DAY
I’ll just speak for myself. This seems to be the best plan. When you try to speak on behalf of others you run into trouble. See? Already I has become you, but I cannot be you. But you can come along with me, at my side if you like, even if my walk is a bit awkward and you probably want to move more quickly over the terrain. Probably you wouldn’t say “terrain.” You would say ground or path or street. These choices don’t amount to a disagreement, just a different habit of mind. The mind’s terrain. Just now my mind’s terrain is a bit foggy, a bit dreary. It feels, inside of this fog, quite empty, as if, when the fog lifts, there will be nothing but an expanse uninflected by things to see or do, undisturbed by names and places, recollections and glimpses into other times and other places. Just a wide, pale expanse, like a painting by Robert Ryman, smooth as glass but not transparent. Just now, there is a single fly moving up the windowpane, up and then back down, and over to the edge of the frame; it seems to be speeding up. What is it wanting? To get out? Flies are mysterious. I dislike them intensely. They are possibly my least favorite insect. Meantime, there are drips sounding on either side of the room; the drips nearest me, on the east side, are falling in uneven patterns but their sound is uniformly a dull thud; the drips on the other side are more rapid and some of them are hitting something metal and making that sharper, brighter sound. It is curious, how difficult it is to describe a sound, since you, since I must reach for one sort of analogy or another: sharp, bright, dull. The fly doesn’t make any sound at all as it explores the windowpane. If my mind weren’t so foggy, I might attempt to find words to go with the beating of the drops; I sometimes do that with bird songs; they make their sound and I hear words. There are no bird songs at the moment; I don’t think they like to sing in the rain. It’s a conundrum, this business of the sensual world of sounds and sights, the mind in a fog, words. Where are they coming from, these words? Isn’t that a mystery?
DAY
The rain continues; the drips are more infrequent but still coming down and playing their tuneless, drab tune. The sky is the color of a cooked egg white. I wonder how many other persons have thought that same thing, made that same analogy, written those same words. I often wonder these kinds of things, about whether anything one thinks or says or feels is ever unique, or if, as I suspect, we share far more than we like to imagine. We are more alike than different, which of course makes sense, else we would not be able to understand much of what we say to each other or what we do. Still, there is much that I don’t understand about what humans say and do, things that are the result of what we think and believe, feel and desire. I try, sometimes, to understand why someone would kill another person, for example. Or kill most any living creature for that matter, not to be sanctimonious, and I do kill flies without a moment’s hesitation. You can’t kill a fly with a moment’s hesitation. But buying a gun and deliberately loading it, and deliberately taking it with you, and deliberately aiming it at a person, or persons, with the evident desire to end a life? When I was a girl, I could not watch the newsreels in the movie theater; I would have to actually get up and leave while the man with the big voice talked about planes and guns and dead persons on the fields of war. Which war? Planes, bombs. Pictures of wounded bodies. And this phobia continues today, when The New York Times shows pictures, some of which are actually now digitally animated, of the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza. I skip down the page to avoid these images, and so also avoid the stories, and so increase my ignorance. The cat has just made his sound that means he wants something, either some food, or to go out. He will not be happy going out because he doesn’t like the rain. He makes a loud humming purr, a quick pretty sound with a sense of urgency. Then he waits. If I don’t get up, he makes a further sound, more like a whine, higher in tone. If I get up, he walks ahead of me toward the kitchen.
