Illustration by Edward Lear

I must write about Waterman. I must try to do justice to Waterman. Inclination, affection, and duty combine: I must speak and write about Waterman.

23 September 2017, I was in Chicago. I was in a bookstore I seldom visit: Open Books. Open Books does not often “speak to my concerns,” but that day was an exception. I had found, for six dollars, a hardcover of Kierkegaard’s Letters and Documents, volume 25: Princeton edition, jacket intact. I did not yet know that the book is neither rare nor valuable. Nor did I know that, in a year and a half of owning the book, I would not open it once. No, I was exultant: I thought it was probably worth forty-five dollars, and that I would start reading it in the airport on the way back to Texas.

That day I found something else special. I found Paul Waterman. In particular, I found his 1965 book, Five Lines to Limerick. It has fifty-six numbered pages. It was warmly inscribed (“Best to Virginia Rick”) in ballpoint pen on 22 April 1966, in Worcester, New York. The book was published by Candor Press in Dexter, Missouri. Here is the cover:

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John Ruskin, Study of Dawn, 1868

It’s said the British never stop remarking on their weather. How will they cope in decades to come, when life is all weather, all the time? The country ran a brief test a few weeks ago: in mid- to late February the sun blazed, spring surprised itself, and the temperature in London, where I live, reached over 20°C (68°F). Boon or portent? Meteorological holiday or climate-change hell? Beautiful or sublime? Britons could not agree. It’s now mid-March, and I was awoken at five this morning by rattling windows and the rising shriek of a storm called Gareth (not the direst of names). Abruptly, spring is canceled, and London’s squares are littered with the corpses of premature blossoms.

As the wind died in the morning, I wandered around to Finsbury Circus, on the north side of which the London Institution once stood. It was here, on February 4 and February 11, 1884, that the essayist and art critic John Ruskin (who was born two hundred years ago last month) delivered “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”: a pair of apocalyptic lectures on modern weather. Ruskin was days away from his sixty-sixth birthday when he rose to address a skeptical audience on the subject of “a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weight existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times.” His powers as writer and orator were not yet depleted; such masterpieces as Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice were behind him, but the autobiographical Praeterita, his last great work, remained to be written. Still, Ruskin’s psychic weather was on the turn. In 1878 he suffered the first of several breakdowns, and was unwell enough, later that year, to miss the infamous libel case that James McNeill Whistler brought against him after Ruskin accused the artist in print of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Read More

Photo by Dialog Center Images via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Many years ago at a dinner party, I met a couple who had brought along their two-year-old son. The mother was Jewish, and the father was a practicing Buddhist from Tibet. Making small talk in the kitchen, the mother began to tell me about how she had been unable to get pregnant, so her husband had gone to their lama to ask him to bless them with a child. Some months later the couple successfully conceived, but before they broke the news to friends and family, they received a call from the lama, who told them that their unborn son was a bodhisattva—a being who has achieved enlightenment but chooses to reincarnate for the good of the world. As she told me this story, I felt dizzy and entranced. All I could see was her suddenly illuminated face; all I could hear was her voice.

Now, I am not a Buddhist, but I experienced what she said about her child as true. He was beautiful and played quietly on the floor at our feet. For me, this was an encounter with the numinous, a realization of holiness and magic that didn’t require what religious people call faith. Moreover, when my trance broke and the other voices and sounds of the party returned to my awareness, I didn’t immediately begin to rationalize what I had been told or how I had felt about it. That spirits of the dead might move through the heavenly spheres and reemerge in new earthly forms seemed as real to me as the food that was being prepared for us. The language the family used to convey the story stirred all our imaginations. Read More

Félix Vallotton, The Sick Girl, 1892.

In my early twenties, along with an obsessive but largely un-acted-upon desire to become a writer, I was afflicted by an enduring physical malaise. It is hard now for me to separate these two dominant features of my life at that time, perhaps with good reason. I was always exhausted. I had a constant sore throat. I had headaches that went on for days. My mind was often foggy, dulled. I was checked for everything and I saw everyone—doctors, specialists, homeopaths, nutritionists, hypnotists, Reiki healers. When my acupuncturist felt she was making no progress she referred me to her mentor and he interviewed me about my symptoms in front of a lecture theater of trainees, who discussed the enigma of my case and took turns drawing my tongue. Eventually I was diagnosed with ME/chronic fatigue syndrome by a consultant, but this brought no hope of treatment except for a handful of sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. I was struggling at work and when my temporary contract came to an end I left London and went to South America for six months, during which I felt no better. On my return home, anxious about the future and unsure how I would cope with the demands of a more orthodox job or career, I began a graduate course in creative writing. I hoped—but didn’t really believe—that writing would save me.

The sickly writer is a staple, a cliché, of literary history, enduring and strangely compelling. Thomas De Quincey and the neuralgia, digestive issues, and visual problems he numbed with opium. Charlotte Brontë with her headaches, bodily pains, and hypochondria. Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet and syphilis. James Joyce and his failing eyes. Flannery O’Connor and lupus. And perhaps most notoriously, the consumptive writer—John Keats, Robert Walser, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and many, many others. In some cases, illness, particularly mental illness, has become a key part of the writer’s literary iconography, near impossible to disentangle from the work: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, David Foster Wallace. In many of these cases their sickness seems to have added to their authenticity as writers, that they were too cerebral or too sensitive for the demands of the world, that their suffering brought to their work depth and insight that were unavailable to others, the humdrum well. Read More