April 15, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Book of Disquiet By Eddie Grace In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. Maybe it is true that books find you when you need them: The Book of Disquiet sat on my shelf for at least a year before I took it down, sometime in February. The hardcover is fat and dense, and the text is, like a drug, rather mood-altering, so I was still working my way through it as things began to change, and am still working through it now, in a world that has come to feel entirely different. The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, is properly speaking perhaps not a book at all, and I imagine Pessoa would not necessarily be pleased to have his name so prominently affixed to it. Under the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa” he did write an introduction, but he credited the texts themselves to two different authors, his semi-heteronyms “Vicente Guedes” (who “endured his empty life with masterly indifference”) and “Bernardo Soares,” an assistant bookkeeper. The book is made up of fragments of varying length, something like disconnected diary entries. They have been ordered in different ways since they were first collected in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death; in 2017, the Half-Pint Press in London did an edition “typeset by hand and printed by hand on a selection of various ephemera, and housed unbound in a hand-printed box.” Maybe Pessoa had a plan in mind for his fragments, maybe there was a structure that we just can’t divine—the version I have, Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation of Jerónimo Pizarro’s 2013 edition, is, I think, the first in English to present them as close to chronologically as scholars can figure out—but if any hypothetical order exists I’d rather not know: these are scattered times. Things one didn’t even know one held to or depended on are gone. Rhythm, habit, the rituals that mark and shape the day, something as mindless as the commute that shifts you from one gear to another, none of that registers anymore. There is a frozen-in-place quality to things, an eternal present-ness. Which is a way of saying that it’s been hard these days for me to find meaning; we are storytelling creatures, but I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t register a story, keep up with a narrative, make sense of any frame. In The Book of Disquiet, though, there seems thus far to be no plot to lose. There are characters and events, but I can find no thread to follow, no causes and effects. Every fragment feels self-contained, its connections to those on either side tenuous at best. As far as I can tell, there is really nothing to be gained from reading the book front to back: you could approach this as bibliomancy, opening at random to find something that speaks to you (no. 27: “To organize our life so that it is a mystery to others, so that those who know us best only unknow us from closer to”). Jull Costa notes that its “incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of these fragments.” For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone. Read More
April 15, 2020 Freeze Frame Tsai Ming-liang’s Shadow City By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him. Still from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. For most of the second half of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 masterpiece of unfulfilled desire, the characters struggle to breathe through makeshift face masks, fashioned from materials as desperate as plastic bags or metal jelly molds. Their daily lives are being slowly constricted, suffocated by something in the air, which we presume to be Kuala Lumpur’s famous near-annual smog, except no one really knows for sure—the news on the radio provides conflicting information—so the smoke that descends upon the city takes on a more sinister aura. The air itself has become dangerous to breathe. No one knows when this oppressive anxiety will end. As I write, Kuala Lumpur is in virus-induced lockdown. Looking out from my apartment I can see only the odd car on what is usually a busy highway, and the neighborhood is almost eerily calm. The city’s streets are emptier and more silent than in the film, but the sense of stasis and uncertainty is the same. Both in the film and now, the anxiety is caused by something that threatens our health, but it is also tied to a deeper malaise: a fear that our societies are fragile and ill adapted to the swirling changes of modern life. Read More
April 14, 2020 Redux Redux: This Caliper Embrace By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week at The Paris Review, we’re having a little birthday party for Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, all born on April 13. Read on for Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, an excerpt from Beckett’s novel Molloy, and Heaney’s poem “Polder.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates. Read More
April 14, 2020 First Person Nobody’s Fault By Emerson Whitney © Vladimir Liverts/Adobe Stock. Mom would give us bowl cuts with a breakfast bowl over our heads, I’d catch pieces of hair in my toes. There were sheets all over the furniture. I don’t know why there were sheets. When it was quiet, I’d pick at the skin around my nails. I’d stand behind doors listening for the consonants of my name. Mom would rip at Hank’s shirt so that buttons would roll off and toward me. You’re a piece of fucking shit, she’d say, and yank his shirt like she was ringing a bell. When Hank learned that Charmian died, he struck up a conversation with her family. It was decided that we’d move over there, pay a lot less in rent. We’re moving, Hank had said, taking Mom by the shoulders. She was wiping something yellow off of Gunner’s forehead. Where are we supposed to fucking go, Hank? she said, not looking, her back to him. Next door, Charmian’s, he said, gesturing all around. It’s so fucking cheap. Mom wiped her eye with the back of her hand. Read More
April 14, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Secret Garden By James Frankie Thomas In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times. I can’t be the only one who’s been having trouble focusing on books lately. Everything feels either depressingly dark or depressingly light; I don’t want to be reminded of the news, but how can I care about anything else? I’ve tossed aside several novels in the last week. Only The Secret Garden has held my attention. Only The Secret Garden takes place in a universe I recognize. When I was a teenager and my little cousin Anya was a toddler, I indoctrinated her into loving Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film adaptation. I dusted off my beloved videotape (it came with a free locket necklace) and played it for her. Then I played it again, and again and again and again, until the two of us could act it out from memory. Anya was always the heroine, Mary Lennox; I played all the other characters, Peter Sellers–style. One perk of having a cousin twelve years younger than you: it gives you an extra window of time—long after you’re supposedly too old—to play make-believe. My little cousin Anya is not little anymore; she was about to graduate from college before, you know, all this. Now she’s staying with family in Connecticut. She’s just a half hour drive from my New Haven apartment, but of course we can’t visit each other. We’ve been texting a lot. Yesterday I awoke to this text from her: Going to get through this by going back to doing Secret Garden re-enactments. Honestly, it’s a parallel situation—I have to leave home because of a contagious illness and live out in the country, finding hope and new life as spring blooms—only issue is I wouldn’t be able to hang out w Dickon because of social distancing [plant emoji] As a substitute for the hug I wish I could give her, I’ve decided to reread The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is available for free on Project Gutenberg, so you can read it, too. I should warn you that it may not take your mind off things. As Anya correctly recalled, the plot is set in motion by an epidemic. The 1993 film changes it to an earthquake, which is more cinematic but (I now think) less harrowing than the novel’s opening chapter, titled “There Is No One Left”: The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies…. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows. During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. …When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. Read More
April 13, 2020 Arts & Culture Return, Investment, Return By Leah Naomi Green 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. Read More