DAY
While I am in this gloomy terrain, I may as well go on. There isn’t anyone to stop me. That’s an interesting fact about being a writer; no one tells you to stop, except perhaps your partner calling from the kitchen, Dinner’s ready. Also, I suppose, the figure in your inner world, where the words seem to be located, although they are not, that figure will of course tell you to shut up. I remember in an interview Saul Bellow called this figure his “inner saboteur,” which somehow seems about right. I suspect that some writers have a friendlier inner voice, one that says, “That’s great!” or “Wow!” but mine, alas, seems to lack words of praise. In any case, I was going to go on. I was going to write about my cousin Michael, who died a few weeks ago, and some of whose ashes I put into the ground down by the stream that runs into the Hudson River. Along with the ashes, which were a chalky white and not ashlike at all but like delicate, hard splinters, I planted some daffodil bulbs. I had asked his wife, Margot, what flowers he loved and she told me daffodils. And I thought about whether this was because, when we were young, and he was living in Chappaqua, where our grandmother also lived, there were always many daffodils in spring. I bought a few different varieties, and I am hoping that they will come up in a great celebratory burst in April. Michael was one of two surviving children of my aunt Priscilla, who was my mother’s youngest sister, and uncle Bill. They had seven children, and Michael was the second, after Douglas and before Elizabeth; then came Katherine and then Matthew and then Stevenson and then Melissa. When Doug was around ten, it seemed he had some trouble with his lungs; he was, I recall, sent out to Arizona to be in the dry air there. But he died, at twelve, which made Michael the eldest, by default. When my sister Jennifer died, I became the eldest by default, but that was later. I had an adoration of Priscilla; I thought she was the most beautiful person I knew, with a lithe figure and long, dark hair and bright green eyes, and who always wore the most simple but elegant clothes. I loved my uncle Bill as well, who was handsome and large, and moved a little like a bear, and so I called him “Bear.” On Easter, Thanksgiving, and sometimes Christmas, we would drive up from the city to my grandmother’s house, and Pris and Bill and their kids would come over. My aunt Alice, another of my mother’s four sisters, lived with her mother, whom we called Shaw, in Chappaqua with her son, my cousin Nathaniel. We were three: Jennifer, my sister; me; and David, our brother. Now I am tired of this recitation, feeling it has become dull, that the narrative has bogged down with all these names, and I have lost the thread of Michael. One by one, his siblings died, Liz and Kate and Matthew. Maybe not in that order. Then their little sister, Melissa, at around eighteen months, drowned in the pool. So Michael and Stevenson were the only remaining children of my aunt Priscilla and uncle Bill. I lived in their house for a time. They died of the same disease that had killed Doug. Michael became a photographer. He had a sense of absurdity, sometimes melancholy, sometimes comic, often propelled by unexpected juxtapositions of persons and words—billboards, signs—which he photographed with something akin to empathy. As the character in Jim Jarmusch’s film Down by Law says, “It’s a sad and beautiful world.” I think that is what Michael also felt. When persons die, they stay inside. The room with the dead is crowded.
DAY
The day is fading quickly. No sunset, as there is a pale blue-gray cloud cover, although, to the west, a sliver of white-gold where the sun is. The leaves on the huge oaks that stand over the graveyard next to my house have turned a russet brown and are slowly beginning to release; usually, they are last to fall and stay in brown piles on the ground until spring. Tonight we will turn the clocks back and arrive at standard time and experience the abrupt end to the day in what was midafternoon in summer. For some reason, this year the seasonal transition feels more strenuous or demanding; these are not quite the right words; more unwanted, maybe. My ongoing argument with time seems to be increasing, and for good reason, as I come closer each second to losing it: the argument. Time is going to win, no matter what I attempt to do to cheat. I thought that if I had unmolested time, days without any plan or obligation, just open and available, then I would feel a kind of happy freedom from its mean incursions, but this is not the case. The opposite is what happens; if you empty time, time empties faster, like a kind of unpunctuated, run-on sentence, loose and directionless. This is curious even as I am sure it is a known fact. I have thought I could see time, or at least watch it, but that also turns out to be a delusion. The light is fading; soon it will be dark and I will need to get up and turn on some lights. But this diminution is not palpable, it has no material substance, it is a perceptual flow for which, it occurs to me, the clock, with its numbers, is an absurd device. Counting. I return to this theme often; my dislike of counting as a measure of anything: age, worth, dollars, sense. I read today a very informative article about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced and now also incarcerated for a long time person who made and lost billions of dollars, in which it is said that he more or less thought in numerical terms. It also said that he seems to have had no emotional or moral core. None. A person made for the crypto world. It’s like Lear: Nothing will come of nothing.
