’ve only seen on the internet. Last night I dreamt of a woman about whom I know little: she has published two bestselling cookbooks, she has a twin sister, she is married to a successful artist, she has two sons and two daughters, she rides horses, she makes her own cheese, and she lives in the Berkshires.

And then, on my subway ride to work this morning, I found myself sitting across from the woman’s sister, who, I assume, was commuting to her job as the director of a small yet prominent museum. The sister wore a gray tweed suit over a shirt and tie in matching shades of amber. Her black down jacket folded neatly in her lap. A sturdy leather purse beside her. Three silver hoops in one ear and five in the other. A wedding ring, a thin silver bracelet set with a single pearl. An infinity symbol tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. She was reading a paperback copy of a Natalia Ginzburg novel.

In my dream, the woman and I were seated at a long table in a beautiful old library. I had brought a loaf of homemade bread for us to share. She didn’t want to eat my bread. She told me, quite peaceably, that it smelled rancid. I was humiliated. I ate the entire loaf by myself.

February 13

Today I had my hair cut. I cherish my hairdresser. Alas, he is a man. I tried explaining how my hairline has changed since giving birth again. I told him that the way the hair grew in after postpartum hair loss means I can’t set my part as I used to, the way it falls is different—but I could see we weren’t understanding each other. It was almost like he didn’t believe me.

February 14

A curious passage from It Happens in the Month of February by Ellen Jackson, illustrated by Robin and Pat DeWitt: “Because the weather in February can be unpleasant, people who are unhappy are sometimes said to have a ‘February face.’ Symbols of Valentine’s Day—lacy hearts, ribbons, and candy—are displayed in shop windows. Cupid, a winged child who is full of mischief, is also a Valentine’s Day symbol. He is said to shoot arrows at his victims, causing them to fall in love.”

February 15

Michael Silverblatt died. He is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as having said, “The books I love the most made it harder for me to live.”

February 16

Crushing headache. Another argument with F. We seem to be diverging more and more; all of our conflicts that begin with professional disagreements end up bitterly personal. She considers her opinions to be irrefutable, still somehow she accuses me of obstinance. I fantasize about quitting. It’s like fantasizing about suicide, about using one’s own life or death as a punishment directed at others, which of course never works as intended.

February 17

Today marks two years since I began running. I run three or four miles every other day. I have not discovered some long-hidden athletic acumen. I have discovered, though, that I can run in sunshine, in rain, in snow, in heat, in freezing cold. I can run when I feel anxious or overwhelmed or bored. I can run on poor sleep. I can run alongside others and I can run alone. I can do something that requires effort and dedication without full cathexis. I can keep going.

February 20

Agonizing cramps and a dark mood. No appetite. Dry crackers, raw almonds, herbal tea, water. Thankfully I’m able to work from home, and L. and H. are with the sitter. Starlings cackling in the linden.

February 21

Today marks five years since I stopped drinking alcohol.

February 24

I am contemplating what Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu told a reporter after placing third in the women’s single short program: “I’m really confident in myself. I mean, even if I mess up and fall, that’s totally okay, too. I don’t know—I’m fine with any outcome, as long as I’m out there, and I am, so nothing—there’s nothin’ to lose.” Two days later, Alysa won the gold. “That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about,” she shouted as she exited the rink.

I am contemplating what director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview with New York Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz: “Grace and hope in ignorance have no value. But grace and hope with the knowledge of the world and how it is, is radical.”

I am contemplating what Emma Bovary, facing financial ruin and the collapse of an affair, thinks to herself: “Let whatever happens, happen!”

I am contemplating a line in Agnes Martin’s “The Untroubled Mind”: We seem to be winning and losing, but in reality there is no losing.

February 26

Today I went to the grocer and bumped into a former colleague. She introduced me to her wife. We marveled at how long it had been since we had seen one another—six years? Seven? When I started at that job, my colleague had been the age that I am now. Her hair has gone completely white. I asked after other coworkers and she asked me a few questions about my life—two kids, okay, wow! she exclaimed, as though that were a bit excessive. After several minutes I could see they were eager to get to their shopping. It was impossible not to pass by one another as we shuffled around the store; whenever we did we averted our eyes and kept moving.

February 27

Early this morning I listened to a male cardinal sing from his perch on a bare branch of a European beech.

Lately I’ve been feeling unproductive. Then I reassure myself: productivity is a capitalist construct—you’re enough! But what if the desire to be productive predates capitalism? What if the need to contribute is essential to human nature? What if it has been manipulated and exploited for the purposes of capitalism yet, crucially, does not belong to it?

