Dear You,
How are you? Are you getting enough sleep? If you aren’t, I recommend reading a long novel where the burden of traversing a life in pursuit of a thing is dispatched to someone else.
I am reading a long Norwegian novel translated to English called The Other Name. Right now the narrator-protagonist is walking in the snow cradling a dog named Bragi. He is looking for an inn that used to be by the wharf but seems to have disappeared.
The writer writes long sentences and a few endless paragraphs. Everything happens in the narrator-protagonist’s thinking. The thinking feels like something happening, a life unraveling, a mind unraveling, a snowy drive.
This experience has been like entering a dream close to its makings at a safe distance from the dreamer. A contrast to podcasts pinched with cleverness and ad sales. That space is very crowded right now. Remember life before podcasts? So quiet.
I do prefer our age of podcast glut to the TV at the gym that only plays episodes of Friends — the optic-white 90s specter flattening my soul every time I go in there. It is sad seeing the Friend who died recently. Now they have really lost one and will all be picked off.
I think I understand the dream of that show: finding a third space (coffee shop) where one can desire and never get what one wants, endlessly falling through an open loop back to one’s understanding pretty friends.
Frequently I cross to the back room of my favorite bookstore (owned by my friend) to the psychology books and look for one spine: The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio. It may be the copy I sold back to the store? I don’t want it back. Will someone buy it? My life will alter when it’s gone?
To get there means passing through a narrow gauntlet, admiring a cluster of cabinets with books I can’t afford, perceived by the human presence at the stacked and sorting counter. I find myself on the right island in the right ocean again. The Feeling of What Happens.
This is my version of Friends.
Tell me, tell me how you move through this world.
Your friend,
Elaine
PS. Warm months and barefoot reading ahead…
Marilyn Monroe photographed by Eve Arnold in 1955. Monroe took Ulysses out of her car and talked about it with Arnold while Arnold was loading the film for the shoot. I like to think of her reading Molly’s part out loud. Also, her very human toes! Some iterations of this picture on the internet crop them out, which is dumb.
For subscribers, a little more deep reading from my house after the jump.
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