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In these pages, written in 2021, I seem to have been looking back at earlier notes and journals. The story of Pierre—a French shepherd—is a project imagined decades ago that I still have not given up on. My “theories” are also still interesting to me: for instance, that maybe certain people are more inclined to violence when there is less sensuality of other kinds in their lives.
Lydia Davis’s story collection Our Strangers will be published in fall 2023 by Bookshop Editions. Selections from her 1996 journals appear in the Review‘s new Summer issue, no. 244.
Virginia Woolf, wearing a fur stole. Public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons.
On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years—a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand. It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she “walked out from Lewes.” There were “men mending the wall & roof” of the house, and Will, the gardener, had “dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.” Finally, “bees in attic chimney.”
It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. First, she notes the weather, and her walk—to the post, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the number of mushrooms she finds—“almost a record find,” or “enough for a dish”—and of the insects she has seen: “3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung.” She notices butterflies in particular: painted ladies, clouded yellows, fritillaries, blues. She is blasé in her records of nature’s more gruesome sights—“the spine & red legs of a bird, just devoured by a hawk,” or a “chicken in a parcel, found dead in the nettles, head wrung off.” There is human violence, too. From the tops of the Downs, she listens to the guns as they sound from France, and watches German prisoners at work in the fields, who use “a great brown jug for their tea.” Home again, and she reports any visitors, or whether she has done gardening or reading or sewing. Lastly, she makes a note about rationing, taking stock of the larder: “eggs 2/9 doz. From Mrs Attfield,” or “sausages here come in.”
Though Woolf, then thirty-five, shared the lease of Asheham with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (who went there for weekend parties), for her, the house had always been a place for convalescence. Following her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she entered a long tunnel of illness—a series of breakdowns during which she refused to eat, talked wildly, and attempted suicide. She spent long periods at a nursing home in Twickenham before being brought to Asheham with a nurse to recover. At the house, Leonard presided over a strict routine, in which Virginia was permitted to write letters—“only to the end of the page, Mrs Woolf,” as she reported to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies—and to take short walks “in a kind of nightgown.” She had been too ill to pay much attention to the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, or to take notice of the war. “Its very like living at the bottom of the sea being here,” she wrote to a friend in early 1914, as Bloomsbury scattered. “One sometimes hears rumours of what is going on overhead.”
In the writing about Woolf’s life, the wartime summers at Asheham tend to be disregarded. They are quickly overtaken by her time in London, the emergence of the Hogarth Press, and the radical new direction she took in her work, when her first novels—awkward set-pieces of Edwardian realism—would give way to the experimentalism of Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. And yet during these summers, Woolf was at a threshold in her life and work. Her small diary is the most detailed account we have of her days during the summers of 1917 and 1918, when she was walking, reading, recovering, looking. It is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling. Unpacking each entry, we can see the richness of her daily life, the quiet repetition of her activities and pleasures. There is no shortage of drama: a puncture to her bicycle, a biting dog, the question of whether there will be enough sugar for jam. She rarely uses the unruly “I,” although occasionally we glimpse her, planting a bulb or leaving her mackintosh in a hedge. Mostly she records things she can see or hear or touch. Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.
***
Between 1915 and her death in 1941, Woolf filled almost thirty notebooks with diary entries, beginning, at first, with a fairly self-conscious account of her daily life which developed, from Asheham onward, into an extraordinary, continuous record of form and feeling. Her diary was the place where she practiced writing—or would “do my scales,” as she described it in 1924—and in which her novels shaped themselves: the “escapade” of Orlando written at the height of her feelings for Vita Sackville-West (“I want to kick up my heels & be off”); the “playpoem” of The Waves, that “abstract mystical eyeless book,” which began life one summer’s evening in Sussex as “The Moths.” There are also the minutiae of her domestic life, including scenes from her marriage to Leonard (an argument in 1928, for instance, when she slapped his nose with sweet peas, and he bought her a blue jug) and from her relationship with her servant, Nellie Boxall, which was by turns antagonistic and dependent. Most of all, the diary is the place in which she thinks on her feet, playing and experimenting. Here she is in September 1928, attempting to describe rooks in flight, and asking,
“Whats the phrase for that?” & try to make more & more vivid the roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wing <deep breasting it> slicing—as if the air were full of ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise <pleased them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water.
But the “old devil” of her illness was never far behind. If, in her diary, Woolf could compose herself, she could also unravel. There are jagged moments. She could be cruel—about her friends, or the sight of suburban women shopping, or Leonard’s Jewish mother. And she felt her failures acutely. In the small hours, she fretted over her childlessness, her rivalries, the wave of her depression threatening to crest.
Her diaries’ elasticity, their ability to fulfill all these uses, is, as Adam Phillips notes in his foreword to Granta’s new edition of the second volume, evidence of “Woolf’s extraordinary invention within this genre.” The Asheham diary was one of her earliest experiments in the form. She was reading Thoreau’s Walden and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, marvelling at those writers’ capacity for a language “scraped clean,” their daily lives, and their descriptions of the natural world, intensified for the reader as if “through a very powerful magnifying glass.” Yet the life span of her own rural diary was short. In October 1917, upon her return to London, Woolf began a second diary, written in the style of those which preceded her breakdowns. Her Asheham diary she left stowed away in a drawer. (When, the following summer, she reached for the notebook, writing in both concurrently, it was the only time she kept two diaries at once.) In her other diary, the ligatures loosened, and she began developing the supple, longhand style she would use for the rest of her life. Her concision was gone, though her Asheham diary had left its mark. In London, she continued to open each day with her “vegetable notes”—an account of her walk along the Thames, or a note about the weather. And she described everything she saw with the curiosity and precision of a naturalist’s eye.
***
In the long and often fraught history of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, no one has known what to do with such a sporadic notebook, seemingly out of sync with the much fuller diaries that came before and after it. Following Leonard’s selection of entries for A Writer’s Diary, which was published in 1953, work on the publication of her diaries in their entirety began in 1966, when the art historian Anne Olivier Bell was assisting her husband, Quentin Bell, in the writing of his aunt’s biography. As parcels of Woolf’s papers arrived at the couple’s home in Sussex, Olivier—the name by which she was always known—realized the scale of the project, which involved organizing, noting, and indexing 2,317 pages of Woolf’s private writing. She leaped at the chance, “largely,” she later reflected, “because it gave me an excuse to read Virginia’s diary, which I longed to do.” So began nearly twenty years of scholarship, culminating in their publication, in five volumes, by the Hogarth Press, between 1977 and 1984.
It was a laborious process. Working first from carbon copies—which needed to be pieced back together after Leonard had gone through them, with scissors, to make his selections —and later from photocopies (the manuscript diaries were moved in 1971 from the Westminster Bank in Lewes to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library), Olivier set about constructing her “scaffolding”: she took six-by-four-inch index cards, one for each month of Woolf’s life, and recorded on them the dates in that month on which Woolf had written an entry, where she had been, and who she had seen. Olivier spent long hours in the basement of the London Library, consulting the Dictionary of National Biography for details of one of Virginia’s friends, or decaying editions of the Times for a notice about a particular concert at Wigmore Hall. And there were decisions to make. What to do with Woolf at her most unkind, or snobbish? Olivier devised some basic rules for inclusion: she pinned a piece of paper above her desk that read ACCURACY / RELEVANCE / CONCISION / INTEREST. She decided there was little point in upsetting those friends still living, and cut any particularly unflattering descriptions. And Woolf’s Asheham diary—“too different in character” from the other diaries, she noted, and “too laconic”—didn’t merit publishing in full. The second volume, from the summer of 1918, was omitted completely.
This summer, Granta has reissued Woolf’s diaries and billed them as “unexpurgated,” a promise that has caused no small stir among Woolf scholars, who had thought Olivier’s editions were complete. The new inclusions are, in fact, mostly minor: a handful of comments about Woolf’s friends, written toward the end of her life, including an unpleasant description of Igor Anrep’s mouth. Otherwise, Olivier’s volume divisions remain unchanged, her notes and indexes intact; it is as much a reproduction, and a celebration, of her scholarly masterpiece as of Woolf’s diaristic eye. The most significant addition is Asheham. For the first time, Woolf’s small diary—the last remaining autobiographical fragment to be published—appears in its entirety. And yet those readers turning to Granta’s edition for details of Woolf’s country life in 1918 must skip to the end of the first volume, and look for her diary beneath the heading “Appendix 3.”
***
Appendixes can be awkward, unwieldy things. They serve a scholarly function—to present information deemed unsuitable for the main body of a text, like an attachment, or an afterthought. And an appendix is an especially odd place for a diary, putting time out of sequence, disrupting the “current”—as Woolf liked to call it—of everyday life. The remaining paragraphs of the Asheham diary have been relegated behind the main text; they sit quietly, unobtrusively, documenting a life as minute and domestic as before. Returning to the house in 1918, Woolf records her days, the winter melting into spring—the last of the diary, and the war. Out on her walks, she sees “a few brown heath butterflies,” the air “swarming with little black beetles.” She spends afternoons on the terrace, the sun hot, “had to wear straw hat,” and in the evening, she and Leonard sit “eating our own broad beans—delicious.” There are more local intrigues: the coal from the cellar goes missing, a mysterious plague kills the farmer’s lambs. Day by day, she watches a caterpillar pupate. The news is better from France. Still, the German prisoners work in the fields. “When alone, I smile at the tall German.” But her entries are thinning. By September, there is “nothing to notice” on the Downs, or “nothing new.” Even the butterflies are less brilliant—a few tortoiseshells, some ragged blues. Finally, toward the back of the notebook, she lists the household linen to be washed.
