“You are not the first of my patients to mention that,” my omnipotent therapist said when I sat on her couch and voiced some deep-seated feelings about the film adaptation of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Funny how the best and worst thing your psychologist can say to you is the same. Here was the coach of my tenderest soul saying that I was not unique in the world—how dare she! On the other hand, maybe it would be nice not to be alone. Reading Normal People by Sally Rooney and then watching the very convincing Hulu adaptation, to be released today, I wondered if that was the spell of this story as well. Rooney addresses the contradiction again and again: the fundamental tension between being independent and needing to be understood, between wanting to be uncategorizable and wanting to belong.

Before I watched the series, with only the novel throwing light motes on my subconscious, I wondered if there were oceans of young reading women who saw themselves in the prickly character of Marianne. Certainly, the book found many fans—enough to push it into seven editions, reach almost 500,000 copies in the UK and 76,000 in Ireland, and sell translation rights into forty-one languages before adaptation. Or if Rooney was a convincing enough author to pull that most astounding trick, of making the lives of any individuals feel relatable on a grand scale.

Normal People is a pas de deux: a boy and a girl take turns misunderstanding each other as the novel follows them from their senior year in high school to their senior year of college. Their deep physical compatibility is derailed by a series of small misconceptions. The story is a kind of minimalist millennial antidote to the theatrical impossibility of the epics of my youth: Cider House Rules, Cold Mountain, Snow Falling on Cedars, dining on the idea that a tiny misunderstanding can cause ripples of heartache.

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© robert / Adobe Stock.

It begins in this way:

It’s as if we are dead and somehow have been given the unheard-of opportunity to see the life we lived, the way we lived it: there we are with friends we had just run into by accident and the surprise on our faces (happy surprise, sour surprise) as we clasp each other (close or not so much) and say things we might mean totally or say things we only mean somewhat, but we never say bad things, we only say bad things when the person we are clasping is completely out of our sight; and everything is out of immediate sight and yet there is everything in immediate sight; the streets so crowded with people from all over the world and why don’t they return from wherever it is they come from and everybody comes from nowhere for nowhere is the name of every place, all places are nowhere, nowhere is where we all come from; the dresses hanging in a store window that are meant for people half my age are so appealing and the waist of this dress is smaller than my upper arm and I walk on; the homeopathic combination of vitamin C and bioflavonoids and zinc are on a shelf in the Brattleboro Co-op and I let them remain there, but in the Brattleboro Co-op are cuts of meat that used to be parts of animals and these animals were treated very well and given the best food to eat and that is why they are on the meat shelf of the Brattleboro Co-op; the blue sky, the blue sky and the white clouds are made less so even, modified really, when I place them next to the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds I know exist in the place where I was born and grew up, St. John’s, Antigua, nowhere, nowhere; the long lines in/at the airport and the people manning the various portals of entry and then exit to allow me to attend my oldest brother’s funeral, though he was nine years younger than I was at the time he was born but how much younger is he now that he is dead, he is dead and I am alive in the time of the dead, the time of the dead being the time in which to be alive is a form of being dead, we are dead right now for we cannot be all our ways that are ways of being alive that is familiar; I can hear Martha and the Vandellas singing back up to Marvin Gaye as he sings, close my eyes at night, though to close my eyes at night does not bring sleep or dreams of being loved, only how it came to be that I thought being dead would come about by nuclear bombs, not from something my eyes cannot even see; that very shaded part along the banks of a small stream, which feeds into a larger stream, which feeds, all ending the Atlantic Ocean, that very shaded area is beginning to be filled up with ramps; there were funerals, there were weddings, there were bar mitzvahs, there were meetings I never attended and was penalized, there were evaluations and I thought hard and did my best to be fair; there were sentences that could not be completed for long periods of time; bells, all kinds of bells, in churches, at dinners, in gardens, when someone was hung at Her Majesty’s Prison at eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning; girls with small bosoms, ladies with large bosoms, men who couldn’t stand up straight, the phone ringing, somebody telling me that my mother had died; the fear of using public toilets because people I didn’t know had used them before; one thing I would have loved: sailing across the southern Atlantic Ocean from Argentina to Cape Town, South Africa, and making a little detour to the Drake Passage; the wonder of this world, the wonder of this world and there are no words for it, every word spoils it; the prison for women on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and in it were women who had violated all sorts of rules: sexual, which were political, and political: Grace Paley and Angela Davis, a writer of one kind and a writer of another but thinkers observing the same thing and not being heard and not being heard is in the land of the dead where I am now; Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina; walking so closely to someone just to hear what they are saying and then telling someone else what was overheard, so I could make fun of it; the joy of ridiculing someone I don’t know and will never meet again; there was that time when I told my best friend that if I got married and had children that he should commit me to an institution for the insane because this meant that I would never be a great writer and I did get married and had children and never became a great writer, that thing, the great writer, now looks so ridiculous, like a clown or something unworthy of human attention, not garbage, not that at all, just something to be but, but, I was young and didn’t understand anything at all, though I knew everything all and danced in the streets while wearing pajamas that had been issued to me by a cancer hospital, where it was found I did not have cancer at all but after I left the hospital I continued to wear the pajamas for they had been so comfortable; and having children, how difficult to see that they were not me and that their comfortable childhood was not mine and my girl daughter, oh how she suffered from my confusion and that world is separated from me, lost forever because of that thing that came from nowhere, like the rest of us it comes from nowhere, China, the United States of America, Antigua, all of that is nowhere, we are all of us from nowhere, and nowhere is where we end up, it is our destiny; alive but dead, dead but alive; a great divide has fallen on our life, on my life certainly and on the way I see the world: in life itself there are lots of dead in it, the kingdoms of mammals, vegetable, mineral, and all the others, are all in the living sometimes but in the dead all times.