DAY
We have been given an extra hour. I don’t understand how this works, that you can just spin the dial forward or back and create another hour out of nothing. The extra hour, if it is extra, which I doubt, presses on the day a new light, one that also fades earlier, as now, with the sun already advancing toward the western horizon, shedding its white light through the remaining leaves of the oak. It is a drama of endings, or apparent endings; these words we use are inexact, because they seem not to allow for the necessary ongoingness of everything that overrides any given time being up. Measures, increments, more, less, there is really only a gradual shift and yet we do end, each of us, sooner or later. Sooner or later, we are not any longer, any more. These days with their quick curtailment bring these thoughts to many, not just to me, although I admit they seem to be persistent to the point of boredom. I am bored with contemplating endings and I wish I would stop and begin elsewhere, inside of some forgotten promise I made years ago. Motion. How does motion become emotion? What added that “e”? mo, emo. The tion is nothing, so the words are both held in that little phoneme: mo. I will find out and come back to you. The root seems to be meue; the word derives from French, meaning movement out, agitation. The affiliation with feelings is late, not until the seventeenth century. Well, the lowering sun is now casting light on the lower leaves of a maple below the oak, which are blazing orange; the blazing happens only when the light is on them; otherwise they are a drab tawny color with still some green parts. When the sun sets you don’t have a sense of motion. This is partly because, of course, the sun isn’t setting at all, but the earth is turning. You would think that nothing much is happening in this turning world; all my chatter lingering like dust in air, as if the world were not in tatters, riveted, ripped, with so little sense of hope that we are all turning in circles pretending not to be in total despair. You know: When in doubt, cut to the sunset. The doubt is almost unendurable, the fear flicking at the edge like embers of a fire about to combust, the sense of being stymied, arrested, at odds with the sweet flow of the day here, this little plot of calm. The tropes of day burnished; arrivals and departures happening but not visible except for the occasional flicker of a bird wing past the window. It seems pathetic, finally, this desire to hold on to what cannot be held, certainly not by words. The best one can hope for is an overlay of time across time, so that this present, the one into which I am writing, lies across another present, in the future, after I am no longer but merely a vanished scribe, faceless, bodiless. I had said not long ago that I thought the soul might be the word we have for the alignment of a heart with a mind; the fact of that alignment, which would mean a release of energy outward, into the assembly, a connector similar to music, the way music can make everyone who hears it feel that they are, for once, united. Soul: the animating tissue of that connectivity.
DAY
It is Monday evening. The sky was amazing; I took some pictures. I have taken a lot of pictures of the sky over the years, another failed attempt to hold on to time. Photographs are strange; they baffle me even in their ubiquity. Pictures of persons I know and now knew only increase my bewilderment. How can you be dead? I ask the photograph. And it gets too warm and then it gets too cold; one is in a constant transition. And weary. I feel weary although I have attempted next to nothing today. Next to nothing, there must be something. There must have been something. Driving home as the sun was descending behind the mountains across the river, it made a brilliant shield against which the mountains were nearly black, silhouetted. I stopped the car but taking photos through the window is hopeless. I have so little time left on earth. What should I do not to just throw it away? I wish I could figure this out; I wish my lesser angels weren’t quite so in charge of the days. I think about a time when someone looks at a picture of me and wonders: How could you be dead? Is that not a kind of ultimate narcissism? Or just a simple acknowledgment on a day when it is reported that more than ten thousand persons have died in Gaza. Numbers again, the way they attempt to make things conceivable that are not. Dollars, miles, deaths. These measures are simultaneously empty and full, real and illusory. In another life, I shall study the origin and history of numbers.