Her attention had begun shifting elsewhere. In London, she was becoming intensely preoccupied with the Press, and with writing shorter things, impressions and color studies—the pieces that will make up her first book of stories, Monday or Tuesday, published in 1921. And yet, if one looks closely, one can see the diary in some of these stories; something like an underpainting.
Take, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Asheham in August 1917. The diary’s summary of Katherine’s visit is brief: her train into Lewes was late, so Woolf bought a bulb for the flowerbed; later, the two writers walked on the terrace together, an airship maneuvering overhead. Yet from letters, we know that the manuscript for Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” was almost certainly brought out. In it, we can see the imprint of Asheham, its reversal of scales, its teeming insect life. In the story, which was published in 1919, human life takes place off center, in the murmur of conversation wafting above the flower bed, while the “vast green spaces” of the bed and the snail laboring over his crumbs of earth loom largest of all. The story, though set in Richmond, captures the atmosphere of Asheham. Its form, like the other stories in Monday or Tuesday, owes much to the episodic structure of her diary, in which impressions are hazy, words come and go, and attention is both microscopic and abstract. And its authorial presence mirrors the one we find in the notebook—a writer who is both there and not there, looking and noticing.
Toward the end of 1918, as Woolf’s convalescence comes to an end, so does her Asheham diary. Back in London, she muses on the project she has kept going for two years: “Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles & the price of eggs,” she writes in her other, longer diary, “&, being alone, there is no other event to record.” It has served its purpose, paving a way back to writing after illness, of nursing her attention back to life. Though it was later forgotten, it always stood for one of her quietest and arguably most important periods, between her first attempts at writing and those fleeting experiments which determined the novels that came afterward. And it continued to be a storehouse for images to be drawn upon later—her nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, carrying home antlers, like those in the attic nursery in To The Lighthouse; a grass snake on the path, like the one Giles Oliver crushes with his tennis shoe in Between the Acts; a continuous stream of butterflies and moths.
Harriet Baker is a British writer. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Apollo, among others. Her first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, will be published by Allen Lane in March 2024.
All relationships are asymmetrical. But there are some asymmetries that fray the fabric of the relationship and maim both people involved — none more so than those of a deep friendship where one person feels the tug of romantic love and the other does not, cannot. The challenge, then, is how to preserve the sanctity of friendship from being crushed beneath the weight of unequal expectations.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772–July 25, 1834) addressed this haunting paradox of friendship and romance in his marginalia while anguishing over a decade-deep chaste infatuation with his friend William Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, all the while editing his literary journal, The Friend, which he dedicated to Sara.
In the margins of the 1669 classic Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne — himself a man of intense and anguished propensity for romantic friendship — the 38-year-old Coleridge writes:
Friendship satisfies the highest parts of our nature; but a [beloved], who is capable of friendship, satisfies all.
He contemplates why friendship alone will always feel less satisfying than a love that includes friendship but reigns supreme over all other relations:
We may love many persons, all very dearly; but we cannot love many persons, all equally dearly. There will be differences, there will be gradations — our nature imperiously asks a summit, a resting-place — it is with the affections in Love, as with the Reason in Religion — we cannot diffuse & equalize — we must have a SUPREME — a One the highest. All languages express this sentiment.
But such supremacy, Coleridge observes, is only real when buoyed by mutuality — by the sheer laws of logic, by the sheer laws of physics and their force-counterforce equivalence, there can be no such “summit” on one side only, or else it is merely an echo of selfishness or delusion. Pulsating beneath this fact is the necessity of accepting that, in some fundamental sense, all unrequited love is not real love but fantasia — and only by letting go of that fantastical longing can symmetry be restored to the lopsided relationship.
Coleridge writes:
In order that a person should continue to love another, better than all others, it seems necessary that this feeling should be reciprocal. For if it be not so, Sympathy is broken off in the very highest point. A. (we will say, by way of illustration) loves B. above all others, in the best & fullest sense of the word, love; but B. loves C. above all others. Either therefore A. does not sympathize with B. in this most important feeling; & then his Love must necessarily be incomplete, & accompanied with a craving after something that is not, & yet might be; or he does sympathize with B. in loving C. above all others — & then, of course, he loves C. better than B. Now it is selfishness, at least it seems so to me, to desire that your Friend should love you better than all others — but not to wish that a Wife should.
Coleridge considers the way a balanced love — be it friendship or romance — helps us integrate ourselves, uniting the mind and the heart into a single force-field of being:
The great business of real unostentatious Virtue is — not to eradicate any genuine instinct or appetite of human nature; but — to establish a concord and unity betwixt all parts of our nature, to give a Feeling & a Passion to our purer Intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings & passions.
Complement with Van Gogh on heartbreak and unrequited love as fuel for creativity and the philosopher-poet David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Coleridge on the interplay of terror and transcendence in nature and human nature.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There is an ineffable comfort that our non-human companions bless upon our lives — those beings whose daily task it is to “bite every sorrow until it fled” — and with their loss comes an ineffable species of grief.
Two centuries after the young Lord Byron tried to put it into words in his soulful elegy for his beloved dog, the poet and novelist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) captured it in stirring prose in the wake of her beloved cat’s death, reflecting on the emotional rollercoaster of loss — the syncopation of grief and relief that is any death.
In a diary entry from the autumn of 1974, found in her uncommonly rewarding journal collection The House by the Sea, Sarton writes:
In some ways the death of an animal is worse than the death of a person. I wonder why. Partly it is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal, and also there is total dependency. I kept thinking as I drove home, this is all inside me, this grief, and I can’t explain it, nor do I want to, to anyone. Now, six days later, I begin to feel the immense relief of no longer being woken at five by angry miaows, “Hurry up, where’s my breakfast?” from the top of the stairs, no longer having to throw away box after box of half-eaten food because she was so finicky, no longer trundling up three flights with clean kitty litter — but, above all, no longer carrying her, a leaden weight, in my heart. She was the ghost at the feast, here where everything else is so happy. But, oh, my pussy, I wish for your rare purrs and for your sweet soft head butting gently against my arm to be caressed!
Complement with John Updike’s stirring elegy for his dog and Leonard Michaels’s playful, poignant meditation on how our cats reveal us to ourselves, then revisit May Sarton how to cultivate your talent, the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, the cure for despair, and her timeless ode to the art of being alone.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Courtesy of Semiotext(e).
I met Sean DeLear when I was twenty-four, in this house across from the Eagle in Los Angeles—I remember Sean talking about the LA scene, me asking him if he had a Germs burn (I don’t remember the answer), but also being very struck by the fact that up until that point I had probably met only a couple dozen Black punks but never anyone of Sean De’s age and with their poise. Even in Stripped Bare House at 2 A.M. and being festive she just commanded this kind of magic and glamour—it was definitely something to reach for and to aspire to. We don’t always clock these things when we are younger, but the mere presence of her let me be hip to the fact that I could be beautiful, Black, and punk forever—and in fact, it would be the best possible path to take.
It had been mentioned to me by Alice Bag (of the Bags, duh) that Sean was amongst the “First 50”—that seminal group of LA kids who were the first freaks to go to punk shows in Los Angeles and the geniuses of LA punk. Being a total-poser nineties punk I can’t even wrap my head around the dopamine effect of being in the mix when it all felt new—when Sean first started taking the bus out of Simi Valley and going headfirst into the scene for shows in Hollywood. How very frightening and liberating it must have been at the time for her, but of course I think Sean De was way beyond the title “trendsetter”—the word for her is MOTHER, forever, for sure, and for always.
What is contained in the tiny pages of this book is a blaringly potent historical artifact of Black youth, seconds before the full realization into the scary world of adolescence and inevitable adulthood. Uncomfortable in parts? Yes, of course. I remember in eighth grade reading The Diary of Anne Frank—the uncensored version, which was withheld from the public until her father’s death because he stated he could not live with the most private parts of his adolescent daughter’s diary being consumed by the world. There is a certain sense of protection I feel for baby Sean De’s most private thoughts being so exposed; however, so very little is written about the lives and the bold sexuality of young queers, and specifically of young Black queers, that I also have to give regard to the fact that there is something ultimately explosive about this text. It also denotes the intense singularity of its author. A gay Black punk one generation AFTER DeLear, at the age of fourteen I was rather content staring at a wall and obsessing over my Lookout Records catalog—I can’t even comprehend a gay Black kid some thirty years before planning to blackmail older white boys’ dads for money for acting lessons. Okay, like first of all, YAAAAAAAS BITCH, and second, this level of forward thinking is what propelled Sean De to become the scene girl to end all scene girls. I do have to imagine what level of this diary is real and which parts sit in an autofictional space—did she REALLY fuck all these old white dudes? Or was it a horny and advanced imagination at play? The only real answer is WHO CARES. I think one of the most magical things about Sean De was that her imagination and her fantasy world were so absolute. The world she was spinning always BECAME true—this is the beauty of a shape-shifter, and she was a noted scene darling and muse for this reason.