The writer, novelist, and professor Jamaica Kincaid’s works include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter, A Small Place, My Brother, and See Now Then. Her first book, the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature.

This essay originally appeared in Swedish in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1766

In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the confines of community: “So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own… [D]etached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.”

After a scandal erupted in 1762 about the unorthodox religion in one of his books, Rousseau spent the next eight years in exile from Paris, wandering around Switzerland, England, and the French provinces. Having previously occupied a place at the center of civilized society—secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, friend of the philosopher Diderot, protected by rich patrons, “acclaimed, made much of, and welcomed with open arms”—Rousseau became gripped by the paranoid belief that he was an object of universal derision. “The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest. With all the ingenuity of hate they have sought out the cruellest torture for my sensitive soul, and have violently broken all the threads that bound me to them.”

By the time he returned to Paris in 1770, Rousseau was one of the most famous men in Europe, known popularly by his first name and revered by many of his contemporaries. In spite of this celebrity, he chose to live quietly with his companion Thérèse in a modest flat near the Palais-Royal, occupying his time with music, botany, and country walks.

“Alone for the rest of my life”—in Rousseau’s eyes, female companionship did not obviate his own special class of solitude—“since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire… Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me.”

Claiming to be no longer concerned about his reputation—“the desire to be better known to men has died in my heart”—Rousseau decided that his next project would be a simple one: he would walk, he would think, he would write down the thoughts that came to him. His Reveries would be nothing less than a faithful record of his friendless perambulations and the daydreams which occupied them. “I will give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature meant me to be.”

In Rousseau’s scheme of things, solitude was the natural human state. By stepping outside of society, by distancing oneself from other voices, one was facilitating a return to oneself. But being with oneself is one thing; writing about the state of being with oneself, another. There are ten walks in the Reveries (“First Walk,” “Second Walk,” et cetera), and although some of them may well record the thoughts that occurred to Rousseau as he ambled around Paris, what they amount to are carefully crafted reflections on his life and earlier writing. The Reveries are not the spontaneous jottings of a dreamer, nor do they attempt to mount an illusion of such spontaneity. Rather, they are the work of a stationary body—a bent back, a cramped wrist, a strained eye, an aching temple—as it worked to broaden and deepen certain fleeting images, particular flashes of insight, into a sustained, intelligible vision.

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© Layn / Adobe Stock.

The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to pay attention. Dreamed last night of a senile woman who’d taken up piano-playing; dementia had etherealized her features. Like a seasoned, reputable coach, I stood behind her while she fumbled through Schubert. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to remember the history of song, and to remember the reasons that troubled people have looked toward song to relieve pain and to organize, with other sufferers, in resistance.

*

With curiosity and reverence, I pulled down, from the shelf, the legendary No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, the original paperback edition, 1973, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to revisit books to which we have ceased paying sufficient attention, books we have failed adequately to love.

*

On a transcontinental flight I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I wanted to live in the crevice where words broke down, and where matter arose to compensate for the loss. Some words I found in The Unnamable: “grapnels,” “apodosis,” “sparsim,” “congener,” “paraphimotically globose,” “circumvolutionisation,” “inspissates,” “naja,” “halm,” “thebaïd.” These words—obstructions in the throat—seemed specimens of rigorous, refined accounting, of a system so late-stage, so desolate, it could only satisfy description’s mandate by lodging in words virtually never used. And, while 39,000 miles in the air, I imagined an island where the only currency, for the stricken inhabitants, gumming their porridge, was the obsolete word, the rare word, the word stigmatized, in the dictionary, as “literary.” I was imagining an island—call it the planet Earth—after most of it was rendered uninhabitable, where there were no words or only the most elementary words or only the most obscure words, only those words so specific, so paraphimotically globose, that they could function in this new, eviscerated terrain. Imagine, then, an ecology of language, where only “cang” and “ataxy” can make the rivers flow, where only “serotines” and “naja” can serve as verbal cenotaphs for the missing bodies, whether made of words or of matter, that failed to arrive at this final, spectral island. If we don’t live on that island now, we may, one day, and we might not be “we” any longer; we might be sparse tuft or diatomaceous phlegm. Read More

Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. Read More

Cross section of plant stem under the microscope [adobe stock]

“I was wakened from my dream of the ruined world by the sound of rain falling slowly onto the dry earth of my place in time.” —Wendell Berry

Spring has no reverence for pandemic. The world is all at once shutting down and opening up, the velocity of change in opposite directions creating a vacuum for each of us.

Last night my nephew was born, and I can’t help but think that he opened into the middle of history.

Nine days before, my cousin Daniel’s body shut down. He had struggled for much of the last decade with addiction and depression. I had been an emotional support for him, perhaps since childhood; we were close our whole lives. He was thirty-three.

My partner and I, and our two young daughters, grow most of our food for the year in the garden, and raise chickens and trout. We heat with wood from the forest in which we live, half an hour from the nearest small town, and have no internet at home. Before this week, we might have taken the phrase “shelter in place” as spiritual instruction. Last week, just before gatherings were prohibited, we traveled to a metropolis for the funeral where, to prevent further disaster, we tried our hardest not to hug Daniel’s parents and sister.

My life decisions, like those of many, are attempts at joy. Some of the choices my partner and I have been able to make are motivated by the desire to disentangle ourselves from systems whose interconnections rely on hidden suffering. But my hope, and I think the greater truth, is that our decisions are also motivated toward interconnection, toward joy.

Each of us who pooled our tears at the funeral last week is now in an isolated cell. Each of us in the United States now is in a cell, and countless of us the world over. Prisoners live in cells, but so do monastics. So does all of biological life, isolated and interconnected into the formation of organisms: apple, deer, human being. Cells are discrete but they are not separate; there is the larger body.

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