The Art of the Wasted Day

 

Any Good Books, July 2023

The Art of the Wasted Day

Patricia Hampl (Penguin, 2019)

The never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better. That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that: what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree, that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious enough to be worth going to hell for.

Of course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list, which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details. “Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list.

So Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for. “...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’ apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.”

What did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks, correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.” Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world. Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the possibilities.

As she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’ though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.”

If the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.” Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually, there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship, remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely thing to witness.

Left on Tenth

Left on Tenth – A Second Chance at Life: a Memoir

Delia Ephron (Back Bay Books, 2022)

In 2015, Delia Ephron’s husband died of cancer. She was seventy-one, and they’d been married for more than thirty years, supporting each other in diverse and successful writing careers. He died at home, thanks to hospice, but it was exhausting and disorienting. With the help of sisters and friends, she planned a memorial, and reoriented her life toward taking care of herself. Her sister Nora had died of leukemia in 2012; Delia had been seeing Nora’s hematologist regularly, and she had seven years of ‘all clear’s.

“People always asked ‘How are you?’ Emphasis on the are so I knew it was a serious question. But I never had a clue how to answer it...I couldn’t articulate my grief. And to try seemed to cheapen Jerry’s memory.”

A year and a couple of days after his death, Delia got a message from a man in California who wanted to reopen an old acquaintance; old, as in, they went on a few dates when she was in college. But in the present, they had a number of interests in common besides their recent widowhood. The e-mails that ensued are reproduced in the book – they read like the first drops of a monsoon. She liked him, he liked her, they talked on the phone like teenagers used to do. Peter flew to New York a couple of weeks later. “Looking back, we were already in love and possibly set up for catastrophe. The phone calls and e-mails were almost dreams, perfect versions of ourselves.”

But at the next blood test, things are not so good. “I should say that I am someone who keeps myself nearly completely medically ignorant. In spite of all the googling I do, I have never googled myelodysplastic syndrome or AML...Everything else is about to change on this day, but my attitude toward illness will not.” Like her late sister, she has leukemia. Dr. Roboz says, not for the first time, that she is not her sister, and her illness is not her sister’s. Possibly more to the point, treatments have advanced continuously, and there are new drugs and procedures to try. It’s good news that her new boyfriend is a doctor; a Jungian analyst, actually, but a trained scientist, who’s happy to handle what the doctors need to tell them.

Delia and Peter get married in the hospital where she goes for the first treatment with CPX-351, a drug so new it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a optimistic move for two seventy-two-year-olds, but it bespeaks a hope that could only help, over the coming months. This first time is not so bad; five weeks to kill the bone marrow white cells and hope that only healthy ones grow back. But no – her disease comes back, and the doctors want her to have a bone marrow transplant.

We know, because she survived to write this book, that it worked, but, wow, what a harrowing ride it would be. Delia doesn’t know this, because she doesn’t want to know it. “If I do research I will panic, I will become hysterical, I will misunderstand, I will obsess.” Instead, she marshals friends and friendships, right down to a neighbor she knows from dog-walking.

The marrow graft means another six weeks in the leukemia wing, so many pills, so little appetite, so much weakness. Worst of all, after the graft is in and starting to work, she’s visited with a crushing depression. She hates it all, and wants to die–but then she doesn’t, and lives to tell about it. Credit the doctors and the inventors of CPX-351; credit Peter’s love, wisdom, and constancy; credit all those devoted friends. “And luck. Is luck another word for miracle?” Maybe not, but does it matter? She’s grateful, and so am I.

 

 

Any Good Books, June 2023 by email 6/1/23

 

Why Fish Don't Exist

 

Any Good Books, April 2023

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

Lulu Miller (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Lulu Miller’s father is a cheerful nihilist. When she was about seven, she questioned him about the meaning of life. “He turned to me grinning and announced, ‘Nothing!’ It felt like he had been waiting eagerly, for my whole life, for me to finally ask.” No God, no destiny, no meaning. You don’t matter. “He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code, While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.” As a grown man, full of vim and bonhomie, he could afford to believe that Chaos is the bottom line, but this revelation had a depressing effect on his youngest daughter, causing her to wonder if her life was worth living at all.

Miller was attracted to the story of David Starr Jordan because he seemed like a man in whom Chaos might have met its match. He was a naturalist from his youngest days, on a farm in upstate New York, obsessively drawing and mapping the world around him. This was seen as an old-fashioned and even useless pursuit by his mother, who had a practical, Puritan turn of mind. But in 1873, when Jordan was twenty-two, he had a chance to spend the summer on a small, treeless island off the coast of Massachusetts, under the tutelage of Louis Agassiz. The great geologist proposed to get young scientists out of the classroom and into the natural world. On the shores of Penikese Island, on Buzzards Bay, Jordan found his life’s work: catching, preserving, and naming the world’s fish.