Now amid all this magic, of course, was her fair share of trials and tribulations. Sean related to me that when her band Glue’s music video for “Paloma” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes, a higher-up in programming made a call to make sure that it was never shown again—and how sad.
Now, let’s consider that Sean De’s performance did not exist in a vacuum—I mean, if there was room for RuPaul, why not for Sean De? Certainly by the nineties there was room for a punk rock gender-defying Black child-gangster of the revolution—or then again, maybe not. Whereas RuPaul was relegated to the dance world, Sean De made rock and roll her drama—and rock and roll to this day REMAINS (disappointingly) the last stronghold of segregation in music. In a post-Afro-punk reality this should not be the case, but as desegregation proves itself to be a one-hundred-year period, Sean De’s struggle to claim solidification and recognition in the world of SoCal nineties music comes as no real surprise. But also, as we are in an intense period of rediscovering buried histories and legacies, Sean De’s is one of great note, triumph, and inspiration. As a matter of fucking fact, she is the Queen Mother of alternative music, and in whatever higher realm of existence she is currently existing in, I can only imagine the sound of great explosions and bells ringing as she is gluing on her ICONIC eyelashes and receiving her flowers.
At the time of Sean De’s death, I actually got a handful of her eyelashes, which I promptly put on my altar for the dead. I collected every zine she was in in the nineties and the Kid Congo record of which she was the subject, and I got to read and relish in the world of this great artist as a teen. I don’t know how I got so lucky as to share a planet for a brief time with this punk-rock fairy godmother, but you best believe that I pray to any god listening that I am grateful for such. Long live Sean DeLear.
—Brontez Purnell
Monday, January 1, 1979
Happy New Year Tony it is now midnight and one second. Well this is my first diary and I will write everything that happens to me in 1979. Will write tonight Bye … Well I am going to bed now so today there was a bitchen earthquake that was 4.6 on the Richter scale. Me and Terry went bowling today and me and Kim got in a fight on the phone. About Ken (fag-it) P. Kim still likes him even though he was going to ask her to go with him but he didn’t. I thought of a name for you, Ty short for Tyler who works at the bowling alley and who I have a crush on madly. I don’t know if he is gay or not but he is so so so so cute cute. Well I am going to go to bed now, so good night.
Love,
Tony
Thursday, February 8, 1979
Dear Ty,
Today I did the long jump and got almost fifteen feet, not bad. I had acting class today and I think the play will be okay. I hope I don’t forget my lines and my cues. Well if I forget, oh well—there is nothing I can do about it. Tomorrow I am going to go to Topanga Plaza and try to get a trick and if I do I will swipe all his money, or her money. And Chatsworth High is right across the street and I will go into the locker room and act like I am looking for someone and I will say I am from Great Falls, Montana. I am looking for David B. I hope I get some money or I might just rob a store for all you know. But I don’t think so. Good night.
Love,
Tony
Friday, February 9, 1979
Dear Ty,
Well I went to Topanga Plaza and was in the tearoom and stuck my cock out to this man and he was a cop and he arrested me for masturbating in a public restroom. Can you believe it? They took me to the police station handcuffed then they called my mom and she had to come get me. She asked me if I thought I was gay and I told her I don’t know. I went to the high school and could not find the locker room and there were a lot of hunks. Then at about 2:30 A.M. I got my mom’s keys to the Zee and went for a little bit of a spin. It was so bitchen at first. I almost hit a car and from then on I was very careful. I went about twenty-five miles. I went to Simi Bowl and there was no one and then over the hill to Rocket Bowl and they were not open. I came home and Mom went through my room and called Dad.
Love,
Tony
Saturday, February 10, 1979
Dear Ty,
In the morning dad was here and he gave me a lecture about why I went over the hill and for what. I don’t know how to tell them that I think I am gay. I don’t think I will tell them at all. I had so much fun driving last night. Dad said “You don’t know how to drive,” that is what he thinks. Oh well. I went to bowling today and I was the only one there and we won two games. I bowled a 115, a 149, and a 169, not bad. I did not go in the tearoom that much because of yesterday over the hill. But I did see this one man’s cock—not bad about six and a half inches long, not that thick at all. Well tomorrow is the big day, I hope I can spin the basketball on my finger and don’t drop it. I hope it will be fun. I wonder how long I will be grounded for ditching and taking the car. When I find out I will tell you. This will be the first time this year. Good night.
Love,
Tony
Sunday, February 11, 1979
Dear Ty,
Well today was the big day of the play and it was okay and I didn’t drop the basketball when I spun it on my finger. I remembered all my lines I was so glad. Mom did not take my mags away from me that she found Friday night so I put them back where they belong and nobody knows where they are. We have a three-day weekend but I had four days. I am going to build a fishpond I started digging today and it is half dug up. I want to get little turtles and goldfish and all kinds of plants around it. I hope it does not cost a lot of money. I might get my phone put in but I don’t know. I wonder when I get Grandma’s piano I want to get it so I can learn to play super good. Good night.
Love,
Tony
Monday, February 12, 1979
Dear Ty,
Well I finished my fishpond now, all I have to do is get some cement and fish and turtles and a lot of plants to go all around it. I just thought of something—I have to get a good filter to keep it clean so I don’t have to clean it every day. I want to get a good one. I still don’t know when I get to be a free man again. I will probably be grounded for a week or two. I hope it is not long for my sake. It will be a long time I know her too well to let me off that easy. I meant to ask about the piano but I forgot again. I don’t think it will be too soon don’t you worry. I still love Tyler S. he is a total babe so is Dale B. and Victor C. I want their COCKS.
Love,
Tony
Tuesday, February 13, 1979
Dear Ty,
It started to rain today so I can’t do my pond today. I don’t think it will ever be finished but I can hope and pray. Today I was at Santa Susana Liquors and this old lady was looking at the naked ladies in the mags I could not believe it. She was probably a lez so who cares anyway. Then I went to Simi Liquors and they have the new Playgirl and the centerfold is a total fox with a huge cock and nice balls. I still don’t know when I will be a free gay person again. Probably a month or so; I hope not. I have to find out where Victor and Dale live so I can see them masturbate alone or together. I hope they do it together. If they do it together I will join them and spread it all over school and that will be hell for those two forever … Good night.
Love,
Tony
Wednesday, February 14, 1979
Dear Ty,
In office practice I did not get a chance to find out where Dale and Victor live. Well I went to McDonald’s for lunch and brought it back to school for me and Kim. Everybody was pissed off at me for not getting them something to eat. Oh well. Tomorrow we have our first big test in Mr. Billings’s class. I hope I get a good grade, better than Michelle’s. I still don’t know when I get to be a free gay person again. Right now, I am laying on my big nine-inch cock with a full erection—wish Dale’s cock was up my ass right now but no POSSIBLE WAY. Or Victor’s in my mouth so bad. I still don’t know when I get the piano. Max and Glenda think I broke into their house last night but I didn’t and I know that for sure so they can FUCK OFF. Good night.
Love,
Tony
Thursday, February 15, 1979
Dear Ty,
Nothing at all happened today. I still don’t know when I get the piano. Well, that’s all for tonight. I still love Tyler S. and want to see Dale’s, Victor’s, and Ryan’s cocks so bad. I want to find out where Victor and Dale live. Well, good night.
Love,
Tony
Friday, February 16, 1979
Dear Ty,
It has been one week since I got picked up by the pigs in the bathroom, and one week since I drove the car at night, and one week since I have been grounded. I still don’t know how long I am grounded. I think I will quit my paper route. I am so sick of Mr. Drunk, I am ready to just quit at the end of the month. I got Victor’s and Dale’s address. I can’t find either streets so I have to get a map of Simi Valley. Well, good night.
Love,
Tony
Saturday, March 3, 1979
Dear Ty,
I went to bowling today and we won all four games. I bowled a 143, a 115, and a 143, not bad … I hope my average goes up. We are at Dad’s house right now; I went out tonight. It was a total dud, but one thing I liked was there were a lot of cars and people out on the streets not like in Simi. I was walking home and I met this guy but he was not gay, I asked him and he did not get mad because he was higher than the clouds on coke. But other than him it was a dud. They fixed the hole in the wall at the bowling alley by putting a piece of metal over the hole and welding it. Well, good night.
Love,
Tony
Monday, March 5, 1979
Dear Ty,
I finished collecting today and I think Mark J. is gay. He is always in his room. If he is in school he must study a lot but that is still a lot of studying. I have to ask him one day if he is gay if I get the nerve which I doubt I will. Well we went to court today and I have to go to counseling again. See, they did not do nothing like I said. I forgot to ask Mom how much longer I am grounded, I have to ask tomorrow. I hope Mark J. is gay, he is such a cutie I cannot believe it. Now I have a crush on (in order) Dale B., Tyler S., Mark J., and Victor C. I love them all anyway. Good night.
Love,
Tony
From I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear, edited by Michael Bullock and Cesar Padilla and with an introduction by Brontez Purnell, to be published by Semiotext(e) in May.
Sean DeLear (1965–2017) was an influential member of the “Silver Lake scene” in eighties and nineties Los Angeles before moving to Europe. In Vienna, he became part of the art collective Gelitin and devised a solo cabaret show called Sean DeLear on the Rocks. DeLear was a cultural boundary-breaker whose work transcended sexuality, race, age, genre, and scene.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship.
