{"id":143622,"date":"2020-03-17T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T13:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143622"},"modified":"2020-03-17T10:02:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T14:02:00","slug":"quarantine-reads-the-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/17\/quarantine-reads-the-waves\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarantine Reads: \u2018The Waves\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they\u2019re finally making time for and consider what it\u2019s like to read them in these strange times.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An extended self-quarantine resembles, in many aspects, any religious-minded circumscribing of the daily round\u2014a meditation retreat, a monastic cloister, a ritual purification. There is the same restraining force, liminal and protean, keeping one within the enclosure\u2014not quite mandatory, not quite voluntary, but a volatile mixture of superego, conformity, altruism, and the anxiety of social sanction. There is the withdrawal from social life, the distillation of most personal interaction to the telegrammatic and unavoidable. There is the ascendance of repetition\u2014the same cycle of meals, the same rooms, the same window, the same orbit of light from that window. And within that tightened repetition, unintentionally noticing, finding yourself incapable of ignoring, certain physical tics and emotional reflexes, patterns that were previously subliminal. Brushing a chip in the wall paint as you round a corner, lifting yourself just barely but entirely off your chair as you pull into the kitchen table, discovering the tonic thrum of the refrigerator under the clicking of the kitchen clock, the uniquely personal sound and resonance of your spoon scraping, inadvertently but consistently, on the chipped bottom of your bowl. Both retreat and quarantined life become microcosm magnified to macrocosm, like the map drawn to the same scale as its territory in Borges\u2019s \u201cOn Exactitude in Science.\u201d The most minor elements of the daily routine flower to monstrous proportion\u2014I have known, in the midst of a retreat, the consumptive, totalizing desire for just one extra bread roll; the tattooed memorization of the flowering, spidery cracks on a poorly plastered ceiling; the gnawing curiosity about what lay beyond the finite universe to which I had confined myself. And above all, there is the imperative to focus obsessively and intentionally on reflexive actions that were, in the previous life, unnoticed, the white noise of bodily existence\u2014in the case of a meditation retreat, it is one\u2019s breath; in the case of the coronavirus, touching one\u2019s face moves from compulsive background to neurotic foreground. Every touch is monitored, assessed, brooded over.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And alongside this radical shift in scale, there emerges a deepening capacity for interiority, as if cloud cover had burned off a valley floor, revealing in sharpness each tiny aspect of the scene, diorama-like. It becomes easier and more natural to follow internal trains of thought; the inner monologue grows louder, more assertive; and the inner vision vivifies, leaning asymptotically toward eruption, tangibility. It is a paradoxical state, both heightened and diminished, murky and transparent, perfectly captured by V. S. Naipaul in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. <\/em>He frames it, fittingly, as a variety of illness, a childhood \u201cfever,\u201d writing:<\/p>\n

A great tiredness, not unpleasant, a tiredness with the little delirium that\u2014alas, too rarely\u2014had come to me as a child with a tropical \u201cfever,\u201d this fever associated with the chill of the rainy season, the season of extravagant, dramatic weather, of interruptions in routine, of days off from school because of rain and floods, and the coughs and fevers to which they gave rise. How often, as a child, having had my fever, I had longed to have it all over again, to experience all the distortions of perception it brought about: the extraordinary sense of smoothness (not only to one\u2019s touch, but also in one\u2019s mouth and stomach), and, with that, voices and noises becoming oddly remote and exciting. I had never had fever as often as I would have liked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cdistortion\u201d extends both outward, to the touch, and inward, to the sense of the body itself. A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness\u2014they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand.<\/p>\n

It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf\u2019s The Waves <\/em>is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine\u2014a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day\u2019s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind\u2019s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway\u2014it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption. The opening of the first monologue describes the strong spectral presence of the novel itself, lays down its own gauntlet: \u201c\u2018I see a ring,\u2019 said Bernard, \u2018hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.\u2019\u201d I have read the opening pages at least a dozen times, but have not yet been able to string together the unbroken attention required. There is no better opportunity than this moment to try again, for The Waves <\/em>is itself about this estranging and revealing state. The characters, in a ring, each take turns to talk to themselves, speaking to their interior landscapes with total clarity, and with all the hallmarks of extended isolation\u2014the simultaneous telescopic intensity and dazed distance, the noticing of sensation and reflex as if they were new, numinous. Goes the round of private proclamation: \u201c\u2018A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,\u2019 said Susan, \u2018notched with blunt feet.\u2019 \u2018The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,\u2019 said Rhoda. \u2018And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out of the grasses,\u2019 said Louis. \u2018Stones are cold to my feet,\u2019 said Neville. \u2018I feel each one, rounded or pointed, separately.\u2019 \u2018The back of my hand burns,\u2019 said Jinny, \u2018but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.\u2019\u201d The descriptions of the exterior world are, fittingly, given to a disembodied third party, with a suprahuman eye\u2014a bracing blast from the outside, to which we will eventually and inexorably return. For now, though, we are given the time to explore the close, feverish, interior world of The Waves. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Matt Levin is a writer living in Uganda.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this new series, writers present the big books they\u2019re finally making time for, and what it\u2019s like to read them in these strange times.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62714],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quarantine-reads"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQuarantine Reads: \u2018The Waves\u2019 by Matt Levin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 17, 2020 \u2013 In this new series, writers present the big books they\u2019re finally making time for, and what it\u2019s like to read them in these strange times.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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