DAY
Today was Election Day. The nice young woman at the polling station in town, as I was leaving, said, Thank you, my dear, and I said, I don’t think I am your dear. This is what happens when you are perceived to be an old person; you become everyone’s “dear” but it is a kind of insulting, patronizing dearness. But it was Election Day in America, and I went to New York to see my dentist of many years, of whom I am fond, despite the fact that he becomes increasingly right-wing and declared to me as I was about to leave that President Biden is without any doubt a person with dementia. As the young were wont to say, Whatever. Although I don’t feel that at all but a deep sense of intransigent malaise, which I am hoping is at least partly due to Covid, but I think it is mostly my own unhappiness, unhappiness with self, that is causing it. I have fallen into a narcissistic pit of my own making. It is as if, without a certain amount of approbation or praise or their equivalents I am left with a sense of near total doubt about my worth. Worth. What an odd word. To be worthy. To be worth something. When this is at its pitch, as it is now, I cannot find ways to ameliorate, but only to exacerbate. On the train back up the Hudson, I was reading John Ashbery’s “The New Spirit,” which is a strangely drab piece of writing with long stretches of numbing but yet precise and riveting prose in which there is almost nothing to catch hold of, other than delay and the wish to catch hold. Of course the first page is brilliant and confounding and it seemed to set in motion a whole poetic engine around the idea of leaving out and putting it all down, and the precious fragments implicated. On the train I was thinking about emptiness and fullness, trying to decide what it is I am feeling, exactly, in those terms. I am full of emptiness. That seems about right. I think this has to do with knowledge as an accumulated recitation rather than, as in my case, something else that cannot be converted to knowledge, as of something, but rather a more primitive notion of apprehension.
DAY
I have decided not to look back at this writing, to treat it like time and let it go, unrevised. A sort of test, to see how often, for example, I repeat something; I am aware that I repeat words often in emails and have to go back through them and delete; it’s a little skip in the brain that is worrying, as I wonder if it is the beginning of larger and larger skips. And so the whole arena of skipping begins to take on a new cast, as I skip out on passive obligations as, for instance, the faculty meeting happening exactly now. I tell myself that next semester I will attend all the meetings and be a better citizen of the community around me. It began, this day, with a meeting with a student and two of my colleagues, which I did attend. Yesterday it was very warm but today is more like November, and the clouds have come in. Rain expected. I like the idea of non sequiturs. This feels like one way to think about the world at the moment: as a great mass of events that seem not to be in relation to each other but to exist in a grim simultaneity that forbids reason, if reason is a form of temporal logic or a way finally to make meaning. Arendt speaks about this in one of her letters to Mary McCarthy; I should try to find it. It’s in the long letter Arendt wrote on August 20, 1954, in which she speaks about “common sense” as a kind of sixth sense that we all share, and which unites the other five. She writes:
The average life is led in a world given by senses and controlled and guided by common sense. If this common sense is lost, there is no common world any longer, not even that world from which the philosopher will temporarily insist on absenting himself and to which he always must return. The perversion of common sense started when it was assumed that it is not a sense which constitutes the common world, but a faculty which we have in common. This faculty is the logical faculty, the fact that we all shall say unanimously 2 plus 2 equals 4. But this faculty, though we may have it all in common, is entirely incapable of guiding us through the world or of grasping anything at all. It underlines only the utter subjunctivization, even though we may assume (wrongly of course) that all subjects are the same.*
Well, the entire letter is extraordinary; one could spend hours on it, pages on it. She wrote it in answer to McCarthy asking her about the origins of doubt in philosophy. This bit I just quoted is leading up to her answer, which turns on the question of truth:
The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always result-less. That is the difference between “philosophy” and science. Science has results; philosophy never. Thinking starts after an experience of truth struck home, so to speak.
DAY
I am listening to Marketplace on WAMC, public radio. I have been listening to this program since the beginning of the pandemic; I can’t recall how it began. I like this program for many reasons, the main being that it doesn’t engage in politics as such but nevertheless gives a kind of portrait of what is happening in the economy for individuals. And I like the host, out there in LA, who seems to be happy in his role and good at it. Anyway, this evening, a moment ago, I had the thought: it doesn’t matter; that is, I don’t matter. I am sure deep enlightenment must come from this thought, when you stop caring about whether you count. If I could get to that awareness then perhaps my ongoing anxious despair would relent, and I could just live the rest of my life, the few years left, without any interest in or concern for whether or not I count. If I could get there, then perhaps I could also be less envious, less insecure. Why this thought came to me while I was listening to Marketplace, I do not know. Ah, enduring displacement. My dream this morning was an awful episode, interesting because the dream stayed with me, whereas mostly they leave only a residue. The phrase enduring displacement is from the State Department talking about what is happening in Gaza.