Like all unusual people, Thoreau had a hard time connecting. In a desponded diary entry from his mid-thirties, found in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (public library), he writes:
Why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away.
Several months later, just before the Christmas holidays with their cruel magnifying lens of loneliness for the lonely, he rues his inability to connect openheartedly:
My difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. There is no precept in the New Testament that will assist me. My nature, it may be, is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot.
Thoreau finds himself pocked with self-doubt about his ability to connect, his sense of isolation at times swelling into punitive despair:
Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.
Over and over, Thoreau anguishes with the extreme shyness and reticence of his nature, longs for a confidante beyond the diary page, longs for companionship beyond the birds and the trees. On a beautiful spring Sunday, he despairs:
I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even. Awful as it is to contemplate, I pray that, if I am the cold intellectual skeptic whom he rebukes, his curse may take effect, and wither and dry up those sources of my life, and my journal no longer yield me pleasure nor life.
Months after publishing Walden, with its lyrical celebration of solitude, his loneliness deepens into a primal scream of longing for connection:
What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.
And yet this openhearted longing is itself the only real raw material of friendship — only by surrendering to it, with all the vulnerability this demands of us, do we become receptive to the longing of others, the mutual yearning for connection that is shared heartbeat of humanity. Thoreau quietly intuits this equivalence, so that when he does connect, when he does feel the warm glow of friendship envelop him, it is nothing less than an exultation:
Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too.
At only twenty-four, Thoreau had arrived at a foundational fact of living — his own grand unified theory of human connection, which he spent the remainder of his short life trying, often with touching difficulty, to put into practice:
Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother.
Pulsating beneath all of his uneasy reckonings is a deep-thinking, deep-feeling recognition of the essence of friendship:
The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.
Complement these fragments from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau — a biblical kind of book, replete with his deep-souled wisdom on how to see more clearly, the myth of productivity, the greatest gift of growing old, the sacredness of public libraries, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the only worthwhile definition of success — with Seneca on true and false friendship, Kahlil Gibran on the building blocks of meaningful connection, Henry Miller on the relationship between creativity and community, Lewis Thomas on the poetic science of why we are wired for connection, and this lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)
He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”
I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)
Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)
Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.
(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)
Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.
This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:
Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.
I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.
Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.
Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.
I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.
Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.
Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin bellowed in his advice on writing. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
There is a reason we call our creative endowments gifts — they come to us unbidden from an impartial universe, dealt by the unfeeling hand of chance. The degree to which we are able to rise to our gifts, the passionate doggedness with which we show up for them day in and day out, is what transmutes talent into greatness. It is the responsibility that earns us the right of our own creative force.
That is what the great poet, novelist, and playwright May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in an entry from her altogether magnificent journal The House by the Sea (public library).
With an eye to a young writer she was mentoring, Sarton reflects:
One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant… It may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day.
Echoing Mary Oliver’s admonition that “the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time,” Sarton adds:
A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end — all that, and luck too. We tend to forget about luck.
Complement this fragment of The House by the Sea (public library) — which also gave us Sarton on how to live openheartedly in a harsh world — with poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s advice on writing, discipline, and the two driving forces of creative work, Jennifer Egan on the most important discipline in creative work, and Maria Konnikova on the psychology of luck, then revisit Sarton’s spare, splendid poem about the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, her ode to the art of being alone, and her cure for despair.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Photograph by Isabella Hammad.
This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.
I looked at the objects in the house
the titles of the books
strange incandescence from the windows
Thursday, May 21, 2020
I feel, what is the point of anything
going places seeing people doing anything
just ways to pass the time
Friday, May 29, 2020
I woke too early again—5:30. Stayed in bed until 6. Deep itchy dry cough—hopefully just allergies / recovery from smoking at the weekend. It is the weekend again! Time slips by so quickly during lockdown. L. cycled to see me yesterday—I like him when he is my friend. He seemed pleased I am involved-ish with someone although I also detected a bit of jealousy. But mostly goodwill. He said his relationship is stable and suggested somewhat lacking in passion but who knows if that’s true. I think he feels I fucked up what happened between us and that I wasn’t trustworthy. But I know he was also seeing someone else at the time so I don’t really feel guilty. He & I would not have worked together.
I like Annie Ernaux, I think I’ll read all her books. The premium on honesty & exactitude. Hard to know exactly what you are aiming for in writing—the achievement of certain effects, the creation of “beauty” (?)—but as close as possible to honesty—if not truth—is a clear and actually radical-feeling goal
Today I will speak with J. about Prashad & Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.
I dropped coffee on the stairs & I don’t think the stain will come out. I tried over several days, putting mum on video call to help me. I will offer to pay for a cleaner.
lurid imagination
Saturday, May 30, 2020
I slept longer last night but only because I slept a bit earlier—around 11. Woke at 6:30 again / 6:15. Tired. Z. came for dinner. She is reading my manuscript and will drop it off on Sunday. Nervous and looking forward to her thoughts. So tired it’s unbearable. Will I spend my whole life sleepless like this? I used to be able to sleep long. Now I am too light, I am made of nothing, I rise too easily.
Monday, June 8, 2020
thinking about A. & Q.
from Z. to do:
– creative summary of Hamlet before rehearsal
– cast list earlier
– Gaza coastline end of Chapter 2. Lifeguards
– arabic in arabic script
– one of the cast from Gaza
– getting her passport renewed
Monday, June 15, 2020
Read Jacques Rancière.
Hamlet is a dead man from Act One.
Look up map of Bethlehem & camps.
Simone de Beauvoir The Mandarins
p. 275 “The truth of one’s life is outside oneself, in events, in other people, in things; to talk about oneself, one must talk about everything else.”
Where Russian mass spectacle overtly ideological and affirmative, Dada group (at least in early phase) all negating, anti-ideological and anarchist.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Dreamt I went to Amman & didn’t pack any shoes—didn’t plan what to pack at all—got there—opened bag—tons of Converse, for some reason
invited S. & T. over thinking I. & I. were out—they came back, had to hurry everyone out & round the corner
something about Teta
everything feels porous Majed Jihad
Jenan Ibrahim Wael Mariam Amin Faris
what circumstance shows Mariam excluding Sonia from Ophelia
Sonia watching Jenan—having recently read those lines
Jihad saying something
Sonia unsure if he is joking
repetition
play after play
—This rehearsal itself a performance
this exhausting thing where I have to be invisible all the time
the outrage I seem to cause when I take up space or assert myself
I woke up very early that morning and sat outside with a young man cracking olives on a brick to get them ready for curing smoking narghile
Amin says—I had a dream about you
there is so much sky here
Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, 1993
restless trees
incarnation
murderous heat
everyone on their phones
later correct thought about Faris—that she should give misogyny so much leeway
argument amin & wael
Thursday, July 9, 2020
special crumbling plaster
—ask Jess E.?
visual pleasure
patchwork of quotations hunger in the eyes
swedish woman
[ dreamt about Randa ]
oppression turns you into a collective subject rather an individual self present
actor in possession of your body
illusory Genet thing: power of Pals
& lack of power of Isrs
[ deconditioning of impulse ] ——————————– *
[ email theater person ]
burning city
soon to be darkness
Monday, July 13, 2020
Struggling to concentrate on Sonia.
Liberation exists in desire, not identity.
The feeling of running from a burning building.
Death nibbles at everything—everything will disintegrate but we will go first—human bodies are weaker than concrete walls
Friday, August 21, Andros, Greece
Sitting on shared balcony upstairs, looking down, or across, at the sea. Still quite amazed I am here. S., T., C. Everyone is very considerate, understanding, easygoing. Interesting that I usually expect some pettiness or neuroticism or selfishness or irritation to react to—so that I feel the least easygoing in some respects, even though I am very easygoing. Like, I didn’t like the music N. played at dinner the other night; the others didn’t even notice.
Greece reminds me of Palestine.
First few days especially I couldn’t concentrate on complicated reading; starting to come back to me. Because just a body in the heat, under the sun. S. & T. are both so brilliant & so attuned & knowledgeable; makes me want to know more, read more; they are of course older than me but still.
Plans for future—uncertain … visit Athens for a week, come back to Andros? I will go to see the house with Riccardo that he says is beautiful and €350 a month. I will be lonely but I will write. It is better to be lonely somewhere beautiful. When N., M.’s friend, visited with his sister he only said being stuck on Tinos all lockdown was wonderful. But I can’t help thinking he must have been lonely. T. said he seemed a bit intimidated by us and maybe he did, his gestures were very careful, they didn’t talk much. Dinner conversation was all pleasantries, which was perfectly pleasant.
Things that have died in the pool:
2 dragonflies
a bat
a butterfly
a lizard
several wasps
2 (?) crickets
Friday, August 28, 2020
Last day at the villa on Andros—the end of summer rustling. I am ready to go although I regret not writing, thinking more while here. I will move to Athens tomorrow for at least a month.
Yesterday went to see the little house in the mountains above Korthio—a village called Kochilos—ancient little house with staggering view—but I’m not sure I want that level of isolation if I don’t have a car but I did / am thinking about it. T. got grumpy from the drive and C. was jokingly on his side, getting annoyed at S. for both his enthusiasm and his imperfect directions—who took their annoyance with a smile. I felt a bit isolated and retreated into myself. At a very windy beach I entered the water feeling strangely on verge of tears. Why? Because it was my fault we went on the long drive at noon, instead of having lunch first? I climbed over the rocks under a big fallen rock round the corner of the beach & sat in a stony inlet protected from the wind. Lost my sunglasses in the sea when I went for a wee. Sat on the rocks under the cliff & finished Lord Jim with the sea rough and dramatic seething on the rocks and between them.