Agassiz promoted taxonomy as the study of how the living beings of the world could be ranked, to indicate the hierarchy dictated by God. He saw fit to use his own moral sentiments in the service of establishing the great ladder of being. “Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they ‘bestow greater care upon their offspring.’ Parasites, meanwhile, were clear lowlifes, the lot of them.”

The results of Jordan’s energetic collecting were first amassed at Indiana University, where he ascended to the presidency at the age of thirty-four. In 1890, Leland and Jane Stanford came to Bloomington to recruit Jordan to be the first president of their new university. In California, his collection continued to grow, until the earthquake of 1906 threw the whole thing to the floor, in a shower of broken glass. Miller was greatly inspired by the thought of Jordan picking up fish and sewing their tin labels onto them, so that when they were put back into new bottles, with fresh preservative, the crucial information would be preserved as well. Such a rebuke to Chaos! Such perseverance! Such grit!

Or, possibly, such hubris! In the aftermath of the earthquake, Jordan would write, “For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.” Is it? Really? Miller says that this “was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell himself. It was the kind of lie he had warned would lead to evil.” Which indeed it did, though Jordan would never see it that way. He was young enough to accept the principles of Darwin (as Agassiz never did), but also these of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton thought that if natural selection was good, selective breeding–of humans–would be better. “There’s a chance that eugenics could have remained in the realm of speculative fiction had a small group of influential scientists not championed its cause so zealously.” Jordan had the prestige and perseverence to make eugenics a much more powerful force in the United States that Galton would ever have managed without him. State after state passed laws permitting the sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit,’a category that inevitably reflected the prejudices of those making the determination. In Germany, the Nazis would read Jordan’s work, and defend their horrific acts as the natural outcome of scientific reasoning.

Miller points out that Jordan, like Galton and Agassiz, entirely missed Darwin’s point. In fact, it’s variation that gives all life its vigor. We use different tools for different jobs.“This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms.”

About those fish: drawing on the work of Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Miller explains that the category of ‘fish’ doesn’t work as an evolutionary category. A scientifically drawn tree of descent would show that sharks and eels and lungfish are more historically distinct from each other than they are from some land animals. If this idea threatens to unmoor us, it also frees us from the illusion of some cosmic moral order. Miller has “come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath.” A purpose to life, after all!

Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Dan Kois (Harper, 2023)

        Dan Kois’s lovely novel starts in 1991, with young Emily Thiel, newly in New York, getting her first job as assistant to a literary agent. Her first new friend is called Emily; in today’s terms, we might call them Lawful Emily and Chaotic Emily. Emily T. keeps jobs, even if they are terrible, and Other Emily is the employee of your nightmares, until she quits on a whim. “She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma. She knew that she was the boring one. But she also knew that Emily depended on her, and that Emily was extraordinary.” (Kois throws us a bone by letting Genius Emily rename Emily Thiel ‘Em’, for the two sections of the book set in the Nineties. In the sections set after the turn of the millennium, Emily takes her name back. To which Emily says, “That’ll confuse the readers, but sure.”)

        Em also gets to know her mother’s friend Lucy, a divorced mom with a novel to sell. It’s less ‘literary’, that is, gloomy, than most of the well-received novels of the time, but Em warms to it. It’s about two young women in New York, friends with opposite temperaments… wait a minute, are we swallowing our own tail? Well, waving at it, certainly. Kois is not shy of the theme with variations: he will give us two pairs of sisters, two pairs of friends crying together after pregnancy scares, and plenty of subtle-but-not-secret foreshadowing.

      Kois has said in interviews that this book is, in part, an homage to Laurie Colwin, a novelist and food writer of the later twentieth century, who died too young. I’m taking that to mean that Lucy has some of her attributes, especially the ability to write well and seriously, without dwelling in realms of despair and gloom. Lucy’s philosophy is optimism: “I love writing about characters who are living the best they can, who are in love, whose circumstances may be complicated but whose days are full of joy. I love writing about the food they cook, the wine they drink, and the hangovers they don’t regret.” Unfortunately, the occasion for the essay in which she says this is an announcement that she has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease – and her a Mets fan, with a Yankee disease! Colwin left us a couple of great memoirs with recipes, and Emily helps Lucy write one, as well.