February 28

Today the sky is high and vivid, and the snow, abundant days ago, is disappearing. Should it not snow again this winter, this will be the last snow some of us will ever see. The sun is gaining strength, the earth is plumping up, the birds are returning, the rivers are running. Nothing created, nothing destroyed. Even from within the tense brace and clamor of the city I can sense the inevitability of all that is larger than me, which is everything.

Reading Recommendation: Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio

On one acid trip in college she had reclined on her bed in her dorm room, daydreaming and eavesdropping on voices in the hallway, and she could see as clear as anything the sound as it traveled not through nothing but along typically imperceptible pathways made of colorful geometric patterns. Space was quilted. The words were matter. There is no emptiness, she’d learned.

She attempts to apply the same subtlety of perception to what is happening in the tissues and cells and smooth muscle of her stomach, and she is distracted by noise coming from the bedroom, where her husband has his own bowl—the largest metal mixing bowl in the apartment—into which he is now vomiting audaciously.

I wish someone were here to take care of us, he had said to her, so so sadly, only three hours into the retching. We have to watch our water intake, she’d replied, we have to starve the virus—because of course the virus has its own mind, its own desires.

How could they ever have a child? They could not help themselves, let alone one another, let alone a small and vulnerable person. An innocent. They had done something to deserve this, probably, but a child should be spared such abjection. A child should be spared even the indignity of seeing her parents, her protectors, this enfeebled.

Yesterday they had been living blithely, working and grocery shopping and making plans. She had visited a photo shop to have her picture taken for a passport renewal application; they’d recently booked tickets for a trip to Croatia six months hence. Will they still be ill in six months? It seems possible.

Three days ago she’d gone with a friend to see a matinee. Afterward they sat in a quiet café, drank two espressos each, and shared a $15 piece of four-layer chocolate sheet cake. They discussed the film, a hagiography of an 18th-century Christian mystic. What I’m stuck on, her friend said, is how much strength it took to survive. Almost everything was a matter of life or death. You get sick or injured, you give birth, there’s a drought or famine, there’s a war, you’re forced to work in dangerous or unsanitary conditions, you have to travel a long way from home—that’s it. And now, her friend said, we can’t handle even a reasonable level of discomfort. We expect everything to be convenient and pleasurable. We’ve gone soft, she sighed, and that’s why there will be no revolution.

It has been nearly twelve hours of this. Her tongue is thick with dryness but she can’t stop spitting, and she has to sit on the toilet with a bowl in her lap because the extreme upwardness of each heave slams down on her bladder and now the tile floor is slick with urine. The violence of it contorts her abdomen in unnatural directions. She is afraid of rupture, of breakage.

Eventually she joins him in their room, each left to the privacy of their own bowls on their respective sides. The dampened sheets form a trench at the foot of the bed. Pale sunlight presses through drawn curtains. Rising and falling into and out of troubled sleep. Every time they wake, between evacuations, they share meager utterances: We’re saving money on food, she says. He says, Maybe this is how we quit coffee. Hell, maybe this is how we quit drinking.

The two of them together possessed by an organism unknown and hostile, there is no greater intimacy than this. Yet there are limits as to how much they are capable of assuaging each other’s misery. Somehow she is still lonely and cursed by the virus’s effect on her cognition. Thoughts rampage around her brain with such force that it’s like her skull hopes to vomit, too, and it cannot, and the thoughts are trapped, there is nowhere for them to go.

She drops back onto her pillow after releasing somehow more—there is no emptiness!—and immediately begins thinking about Rome’s Spanish Steps and how their 2015 renovation was sponsored by Bulgari, and about a blog post regarding the long-term conservative strategy for an authoritarian takeover, and about something a yoga teacher had said to her one year ago that offended her so irreparably she had sworn never to return to her class ever again, and about an illustration of weeping animals in a book from her childhood, and about the jar of salsa in the back right-hand corner of the bottom shelf in the refrigerator that may or may not be set to expire in the next two weeks, and about an unpaid utility bill, and about how she didn’t have enough sex in college, and about how regrettable it was not to have tried harder at becoming real friends with that co-worker who was by any measure more clever and attractive and professionally viable than her, and about how badly she wished she had spent more time with her grandparents when she had the chance.

And then she thinks: this actually is real suffering, it is. When she recovers—if she recovers—she will report back to her friend, the one who had the cheek to call her soft: Look at what we go through! Look at how we endure! Now and three hundred years ago, we are and have always been pitiful and afraid! We have always been lost and at a loss for how to be good! And this is why there will be no revolution, she will tell her, not because we are soft but because we think ourselves into thinking we are bad, that there is something very wrong with us, very corrupt, very dirty, very wicked and worthless, and so we cannot and do not fight because we believe we, and others, deserve to be punished!