I am the opposite of my boisterous self at the beginning of the trip. Maybe I am getting ready to be alone & write.
Sunday, September 6, 2020, Athens
Dreamt about E. On a boat, at night, in a storm.
Sitting on balcony reading A. Chee (I like it) & hearing a sound like an azan, a ways off—a mournful chanting. Maybe a Greek Orthodox church?
Sky is very blue, stinging blue. Getting sensitized to my surroundings. Being observant makes me feel peaceful.
Thoughts about NOVEL: bring the abortion up front.
Maybe this morning I should trawl through Hamlet looking for a title.
Edward Said on Lord Jim:
“Neither man, whether hearer or storyteller, truly inhabits the world of facts”
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Question: Why is it that whenever I begin to approach my work I feel the beginnings of fear? I start to feel depressed? And yet when I’m not doing it I feel dissatisfied.
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Amin’s brother’s story
a love too new, too strong still, in its first violence
a lot of people dinging out of elevators
Friday, October 2, 2020
In my new flat in Exarcheia—Kallidromiou. Big 2-bedroom, 1970s, marble sink, old shutters. Ancient fridge, malfunctioning oven, balconies front & back.
Everywhere I stay there is building work across the way. Sitting at desk in back bedroom I see through the balcony doors a man with a handsaw on the 3rd floor a few buildings back.
E. called me yesterday & again spent an entire hour talking nonstop about his ex-wife. I called him a chronic interrupter & it briefly seemed to give him pause.
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Struggling to write
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Grief give me 40 days I need 40 days
Joan Didion: “the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself”
Henry Miller: “The ancient Greek was a murderer”
phantom seas of blood
to be free of time & space to be in mythic time to be free of context in Greek time
falling into history
meditate
dreamt of Qais, somehow, renting a beautiful flat in a very dangerous neighborhood
Rilke: “the questions … like locked rooms” … again
murmur in the blood
Sonia is unrefined & unfinished still second order
unbearable freedom marriages like public shelters
Lenin: “Ultra-leftism is an infantile disorder”
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Comical? That he left on first day of quarantine / lockdown, & when I got in the taxi to take him to the airport the driver asked, looking shaky, if we were husband & wife. He said no, at which the driver explained only one of us could be in the taxi then. So I got out & we said goodbye on the pavement.
Hanging her laundry outside and something falls, a string vest, onto the awning of the flat two floors below.
I felt inexplicably happy.
Strange dream swimming a woman said, you don’t have any jewish friends & yet you have jewish lovers an eavesdropper looked at me, shocked; I said, she misspoke—I am palestinian, she meant to say israeli, not jewish
Friday, November 13, 2020
NO MORE SMOKING—ruins concentration in the mornings.
Reading Baldwin, Another Country, first chapter I have a feeling of dread & anger about male violence.
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Dream: in the French quarter in Athens, where J.R. stayed; gated community, residential, everyone speaks French.
as lightning freezes motion
someone turns up with a microphone, puts it in front of his mouth, one man & then another, some of them praying wearing baseball caps & backpacks in the heat, sheikh takes over, wearing sunglasses, gives the khutba
على هذه الارض تحت القبة الزرقاء
I’m sorry, he said, seeing the expression he’d brought to her face
Monday, November 30, 2020
Returning to writing, reflection. Went back to sleep after being woken by reversing truck bleeping & accidentally slept until 10:45. Went to illegal dinner of 7 people at a journalist V.’s house in the neighborhood. I met her first—or saw her first—when I went to look round her flat, as she is staying there temporarily & it belongs to friends of I.L.’s. But it’s a sublet (and they were overcharging) so it wouldn’t work for my residency application. Then I met her again at my neighbor S.’s house for brunch a few weeks ago & she recognized my eyes (I’d been wearing a mask). I recognized her curly hair but only after she said it.
At dinner: V., S., S., a journalist who used to live in Palestine, a Greek Romanian woman D. and her partner, Australian. I forget his name. Was nice. I felt the journalist was performing a lot, cracking jokes. Funny how American journalists who have lived in the Middle East often have a similar vibe. Weathered, knowledgeable, insecure.
I dreamt about A. That I waved at him from across the street in Jerusalem but we didn’t actually meet. Later I found out from a policeman who was also an Oxford porter and also an American don that A. had covid. And that E.’s mother was a billionaire, and her neighbor was in the Greek secret police.
The problem of obsessing over originality—divorcing technique from its proper aim—empty virtuosity. The problem of the West post-Reformation
jinn are made from fire
angels from sunlight
iblis a jinn
shaytan from moonlight?
The Bible: demons love water & search for it. Luke 8:29–33
“I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play”
Wednesday, January 6, 2021, Athens
How to write about that feeling I was reminded of last night at the end of Hurdle: a sheerness of desolation & sadness produced by structures of injustice; the quiet wail of the soul; boys jumping on blocks of concrete
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Seem to be fighting something off. Sleeping long hours. Dreamt about being unable to wake.
Friday, January 22, 2021
Still strange chest pain. Sleeping 9 hours a night. Want to finish story & send to A. although I don’t think he’ll like it. Haven’t smoked in almost 2 weeks.
Sunday, February 7, 2021
I got ill again—sinus, ears—even though I haven’t been smoking just tiredness—a busy week. Chose a flat to buy in Neapoli, offer accepted—started teaching—and then had one particular night of terrible sleep that did me in. Read that M.A.G. who I met when he was O.’s roommate has been arrested and I just felt so angry. Then questioning my anger. Wrote novel today but still feel stuck in the voice. Repetition of the “I.” Need to read some first-person narratives that relieve the pressure of the I—variation. Have started The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez & enjoying.
I can’t believe that almost a year has passed since I was lying on Q.’s sofa trying to prepare for PalFest before I flew to Jordan & they announced the cancelation, the circulation of the virus …
I am currently sitting in my spare room at the back, west-facing; I am grateful for this view. Like being on a ship. I see the skies alight in the afternoons, cracks of sun behind clumps of soft cloud, crowding together; the buildings, far enough away.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
I am tired of this flat. This is the longest I have remained in one house for years and years. I hate the temporariness, I hate the things on the walls, the crappy Ikea beds. Maybe I should think of it as—the temporary place where I will finish my novel. Hard not to feel divorced from the novel—written by a former self. To write about duende and the ecstatic experience of art-making—when I cannot access that. Is this because the pandemic makes time feel so uncontained; unlaces the compartments we allot our time into, so that one thing bleeds into another & destroys (or dilutes) concentration? Everything is diluted, that’s it.
Went to the beach twice this week. It felt good to be in a different environment, to swim in the shocking cold. A pretty effective antidepressant.
The balcony doors of this flat feel flimsy; they let air and creatures in.
I think I am despairing less than some others currently—why? Am I bored of despair?
The environment where they do the performance is crucial. Basically I need to go around the West Bank imagining places to put on plays.
Friday, April 9, 2021
Passage of time is frightening. It is already spring—I have still not finished my book or achieved very much.
I feel increasingly concerned by qu. of living an ethical life—at least that’s where my thoughts often go. Revelation last year partially induced by conversation with L. and then expanded by analysis that ethical behavior begins with ethical behavior toward the self. i.e. self-respect is a moral issue. This seems to solve something for me.
Another revelation is my cynicism. A tendency toward satire, against the humanist proposition of the fictional endeavor—perhaps a zeitgeisty anti-empathy moment in public discourse fuels this—but which also runs contra to my real-life behavior, my hopes from people I meet, & so on. This has also come out in conversations with C. re: faith, & my lack of it—not only in a “higher power” à la ten-step programs but faith in anything larger, metaphysical, not trapped or deterministically conditioned by systems.
everything is so overwhelming—thoughts pass through me—constant feeling that my thoughts aren’t good enough
Z. called thinking it was my birthday. Loved talking to her—we talked about the importance of remaining flexible, not just inheriting opinions or saying “it’s settler colonialism” & mic drop, that closes the debate—& the Nathan Thrall piece in the NYRB
nothing more compelling than a love story
—but why? The ultimate in human connection, the ultimate form of it
do a story in numbered paragraphs
the idea of learning from lovers
(I am always seeking to learn from lovers)
Wednesday, April 21, 2021, Athens
woke up with anxieties of uselessness
slowness
a parcel of eggs
pg. 43 Coetzee In The Heart of the Country:
“Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going”
Friday, May 14, 2021, Athens
dreamt about Gaza was a journalist watching Hamas getting ready in a field—ready, essentially, to be slaughtered
every “town” was next to another town—no space between—more like neighborhoods
Very cramped, everyone’s house led to another’s house
Friday, May 28, 2021, Athens
The day of my first vaccination. Enjoying staying at B.’s—woke up this morning thinking about how miserable I would feel if I was living on my own at the moment. Now—I have company and I can rest. Post-cease-fire. Trying to return to dreaming state of mind. The war increased my phone addiction—I feel like I need a detox.
Contemplating going to Brown in the fall. Have to think about what I want to teach—on archives? Benjamin, Carlo Ginzburg, Saidiya Hartman.