       We leap ahead to 2005, and find Emily with a husband and a baby, and a much better job at a small publisher, though the babysitter costs nearly as much as she makes. They live in Manhattan, but just barely–they’re in Inwood, up at 207^th Street. She encounters Emily again, and they have lunch, but there’s a real question about on what terms they could become friends again. The next chapter, set in 1993, unpacks some of the difficulties that led their friendship to unravel.

        That chapter is also a deep dive into New York’s housing situation. Em lives in a dark, damp apartment on the Lower East Side, whose kitchen is “the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now.” Chaotic Emily lives a few blocks away in an actual squat: an illegally occupied building that is as squalid as it sounds, but is also communal and political in some ways we have forgotten about.

        We also get a day-to-day view of the publishing industry, and the terrible entry-level jobs it offers bright young English majors. We see Emily progressing through its ranks, beginning with the tedium of slush piles, the casual ogling and sexist comments, the lousy pay, the general sense that this hazing has been going on forever. Later in her career, when she has an assistant instead of being one, she is proud to have survived tough, demanding bosses; she also sees that some of the demanding conditions were genuinely out of line. The general lack of respect for assistants lies too deep in the culture to fix, but she can steer a few people away from outright sexual harassment, before leaving for another job, herself.

        Being a mother is a delight for Emily, as little Jane progresses from being a squashable baby to being a three-year-old who believes she can do cartwheels. She also makes time to work with Other Emily’s site-specific theatrical productions, which have somehow progressed from the pipe dreams of their youth to actual shows, with actors and sets and audiences. Emily’s editorial eye is actually just what is needed; her questions and suggestions make the work better, and it’s enough.

 

 

 

Any Good Books, March 1 2023

 

Lost and Found

Lost and Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

Kathryn Schulz (2022, Random House)

 

In the fall of 2016, Kathryn Schulz lost her father. He was seventy-four, so one of the things she lost was what might have been another couple of decades of delight in his company. The first section of Lost and Found is an extended consideration of what it means to lose things, from the smallest shirt button, through keys, and jobs, and friends, and so on up to glaciers and species. It’s a wonderfully personal look at a perennial and universal problem: “Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation against lying about finding someone else’s lost property.”

 

Her atheism, and her Jewish heritage, dispose Schulz against a belief in life after death. Her father is entirely gone, not sitting around in heaven. It pleases her, on the other hand, to imagine a place where all the lost things are collected. L. Frank Baum called it the Valley of Lost Things. “In my mind,” Schulz says, “it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning.”

 

The period after her father’s death felt to Schulz like a visit to that random, melancholy world. She lost her balance, she lost her way. It was hard to know what to do, because she’d never imagined what would happen after the worst happened. Not only could she not write, she could scarcely read. “I did not exactly feel lost, as my father was to me. I felt at a loss–a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.” Exhaustion, irritability, boredom, occasionally sadness itself–all these had their way with Schulz, unpredictably and uncontrollably. 

 

The second section of the book, about falling in love, largely overlaps the first section in time, beginning a year and a half before her bereavement. I think Schulz is wise to treat them separately, but the connections between losing and finding keep making themselves felt. How much of either, for example, is due to our own efforts, and how much to the larger forces of the way the world is? How much is simply the luck of timing? For a long time, she was a single woman in her thirties, with a quiet home north of New York City and an established writing career. One fine spring day, a friend of a friend stopped in her town to break up a long drive, and they had lunch together. A few more emails, another meal a week later, and C. became the woman Schulz was going to marry. 

 

As with loss, Schulz gives us love on all possible scales, from the smear of jam on early-morning pancakes to the outer reaches of the Solar System. There’s the feeling of deep, homely comfort, and a profound astonishment, as of a new planet discovered. They agree on the weighty matter of baby corn (they disapprove); they have vastly different views on religion. Schulz leaves it alone, while C. is an Episcopalian with a serious church habit, yet the matter rests easily between them. 

 

Their origins seemed worlds apart, too: Schulz came from a wealthy Midwestern suburb, C. from Maryland’s rural Eastern shore. Schulz started to worry about that gap on their first trip to see her parents, but, really, she says, “Most of us fit only partially into our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison.” 

 

I love the writing in this book, and the thinking. I love its specificity, and its sense of spaciousness. It ends with a wedding, which abides in a haunting photo of Schulz and her mother, and the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay where her father would have stood: “In a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting.”

 

Let the people say, Amen.

 

 

Any Good Books, February 2023