With incredible effort she gets up out of bed to unburden and rinse the bowls so that she and her husband may continue on with the merest self-respect. In the kitchen where the deep sink is full of dishes and silverware from the night before, the smell of food remnants almost intolerable, she performs the chore and feels as resolute as a homesteader.

Almost as soon as she shakes out the bowls and puts them upside down on the countertop to dry, she is puking into the sink, all over everything, and her husband is moaning, he is throwing up onto the carpet or mattress, he is pleading weakly for her to come, please, please come help me. Head in hands, elbows propped on the lip of the sink, trembling and wane, she cries a little, only a little.

Outside is the gloaming, darkness gathering in the horizonless streets, and the world is full of ordinary dread.

After several minutes, once her husband has grown too tired to call for her, she summons the fortitude to wash one fork, one knife, one spoon, one small plate, one large plate, one wine glass. She moves her hands kindly, even lovingly, and when she is through with each object she places it snugly in the drying rack. Each object safe, each object clean and blameless.

Recommended Reading: Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes

This count includes two books that I read more than halfway and then abandoned (Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein and Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza), four that I have been reading at a pleasurably glacial pace (The Broken King by Michael Thomas, Ruth by Kate Riley, The Heart of Practice by Orit Sen-Gupta, The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett), and two that I recently began and expect to finish by year’s end (Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara and A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews).

It does not include books I gave up on in less than 50 pages (Rumors of My Demise by Evan Dando, yeesh) or the hundreds of children’s books I read with my son (some favorites: Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl, Following the Moon by James Norbury, Farmhouse by Sophia Blackall, The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown and the Provensens, Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown and Garth Williams, The House in the Country by Claire Nivola, and 13 Stories About Ayana by Amy Schwartz).

Every now and then someone asks me how I manage to read with regularity. I am not employed, which may seem like explanation enough, but I am a full-time primary caregiver, which means my labor is unquantifiable and all of my time is circumscribed. This has turbocharged my drive to read, as I’ve become more alert to and more appreciative of the teeniest tiniest opportunities.

I read whenever possible. I read a little in the morning, a little in the afternoon, and some more in the evening. I read standing up at the kitchen counter, I read lying down on the floor. I read sitting on the toilet. I read on the subway. I read in the park. I read while I eat. I read in the bath, I read in bed. I read a page here, a page there. I read while my son draws or builds. I read while he digs in the dirt or collects sticks. I have to remain easygoing in my expectations, and that’s fine. I like my reading to be as quotidian and integrated as cooking, cleaning, bathing, getting dressed, running errands, exercising, etc., and so I treat it that way.

That I deactivated my social media accounts over the last several years (Substack is the sole platform I engage with) seems pertinent. I keep my app usage to a bare minimum. I do listen to a variety of podcasts, mostly literary in nature (Reading Writers, LARB Radio Hour, City Arts & Lectures, Thresholds, the LRB Podcast, Poured Over, Big Books & Bold Ideas, the Fitzcarraldo Editions Archive, Granta, The Book Review, Otherppl, and Backlisted). I limit my overall device use as diligently as I can. This all seems to bolster my reading life.

No doubt my attention span suffers from all kinds of interference, but I believe attention—inclusive of one’s capacity for close, careful, consistent reading—can be rehabilitated, strengthened, protected. Or at least I hope it can, because this is very, very important to me.

Of this year’s 94 books, those that I found most noteworthy were:

Nonfiction

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrere

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace

No Name in the Street by James Baldwin

Sad Tiger by Niego Sanno

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Home Game by Michael Lewis

Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance by Laura Delano

The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith

Fiction

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

The Wilderness by Aysegül Savas

The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Scaffolding by Laura Elkin

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The Novelist by Jordan Castro

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

Sleep by Honor Jones

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey

Trip by Amie Barrodale

Norwood by Charles Portis

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth

Clear by Carys Davies

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus

Playboy by Constance Debré

Assembling a list of books to read in the future feels a bit absurd, but I enjoy comparing what I set out to read with what I end up reading. For 2026 I look forward to:

Nonfiction

East of Dreams by Nastassja Martin

A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland

When All the Men Wore Hats by Susan Cheever

38 Londres Street by Phillipe Sands

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood by Jackie Wang

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel by Frances Wilson

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anne Lembke

The Haves and the Have-Yachts by Evan Osnos

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner

Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Robertson

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao

Art Work by Sally Mann

Heat by Bill Buford

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz

You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips

Fascination by Kevin Killian

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future by Shoshana Zuboff

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger

The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy

The TV Sutras by Dodie Bellamy

Bee Reaved by Dodie Bellamy

Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss

Damaged People: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons by Joe McGinniss, Jr.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene

God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D.T. Max

Practicing Dying by Charlotte Northall

Notes to John by Joan Didion

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground by David Litt

Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest by Melissa Arnot Reid

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster

Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer

Love & Trouble by Claire Dederer

I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally

Love, Joe by Joe Brainard

I Remember by Joe Brainard

Hemlock by Gabrielle Wittkop

Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane

Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux

America, América: A New History of the World by Greg Grandin

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera

Hinterland by Phil A. Neel

Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson by Ted Geltner

First There Is a Mountain by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider

Fiction

The Time of the Novel by Lara Mimosa Montes

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

The Names by Don DeLillo

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Big Chief by Jon Hickey

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth

The Trees by Percival Everett

Erasure by Percival Everett

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

Dr. No by Percival Everett

You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town by Zoë Wicomb

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

On the Calculation of Volume II & III by Solvej Balle

Muscle Man by Jordan Castro

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Guest by Emma Cline

Playworld by Adam Ross

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek

Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Emma by Jane Austen

Flesh by David Szalay

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin

Another Country by James Baldwin

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Near Flesh by Katherine Dunn

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

Liberation Day by George Saunders

Vigil by George Saunders

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela

The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone

The Moral and Immortal life of the Girl from Milan by Domenico Starnone

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop

The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop

Leave Society by Tao Lin

Offenses by Constance Debré

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré

Name by Constance Debré

Lion by Sonya Walger

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Torpor by Chris Kraus

Independent People by Haldor Laxness

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith

The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

Overstaying by Amanda Koch

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

New Paltz, New Paltz by Mike Powell

Service by John Tottenham

Television by Lauren Rothery

Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo

Worsted by Garielle Lutz

I really do feel lucky every time I have a book in my hands. Reading is more than a pastime, it is a companion. My relationship to it is suffused with an attitude of no-matter-whatness. It is both a retreat from and a means by which to meet the world. It is a delight and a regimen. It encourages beginner’s mind. It brightens my solitude and affirms my connection to others, to culture, to history.

Michel Abehsera’s very special Zen Macrobiotic Cooking, published in 1968, is dedicated “to my fellow man—for whom I worry and dedicate my life.” Simple and true, and relatable. I worry so much. Our real-time nightmare continues to metastasize. Disgrace upon disgrace, injustice upon injustice. A layer cake of bullshit and terror. Sometimes I can’t believe people are still making things. But of course we are, thank God. There is such creative abundance on offer from the past and in the present, so much lucidity and rigor. So many artists and writers trusting in their audiences’ capacity for critical thinking and deep contemplation. So many people dedicating their lives to their fellows, giving us more to live for. This is love.

Toward the end of Abehsera’s introductory chapter—after providing a history of Zen macrobiotic cooking and its philosophical underpinnings, after pages of do’s and don’ts, after an overview of vitamins and minerals, after a list of recommendations—he coaxes the reader “not to fall victim to anxiety”: “Nothing is absolute save the laws of relativity and change. I cannot urge you enough to be flexible and unafraid; seek to know yourself and your needs.”

Thank you thank you thank you for reading. May you and yours enjoy contentment, good health, and peace in the new year. May we be flexible and unafraid. May all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be free. May truth prevail.

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In November 2022, a few weeks before he was born, I transcribed a 13th-century poem attributed to Chan master Wumen Huikai in the Notes app on my phone: “Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, the snow in winter. When your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”

Crowding this note are many others, mostly lists: errands, tasks, people to call, supplements and herbs to buy, appointments to make, healing postpartum soups to prepare and freeze, thank you cards and gifts to send, questions to ask (WILL INSURANCE REIMBURSE PRENATAL ACUPUNCTURE?).

Throughout the pregnancy I had been haunted by the feeling that I was getting ready to die as much as I was getting ready to give birth and become a mother. There was so much to do, to square away. Everything was fine, I was exuberant, and yet I conducted business with a measure of solemnity. I wanted to talk about it; nobody seemed to want to hear it. When I was a child I was often told I was being melodramatic. Was this one of those times? I wondered.