Monday, June 14, 2021, Amman, Jordan
I have been here almost a week. Flew in last Monday night arriving at 4:20 a.m.; M. came & picked me up & drove me to N.’s place in Abdoun. Really lovely to see all of them—N., T., M.—although I have felt quite tired and useless, not sleeping well, rising tired, not working well. Still, it’s nice and hot and reassuring to see friends. Cigarettes and hash from last night are heavy on my lungs.
My head isn’t really in the novel yet. I know I have to get there—by reading and thinking.
Wednesday, June 16, 2021, Amman
Now at S.’s in Dabouq / Sweiseh. Dreamt of R.
Book: who do I write this for?
Hegel in Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel got the idea from the Haitian slave revolt.
Friday, June 18, 2021
To fight the fight but also to fight against the fight.
Winnicott’s object to be used.
“Palestinian violence seeks to maintain sanity for its people through the insistence that the self exists even as the oppressors seek to deny it”
Tuesday, June 22, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia
first impressions:
The cucumbers are whitish and hairy. The larger ones are quite bitter. The seawater seems a bit dirty. The air is misty, the horizon meets the sky in a bluish haze, blurred out. Buildings are low, white; small windows, splashes of blue like in Sidi Bou Said, then majnuni trees bow over garden walls and flood a corner with color; domed entranceways, everything designed to keep out the heat.
People are calm, not like in Bilad al-Sham. No need to cover up, dresses and shorts fine. Everyone worn-out and shushed by the heat.
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Still sore from yoga yesterday. Explored Marsa Corniche. Hot & salty air, humid. Saw a black cat with a face like J.S. It was approaching so I gave it the stink eye.
Tomorrow, Friday, I will start writing in the morning. In the afternoon maybe see Z., & then dinner in Sidi Bou Said with M.
Now an orange cat that reminds me of E. Playing hot and cold, friendly eyes, wanted food but got the message, sitting farther down the wall ignoring me.
Merleau-Ponty: “Our thinking cannot be separate from the bodies in which it takes place.”
Jacques Lacan: “We desire the desire of the other.”
Sunday, June 27, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia
Saw M. for lunch—all other Sunday plans dissolved because people are a little flaky. Seems I might need to leave for Paris on the 7th, not the 13th, as Tunis is going on France’s red list. I have to find somewhere to stay. I am at Y.’s from the 13th.
I like Tunis—although it does feel a little dull. Everything calm, fine; hardly any harassment—less than Greece, anyway. Everything is a tad placid.
Some thoughts Saturday morning, Paris
Will be nice when I live in my own place, responsible for my own things, taking mercy on others when they break something of mine.
How particular the French are.
Paris is cramped and expensive.
Sophie Toscan du Plantier—dangerous to be female. That’s why they are so protective of us.
The playground as a first social space, the place of particular kinds of fantasies. Cartwheeling, skipping rope—none of which I did, actually.
Saturday evening
Walked toward Shakespeare & Co. but never made it, spoke to A. & walked home again. Some rain.
Suddenly I have a pang—I’m not as hardworking as a million others—one thing at a time, finish this book & then read & work on the syllabus, read many things, you don’t need to be anything but what you are—
My exhaustion is so intense, that’s the problem, there’s a kind of deadline on this now since I’m going to Brown—I’ve lost the adrenaline & impetus of pre-Covid life only slowly returning to it
—but also don’t lose sight of your subject matter, recent events
—think of Simone Weil’s heart beating across the globe
—perhaps some feeling of fear is good for getting your ass moving—I assiduously & obsessively made notes & filled notebooks for The Parisian—but remember I also want to be happy, I, like everyone else, will die soon
I liked the rain today, it reminded me of London ugly English rain
Kanafani: “Man is a cause, not flesh and blood passed down from generation to generation like a merchant and his client exchanging a can of chopped meat.”
Tuesday, July 13, 2021, Paris
dreamt spaceship hovering above Dublin. Someone went to investigate with an air bicycle. I said, I had a Gaza dream about a spaceship—it looked just like that; square, lights, filling the sky, not moving. Feeling among us in Dublin that this was inevitable; we would all go up there.
A man pursuing me, my friends weren’t dead, just hiding.
O.T. [the writer] was living in the building, he had copies of The Recognitions and something else I loved. I told him I had trouble concentrating on reading.
I killed the pursuing man, he wouldn’t die quietly, I slashed his throat—I think he stood in for H. because I told him I loved him & he said he was sorry and then he said he loved me too.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021, flight, Paris→Athens
Picasso Rodin—saw with M.
Lots of paintings of lovers kissing or fucking, war & sex—the two great topics
also the Courbet at the Musée d’Orsay—L’Origine du Monde—I think I actually blushed when I saw it—& then I watched M.’s reflection in the glass of the other painting on the perpendicular wall, waiting for him to move so I could look at it properly. And then we sat on the grass, or lay rather, in the garden of the museum.
Beside me on the airplane someone’s sister watches a Lara Croft movie on her phone glass shatters in slow motion as Angelina Jolie dives through a window
But returning to Rodin
also why am I always dropping things
chronically I am so clumsy
Rodin—engaging with the human form again—somehow a delight and a surprise to think again of the human creature in a skin
this funny animal we are with 2 legs and 2 arms
Isabella Hammad’s story “Gertrude” appears in the Review’s Winter 2022 issue.
There is cosmic consolation in knowing what actually happens when we die — that supreme affirmation of having lived at all. And yet, however much we might understand that every single person is a transient chance-constellation of atoms, to lose a beloved constellation is the most devastating experience in life. It feels incomprehensible, cosmically unjust. It feels unsurvivable.
In the final years of his short and loss-riddled life, Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) wrote in his diary:
I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sickbed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things.
Thoreau’s life of losses had begun seventeen years earlier. He was twenty-five when his beloved older brother died of tetanus after cutting himself shaving — a gruesome death, savaging the nervous system and contorting the body with agony. Thoreau grieved deeply. A lifelong diarist, he slipped into a five-week coma of the pen. He tried to listen to the music-box, which had always flooded him with delight, but the sounds came pouring out strange and hollow.
Eventually, the fever dream of grief broke into a new orientation to death. Two months into his bereavement, as the harsh New England winter was cusping into spring, Thoreau wrote to a friend — a letter quoted in the altogether wonderful book Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives (public library):
What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder? We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a great grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin on Arabian trees. Only Nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent.
Having resumed his journal, he took up the subject in the privacy of its pages:
I live in the perpetual verdure of the globe. I die in the annual decay of nature. We can understand the phenomenon of death in the animal better if we first consider it in the order next below us the vegetable. The death of the flea and the Elephant are but phenomena of the life of nature.
This was a season of losses in Thoreau’s universe. His friend and mentor Emerson, who had hastened to stay with him and nurse him in the wake of his brother’s death, lost his beloved five-year-old son to scarlet fever, as incurable as tetanus in their era. Now it was Thoreau’s turn to comfort his friend. Leaning on his new acceptance of the naturalness of death as an antidote to grief, he wrote to Emerson:
Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast. The hurricane only snaps a few twigs in some nook of the forest. The snow attains its average depth each winter, and the chic-a-dee lisps the same notes. The old laws prevail in spite of pestilence and famine. No genius or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood, or beast or bird lays aside its habits.
An epoch before Rilke insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” and a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death, Thoreau adds:
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident — It is as common as life… Every blade in the field — every leaf in the forest — lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither — for their death is the law of new life.
Couple these fragments from Three Roads Back with Thoreau on nature as prayer, then revisit the neuroscience of grief and healing, Emily Dickinson on love and loss, Seneca on the key to resilience in the face of loss, and Nick Cave on grief as a portal to aliveness.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
Belted Galloway. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.
The other day we went to Albany so I could return all eight items I had bought online from Athleta. The store was in a giant mall that smelled tragically of Cinnabons. The Cinnabons reminded me of the TV series Better Call Saul, which is set in part in a Cinnabon shop, and the way Saul Goodman was unable to resist pulling a con. He missed his old life. Jail was preferable to feeling unknown to himself.
The clothes in the store were made of fabrics that were “what is this?” and “no.” And there were mirrors, unlike in our house. Richard said, “Let’s go to the Banana.” He wanted a cashmere sweater. There were two he looked great in, and it made me so happy for someone to look good in clothes I said, “Buy both.” He said, “I don’t deserve them.” I said, “No one deserves anything. You are beautiful. Beauty is its own whatever.” One of the sweaters had a soft hoodie thing, and Richard liked walking around in the house in it. The hood came down a little low. I said, “You’re getting a seven dwarfs thing happening with the hood.” He pulled it back a little, and it was perfect.
The next day on our walk, he wore the hoodie over a cap covering his ears. When we recited three things in the moment we loved, he said, “I’m glad we’re walking, although I’m against it.” I said, “Why are you against it?” He said, “It’s too cold.” It was during the Arctic cyclone, and I was wearing my down coat from the eighties. The shoulder pads are out to Mars, and Richard said, “Everyone on Warren Street thinks you’ve been released from an alien abduction after thirty years. They are wondering why you were released.” I said, “Why was I released?” He said, “They couldn’t get anything useful from you about earthlings. It was a total waste of their time.”