DAY
It’s Friday. The day started gray and cool, overcast dull light, uninviting. One feels a little rancorous satyr lurking just below the visible world. The mood in the air is sour; everyone seems encased in a sort of brittle, unnamed disappointment or, rather, one that could be named, differently, at different times by different persons. Small and large reasons to feel unease, and this unease begins to assemble into a general discontent. Of course, all this could be projection; I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the nation, especially as I do not engage with any social media, and basically haven’t much contact, yet still one has a sense of a shared poor mood. Reasons abound; I am not going to enumerate; they are certainly public knowledge. In New York the other day, a sense of ubiquitous incivility caused by this general anxious discontent; so little humor, so little sense of comradery among strangers, which used to be the most delighted awareness on city streets. The taxi driver was not a good person, and aside from crawling down and across, not his fault but also clearly neither his concern, he was listening to a harangue on the radio. He dropped me off where Penn Station once was, pointing me to a sign, “Penn Station,” but it turned out this was the subway station, and down I went only to come back upstairs, feeling disoriented, not knowing how to read the geography. It is a talent one has when one lives in a city, but it can be lost. Which way east, which west? Once the sun is gone, no way to tell. Anyway, I stopped a woman to ask if she knew where the entrance to Penn Station was, and she very kindly took out her phone and asked it. I walked to Eighth Avenue and then downtown and finally found the entrance. I have developed an antipathy to Moynihan Hall and prefer to go down into the miserably cold arena of the old Penn Station and wait with the travelers going home to New Jersey after a long day. Some days one eats stupidly. This has been one of those days. They take a toll. One of the clues to aging with some sense of control is to eat well, meaning not with rigidity or abstention, but with an awareness of how one’s body responds to different kinds of food. This is not always obvious; it isn’t about allergies or difficult digestion, it’s more about energies, mental and physical. The day I was stuck in Penn Station, because I had missed my train, I ate a sandwich: turkey and Swiss cheese on rye with a touch of mayo and mustard and lettuce. I always get this sandwich at the same place when I am in Penn Station. It isn’t unhealthy, exactly, and it tastes OK. But I feel today’s poor diet is a result of that sandwich, which made my usual discrimination about nourishment falter, and so now for a couple of days my diet has been arbitrary. Behind this chatter is a great balloon of sadness and fear and anger—not mine exactly but not entirely not mine either, as I share the sense that something has gone entirely wrong with how humans behave toward each other, the earth, language.
DAY
Some days are worth keeping. If only. Ineluctable. What is that word? Eluctari to struggle out from, so something that one cannot struggle out from. I feel there is something more to it, something about time, different from, say, inescapable. I wish I had more of these basic foundational linguistic knowledges: Latin, Greek. I wish a lot of things now that my wishing season has ended and I must endure the sum of the unmet, undone. Why my inner saboteur is feeling quite so vicious these days, I don’t know. It has nothing kind to say to me, only rebuke and recrimination: lazy, envious—these are only two. Envy is a particularly unpleasant trait; I think I have had it all my life, the wish to be like someone else, or to possess another’s possessions, her gifts, her clothes, her stuff. It comes with a taste of rancor, deeply unpleasant; I suppose it must be driven by simple insecurity; it must have begun there, with a sense of not having, not being, enough. Good enough. So dissatisfaction with whatever one did and a need for more or less constant approbation.
Last light is pale greenish blue. There is one last pear on the pear tree, and there are two pale pink roses, in November. The world continues to tear itself into pieces. Blinking. Awaiting some accurate insight. Blinking.
DAY
Came to a place of incommensurate grief. But we go on into the next day.
—In memory: Michael Lloyd Carlebach
* Between Friends. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.