To be fair, many things had ended or were coming to an end. Our housing situation changed under turbulent circumstances, I was leaving my work without any definite plan for when to return, my partner had lost his job, the social distortion of the pandemic had shape-shifted without subsiding, one of our cats had died unexpectedly, and the other cat was suffering, though we didn’t yet know how much.

We adopted the cats together when they were nearly one year old. We couldn’t separate them, they clung to one another. Their names, according to the agency, were Leo and Millicent, and we renamed them Benson and Stabler.

Stabler arrived congenitally stressed. His anxiety was severe enough that he would gouge the floorboards with his brittle claws and then urinate to mark the spot. He scowled. He refused to be held or cuddled. He would lumber up the top of the refrigerator only to frantically slide down its face. His meows were satanic. For ten years our two-bedroom in Bed-Stuy was his purgatory. We doted on him in ways he seemed to just barely tolerate. He was not easy to love, we loved him still.

Two weeks after we learned I was pregnant, Stabler underwent two minor surgeries and promptly lost any remaining will to live. In his last days, in the midst of the anguish that is deciding whether an animal needs you to pay someone to kill and cremate him, I took a photo of a few lines from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

Eight months later, Stabler’s sister Benson became ill, very ill, shortly after we moved to a new apartment. Was it the carpets? The fresh paint? Shock? Depression? Delayed grief? She took to sleeping all day, curled up beside the radiators. Kidneys, the emergency vet told us. I visited her every day that she was in treatment. Her bloodwork looked good when they released her, but there were the daily subcutaneous fluid injections and a persistent lack of appetite. She had been five pounds to begin with, then hardly four.

The night we euthanized her she was so close to death that I was able to hold her in my arms in the backseat of an Uber on the way to the animal hospital. In better health this would have been impossible. We gazed at each other like we always had. Total mutual devotion.

We loved her brother but we worshipped her, that’s the plain truth. If one of us had the gall to mention the eventuality of something happening to her, the other would hold up a hand and say, “No. No. Never.” She galloped to greet us at the door. When we cradled her she purred so mightily her whole body shook. She lavished us with affection and we enforced not a single boundary. She sat in our laps while we worked or ate, she slept beside or upon my pillow. I fretted throughout the pregnancy over how she and I would manage safe co-sleeping with the baby.

In my phone’s photo library I can see her disappearing behind glassy, dilated pupils. I couldn’t see it then—I wanted a miracle. The last image of her—perched on a blanket on the back of the couch—was taken on December 3, and is juxtaposed with one of the first images of my son.

Roughly 24 hours after Benson died, I was admitted for an induction due to several high blood pressure readings and a trace amount of protein in my urine—kidneys, the midwife told us. After 38 hours of labor, a body came out of my body. He was breathing and his eyes were open, the color of a northern sea in winter. The bardo1 of giving birth and the bardo of being born had led us to the same place, and now we were holding one another, and it was supernatural.

We hoped at least some of Benson’s consciousness had wandered into the baby’s, of course we did. Two secular humanists suddenly, urgently wishing for transmigration to be incontrovertibly real.

Was it so sudden? No, not really. I had been sensing a bit of God hovering in my periphery for a while, and the more primal I became—in pregnancy, in childbirth—the more foolish I felt, realizing I had all along been gallivanting around in a mysterious and confounding world while thinking ultimately everything could and would be understood in clean and rational terms. Maybe not by me, but by someone.

Around the time I must have conceived in early 2022, I took two photos of materials I found while organizing my mentor and employer’s teaching archives.

One photo was of text on a page from a program for Merry Conway’s performance piece Into the Strenuous Briefness, a slightly altered quote from Sir Thomas Browne: “We carry with [in] us the wonders we seek without us.”

The other photo included much denser text, with one section highlighted: “That’s just how it is, as Hannah Arendt writes: ‘The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end.’”

The big kid’s drum arrived in a box illustrated on one side with a woman seated in sukhasana and on the other with a woman in a variation of rajakapotasana. It’s unclear to us what the connection is between this instrument and yogasanas. We’ll probably never know. When he plays the drum it sounds lovely, even—especially?—when he means for it to sound riotous. Special for me.

On November 1, members of the Brooklyn Zen Center sangha took turns striking the big bell until it had been struck 108 times. The altar was adorned with photographs and objects and names scrawled on pieces of scrap paper. All for the dead. It was cold and windy outside but the door to the fire escape was propped open so the ringing might be heard by whomever and whatever, alive or gone beyond, was within earshot. A real bodhisattva move. The bell’s resonance was full and strong, capable of carrying all things, the voice of the universe. It goes on and on and on.

Reading Recommendation: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Reading Recommendation: Trip by Amie Barrodale