I bought a giant wheel of focaccia with salt and olives from a bakery. The grease was soaking through the bag when I got outside. I tore off a hunk. Richard said, “Are you going to eat all that?” I said, “It tastes like a crispy pretzel from Central Park,” and I could see I was missing my old life. The way we live, there are cows outside our windows that belong to Abby Rockefeller. Abby Rockefeller has built a dairy farm down the road where a piece of cheese is either pay this or your mortgage. Richard took a bite of the focaccia. It still took forever to get through the hunk I’d torn off, and my hands froze. I said, “My fingers could break off like one of those corpses holding a clue to their murder.”
Earlier in the day, we’d installed two bookcases in the basement. Richard was arranging the books in alphabetical order. At one time, in New York, the books had been in alphabetical order and every morning I’d walked on Broadway, looking for free samples from the food markets. COVID ended the era of free samples, and now I buy things to eat on Warren Street. The other day I went into a new café. Sun glared from the smile of the woman behind the counter when she said, “All the pastries are gluten-free and vegan.” I wondered if there was something about me that made her happy to announce this or if it had become a cultural commonplace like using the word bandwidth to mean mental space. I said, “I welcome gluten, and I’m not vegan.” She swore I wouldn’t know the difference, and even though I knew she would be wrong, I bought a slice of gluten-free vegan lemon pound cake, which lacked all the ingredients of pound cake. It’s in a bag on the kitchen counter. You can have it.
How we got the bookcases is the mother of a man on Facebook Marketplace had died, and he was clearing out her house. The cases were taller and heavier than reported. Richard wanted me to understand the logistics required to stand up each bookcase and edge it against a wall. He kept saying, “Don’t you see it has to go this way and then that way. Don’t you see it won’t fit from that angle?” I kept saying, “No, I don’t understand, and it thrills me to tell you I will never need to understand, as long as we stick it out together.”
Recently, he found an early book by Louisa May Alcott in one of the free bins on Warren Street. This morning he said, “We didn’t read American literature in school.” (He’s from England.) “Maybe a poem by Longfellow and Moby-Dick.” I said, “Moby-Dick is not chopped liver.” Then I thought that was unfair to chopped liver. If you tasted my chopped liver, you wouldn’t call it “chopped liver.”
I told him about a dream. If I were you, I would save myself and move on from this section. In the dream, we live in a château, and I’m talking to the woman who owns it. First she wants me to take her change and give her dollar bills. Fine. Then there is an enormous platter of lobsterlike creatures. It’s enormous. She holds up one of the creatures, and at first I don’t realize it’s alive. Alive and sluggish. I see the lobsters moving in a jumble on the platter, and I’m horrified for them, for me, for existence as we know it. Why are there lobsters that aren’t quite lobsters!! Why are they so huge!! Then I’m digging in a flower bed, and I think, Ah, it’s time to get the dahlia tubers from the basement. Don’t forget to plant the dahlias. Richard said, “The lobsters are from the zombie apocalypse show we watched with the fungus.” I thought, Yes, and I could see my mind had infinite bandwidth for any old crap fed to it.
A few nights ago, we watched a conversation with Mike Nichols filmed during his last days. He looks emaciated and speaks with his usual clarity and animation. Intercut with the conversation are scenes from some of his films. In one sequence from The Graduate, the camera shoots Dustin Hoffman in his convertible on a California freeway, racing to his future, racing to chaos from a death-in-life torpor—not unlike Saul Goodman fleeing the Cinnabon shop for a life of crime. The camera stays on Dustin’s look of determination, and then it moves to the scenery on his left as he’s racing along, it moves to trees and sky over his shoulder, and then, finally it shoots the road ahead—a tangle of beams and signs and other cars he is driving toward. And I thought that movement of the camera, that layering of shots and the thoughts those shots arouse in the moment and in memory, is exactly what to do with sentences to form a paragraph.
If there were a point to life, the point would be pleasure. I knew a man, an Italian communist, who liked to say, raising a glass of champagne and nibbling a blini with caviar, “Nothing’s too good for the working class.” Kafka’s Hunger Artist explains to the overseer at the end of the story he’s not a saint, nor is he devoted to art or sacrifice. He’s just a picky eater. “I have to fast. I can’t help it … I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”
I once promised a man who was touchy about his privacy I would keep his secrets, and I kept his secrets. Otherwise I have made few promises, and I have never made a resolution. Today Richard was grumpier than me, and it made me so happy I was nice the whole time we walked. I love my phone. I love the first sip of a cocktail when the elevator drops. There is a woman I don’t love and can’t stop thinking about. I love that I will never understand my connection to her. There is a kind of vulnerability that makes me feel my whole life is stretched out in front of me. In a way, it is.
Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press), which has been long listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the “Streaming Now” column for Liber a Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything is Personal substack.
One of the hardest things in life is watching a loved one’s mind slowly syphoned by cognitive illness — that haunting ambiguous loss of the familiar body remaining, but the person slowly fading into otherness, their very consciousness frayed and reconstituted into that of a stranger.
How to go on loving this growing stranger is the supreme challenge of accompanying a precious human being through the most disorienting experience in life — the great open question pocked with guilt but pulsating with possibility.
The poet and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores how to step into that possibility with uncommon sensitivity and tenderness in one of the diary entries collected in the altogether magnificent The House by the Sea (public library).
Sarton was thirty-three when she met Judith Matlack, twelve years her senior. May and Judy fell in love — a love consecrated in Sarton’s almost unbearably beautiful poetry collection Honey in the Hive. When they separated thirteen years later, they remained not only friends but nothing less than family to each other.
Judy was not yet seventy when dementia began fraying her mind. Uncoupled and childless, she moved into a nursing home. Sarton visited regularly. Once she settled into her house by the sea in Maine, she often had Judy stay with her for several days at a time — visits beautiful and bittersweet, for the familiar warmth between them was haunted by Judy’s fading mind. Sarton writes:
It makes me feel abandoned and desperately lonely, lonely partly because I believe no one can quite understand who has not experienced it what it is to lose through senility the person closest to you.
During one of these visits, with Judy particularly disoriented, unable to hold a conversation, wandering into the neighbors’ yards, Sarton offers a passage of tender consolation:
Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person. I do cherish her so; can one maintain the image of love when so much has gone?” I guess the answer to that question is, yes, because when one has lived with someone for years, as I did with Judy, something quite intangible is there, as though in the bloodstream, that no change in her changes.
Couple with Mary Gaitskill on how to move through life when your parents are dying — some of the simplest, most beautiful and redemptive life-advice you’ll ever receive — then revisit Sarton on how to live with tenderness in a harsh world.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page.
The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life.
Life! I missed life very much.
Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another.
La Perdida, O Pando 2018, citrusy, salt, chamomile, then what? A thin mineral sourness.
Codello grapes.
I hate all descriptions.
Maybe this will become all names and nouns.
/
Chanel’s Cuir de Russie—ylang and jasmine and iris, which somehow produces the illusion of leather. But then there’s also Rien by État Libre d’Orange, aldehydes then frankincense, incense, labdanum, which also produces leather but this one somehow fizzing, like it’s at a level above reality.
I have no idea how to write this. I wonder if you could do an essay on perfume writing as an example of the problem (impossibility) of all criticism: something abstract infected by people’s associations (the mad online reviews of Rien, which seem to be describing a perfume that’s completely different to the one I’m smelling).
/
Barthes—The Grain of the Voice: “talking about music without adjectives”
/
Air du Désert by Tauer—Amber, cedar, vetiver, with petitgrain, coriander, cumin, rose, and a powerful idea of incense, or myrrh: if, that is, I even know what myrrh smells like. (I don’t.) Something so rich about this, so matted—I wonder if what I love is this complication, sense of something dense and inextricable. (The allure of the burnt.)
/
Mendittorosa—Le Mat. Pepper and cashmere wood, then rose, clove, geranium, with immortelle, nutmeg, patchouli—another perfume that’s warm and bitter at the same time. A rose that sweats.
Gesualdo’s Madrigals recorded by Les Arts Florissants. Chromatics, dissonance in the rhythm as much as the harmonics. (Are all these excitements to do with layering? I mean, the perfume and the music share the same structure: something uncovered layer by layer?)
/
Whereas this one (Bogue–Mem) it’s as if this is a form of oscillation, whereas so many other perfumes are a progression. Technically an oriental fougère—lavender and roasted barley; underneath, civet, ambergris, castoreum, with little moments of petitgrain, mandarin, then ylang, rose, geranium, vanilla, mint; and finally cedar, benzoin, rosewood.
It’s unlike anything else I know.
/
Another perfume by Bogue—Maai. Again, something that uncovers in overlapping layers: a chypre that begins aldehydic, peppery, then becomes floral—eucalyptus, petitgrain, rose, and finally oakmoss, myrrh, labdanum (I’m copying this list out)—but so rich and so minute: candied fruit, ylang, cloves, cypress: something sticky, dirty, about its beauty.
/
Monteverdi’s Madrigali: polyphony and the invention of the concerted style—the play with voice and instruments that becomes opera. A definition I just read somewhere and can’t remember where.
/
L’Artisan Parfumeur—Timbuktu—this time vetiver with sandalwood and incense and cypriol: the opposite, in a way, of everything else: sparseness, cleanliness, separation of elements. So maybe it’s more boring.
/
Four perfumes today. I feel sick. It all began with Nicolai’s New York Intense: petitgrain citronnier, bergamot, maybe orange, then a deep pepper, clove, cinnamon that ends in oakmoss, incense, civet and musk: something deeply rich, regal about it, a sense of being encased. This was followed by Ormonde Jayne’s Ormonde Man: juniper, bergamot, and pink pepper, then vetiver, cedar, sandalwood, musk, with oud and black hemlock. Here it’s as if the arrangement expands in waves. I then decided to compare this with Ormonde Jayne’s Isfarkand—like a first variant on Ormonde Man: lime, mandarin, pink pepper, then cedar, vetiver, oakmoss: less enveloping, sharper, slightly more woody and also abrupt. And finished with Ormonde Jayne’s Black Gold, which begins like Isfarkand without the pepper: lemon, mandarin, bergamot, then goes closer to Ormonde Man, with oud, sandalwood, but also patchouli. It shimmers. (But how? What do you mean by shimmer?) It creates total presence, and maybe this illusion of presence is what these tastes or perfumes can offer—as if you can enter a new idea of a world or yourself, the way I inhabited this cloud while walking the dog in the dead park.
/
Lea Desandre singing Vivaldi arias – her voice has this woozy chromatic quality, as if something baroque is also supermodern. Maybe all pleasure is to do with sincerity or at least potential expression. These arias: idealised suffering.
/
Vetiver Extraordinaire by Frederic Malle, a sharp vetiver that has this little halo or surround of cedar and lemon. Can these sensations each have a different tempo? This feels very short, very sharp, something that exhausts itself in a single green outburst or movement.
Then I get it again and it smells totally different. WHY IS THIS?
/
Monteverdi’s Incoronazione—the voice dragging against the instruments: abrasiveness amongst the sweetness. Everything must catch, must take (timbre/nuance).
Maybe this is all a definition of the word nuance?
/
Zoologist—Hummingbird—it begins tutti-frutti, with cherry, plum, pear, violet-leaf, then enters a rich soft blur of ylang and mimosa and lilac, until ending on coumarin, musk, sandalwood – and I like it very much, but on me, not A., which must mean that as usual everything, even nuance, depends on context. And that one thing this diary is about is a return to an androgyny I thought I’d lost.
/
I always loved how small I was. I loved the adjective mercurial.
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YSL—Rive Gauche—powdery, floral, and it’s dazzling because it’s so kaleidoscopic—a rotation of different elements.
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “I am always surprised when I see a completed work of something that I have done, all done piece by piece, and between jobs and breaks, in sleep, between arguments with Richard, all the maniac frustrations of these jobs, joblessness, poverty states …”
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Nuance is identity (presence) and the absence of identity (fleeting).
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L’Artisan Parfumeur—Dzing!—is it possible to have comical nuance? Surely yes, like this cardboard circus, something like that circus made by Calder, leather, fur, wood, talc, iris, caramel—all peppery and warm. (Like Jasmin et Cigarette by Etat Libre—the acrid delicious smoke of it, lingering amongst the jasmine.)
Papillon—Dryad: super elegant, but it turns out that elegance is boring.
Nicolai—Eau Mixte—the juniper in this made me immediately think of martini—no, made me want a martini. I miss martinis in dark bars. But that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that it seems it’s impossible for abstraction to exist.
Frederic Malle—Geranium pour Monsieur—a nuance is a sequential procession—I’ve said this already, but it’s what I keep thinking. Or, I like it when the sequence is overlaid on itself, which is why it’s so surprising how much I like this perfume—but perhaps the answer is its stickiness.
I can’t think of any better way of describing stickiness than stickiness.
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Nuance as what you remember: scattered, sparse.
Frederic Malle—French Lover—What makes it alluring is its hard, cold, leafy astringency, incense, pepper, galbanum, oak moss, which goes to a woody amber: but it’s an amusement, not something that convinces.
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Frederic Malle—Une Rose—the pure lipsticky artificial pinkness of it.
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August Kleinzahler in “Music XXII”: “I’m a timbre queen … I especially go for early keyboard instruments, precursors of the modern piano: harpsichords, clavichords, fortepianos, differing among themselves not only as to how their mechanisms work and basic sound, but by the vintage, instrument-maker, provenance, materials between like instruments, i.e., in the way that a Stradivarius or Guarneri violin has its own particular and differing sonic characteristics.”
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In Plato’s Cratylus, I just read somewhere, Socrates describes the difference between the human and the divine as between the smooth—leion—and the rough—truchy. Like Dante on rough/hairy and smooth words.
Goatish tragedy; “rough hairy beasts” (Some Like It Hot): tragikos bios.
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Chet Baker’s voice in Chet Baker Sings: lightness, floatiness, total smoothness. And yet I love it.
Barthes: “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value … I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual … but in no way ‘subjective’ …”
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Elmo Hope Trio—is speed always delightful? Maybe. I love this airplant tendrilly movement from block to block.
Masque Milano—Times Square—Crazed rose, lipstick accord, hazelnut, something gummy, like sweets, cheap sweets, tuberose.
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E V-M—Paris Review—The image of Bolaño’s intensity, of E V-M’s intensity: Piglia’s description of the secret and occluded story in Kafka: purity of dedication, intelligence, playfulness.
Maybe this is all a pun on the idea of the note.
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Musil in The Man Without Qualities: “The light in the room now resembled a hollowed-out silver cube … And at that moment something happened to her—it did not seem to come from her will but from outside—: the surging water beyond the windows suddenly became like the flesh of a sliced fruit and was pressing its swelling softness between herself and Ulrich.”
Derek Jarman’s Glitterbug. Filming like sketching (Sasnal)
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Tacita’s postcard arrives: Shite Zeit, Anus Horribilis, faecism, miracolo de merde, mer de merde. Out of a baroque black and white cloudscape, a shit descends.
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Everything is about something that develops over time. La Garagista’s Vinu Jancu—so floral, complicated. Here the orange wine has a layer of acidity with another layer of honey, rose, violet, fig leaf. Hedgerow eating.
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Chocolate sorbet, hazelnut gelato.
You see? It was always going to end up as just nouns.
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William Lawes, Consorts to the Organ. Lawes and dissonance: the negotiation of instability: movement between alien parts (Mem, Maai)
Billie Holiday—“Fine and Mellow”—on Whitney Balliett’s CBS show, 1957—Lester Young’s solo, and B.H.’s face—the beauty of the directly personal.
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Thomas Adès’s idea of magnetism, indifferent to any break with tonality: ‘I don’t believe at all in the official distinction between tonal and atonal music. I think the only way to understand these things is that they are the result of magnetic forces within the notes, which create a magnetic tension, an attraction or repulsion.’
Morton Feldman on Beethoven: “It’s not so much how he gets into things that’s interesting, it’s how he gets out of them.”
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Separation of elements – to separate might be a way for each element to acquire whatever is meant by life.
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Transitions/juxtapositions (fluid, edge)—Adès: “A thing becomes possible which makes another thing possible which wouldn’t have been possible without it.”
Fetish notes—hinges of ambiguity.
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R. making her teddy sing comic songs.
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Malted milk chocolate from the Saint Vincent Cocoa Company—jammy, figgy, custardy—all the words approximate, requiring the havering suffix—y. (Which you always like.)
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Definition of a diva—in Koestenbaum: “public, creamy, and colossal”!
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Residue: “I can remember seeing her once in the opera of Didone, but can say nothing of her performance, all I can recollect of it being the care with which she tucked up her great hoop as she sidled into the flames of Carthage.” Richard Edgcumbe on Caterina Gabrielli, quoted by Koestenbaum
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The cartoon blue of hydrangeas, with no grading or mixture in it.
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Thom Gunn’s essays on Robert Duncan: as if the pleasure is all in a refusal of a certain modernism. Lushness, instead.
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Radikon—Sivi: something I’m now beginning to understand: the chypre-like structure that is everywhere, in perfumes and wines and chocolate and coffee: stone fruit turning into citrus. So this one bores me.
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A.’s legs on my shoulders, my cock in her, seeing it, watching it—the sensation of such depth, such warmth—her pinkness, my redness. Like you could say: it looks raw but it feels soft.
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Fanny Burney, April 1788: “transactions, reflections, feelings, and wishes.”
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Raisins Gaulois—Lapierre—Gamay: total pleasure, as if the taste transports—in this case to Paris in some idyll of romance—a tiny restaurant, constant drinking, with no future pain or sadness implied.
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Complication is depth, is time: something turning into something else.
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Color and taste. Coffee from El Fénix in Colombia—pink bourbon: jam, peach, watermelon—pink colors for the pink berries? Coffee from Boji Kochere, Ethiopia: blue—fizzy blue, melon gummies, milk tea
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But how to create this kind of nuance in a work? You can’t. Nuance has to be assumed, or hoped for.
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In the early morning, my hand between A.’s breasts. How the breast feels on the back of my hand.
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The problem with anyone reading this would be to make them read as slowly as I try to imagine these adjectives.
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What are these notes except an attempt to recover a previous self—or something else, a permitted feminization, maybe.
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The catalogue of Xenakis’s drawings from the Drawing Center years ago: the colors, the lines of his arborescences, grids, clouds.
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Peonies fading from crimson to pink to cream to ivory to white.
Adam Thirlwell’s new novel The Future Future will be published later this year. He is an advisory editor of The Paris Review.
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