Note: It turns out that I’m suffering an acute case of burnout that isn’t going to be fixed by watching TV for a couple of weeks while planning all the work I’ll immediately pick up the second I feel my energy returning. Instead, I need a short sabbatical. I don’t know how long, and I don’t want to put a timeframe on it, but I can assure my readers of two things:

First, paid subscriptions are going on pause while I take this brief sabbatical.

Second, I have a bunch of pieces that I’m so excited to share with you when I return.

I’ve written what I consider my best writing, including a narrative biography of the bohemian scene in 1940s Greenwich Village that’ll be published soon in one of the great literary magazines we have here on Substack, and a deep-dive into why Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, quit the comic and vanished. All that and more will be coming when I’ve recovered. This isn’t any kind of end, just a pause.

Thank you for reading and for your patience,
Matthew

The whole thing started eight weeks ago, when I woke up with a pulsing between my temples, like my brain had opened a nightclub. The day went on and the pulse got heavier, achier. It didn’t stop me from sitting at my desk, or going to work, or doing any of the thousand and one grown-up chores that make up a day, but the pain was there through it all. I went to bed with the drum and bass thumping inside my brain.

I woke up to the same drumbeat making me physically aware of the pulpy grey mass in my skull. Did all the things you’re meant to do for a headache: plenty of water, screen-free work for the day, bed early that night. Woke up the next morning with the headache. It started coming back at nights. I stopped sleeping for longer than a couple hours at a time.

After sleep, reading was the next thing to go, and for the weirdest reason. First it was the usual complaint: I couldn’t focus on a page for more than a paragraph. I tried to force myself to stay in my chair and stare at the words like a meditative act (keep bringing the attention back to the page, back to the page, ignore that thought, back to the page, put down your phone, back to the page…) and that’s when it happened. The overwhelming need to lift my eyes up and to the left. I could feel the position of my eyeballs in their sockets and, like an itch that demands scratching fingers, the muscles behind my eyes demanded I stretch them. Specifically up and to the left.

This kept happening as my eyes tried to reach the bottom of the page. Up and to the left. As the days went on and my books were read more slowly, choppy, fragments of comprehension at best, this developed into a full-blown tic that required my whole head. I’d be fine until I opened a book, then I’d have to lift my chin up like a reverse nod, flexing the place in my neck where the top of the spine meets the base of the skull. It felt mechanical, like a stiff joint that needs flexing, but I’m not entirely stupid — it was clearly psychological.

This tic made reading impossible, except for Michael Crichton novels, at first, then kids books. Like push ups for the brain, I forced myself to sit down with a big-boy book and follow the words, so I picked up William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his memoir about depression. I guess I was seeking the comfort of a like-mind, the camaraderie of the trenches. Total mistake. Miserable, I went back to escapism. I re-read Roald Dahl, then some Animorphs. I re-read the Harry Potter books. I still wasn’t sleeping, so these silly adventures were company in the darkest hours when my thoughts got dark too.

Lately, I’d been working on a deep-dive story about Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. It was a passion project that thrilled me when I first started researching it. I’d written about 3,500 words of what was looking likely to reach 6,000 words easy. I couldn’t write it any more. It would take me half a day to drag myself to my desk, wrapped in an old cardigan. I’d shift a paragraph, delete a line, stare for a while, and my heart would start racing, shallow breaths. The ache in my head would be doing its thing, the tic in my neck would be ticking, and the page remained blank.

I’d shut the laptop and tell myself I was sweating because the weather was warming up, tell myself my heart was racing because I drank too much caffeine, didn’t get enough sleep, tell myself I’d be back on form tomorrow and the essay could wait until then, tell myself to go do something useful so I wouldn’t be a complete waste of DNA. I told myself a lot of things to avoid the obvious — that I wasn’t very well. Then the panic attacks started.

I kept turning up to the day job, surprised at how much more I could deal with than I’d have guessed at the start of a shift. Rude customers, difficult transactions, people needing things from me — I handled it all. I actually felt my best when I was helping a customer to their seat in the theatre or making an elderly customer feel less alone. Few things get you through a hard time like helping others get through hard times.

But the work was mentally draining and the emotional strain was too much. I got called in for a meeting with two managers and, to all of our surprise (and a hefty serving of embarrassment), I started to cry. I never cry. I’ve written about how hard I find it to cry. Somehow, in that board room with my employer looking uncomfortable, I went from zero to sobbing mess in a heartbeat. The fortification I’d built around my pain came down like the walls of Jericho, standing, standing, then suddenly collapsed.

Burnout. Depression. The boo-hoos. Plenty of things you can call it. Don’t know what to tell you about where it came from. There’s stuff going on, sure, but it’s like that line in that Bright Eyes song: “The reasons all have run away, but the feeling never did.”

So, skipping to the end: I’m taking some time off of work. And I’ve made the decision — for the first time in nine years since starting this project — to take a break from Volumes. Only for a month. We’ll be back here soon enough. But if I’m going to publish the kind of thing I think is worth reading, the kind of thing you deserve in return for your subscription and your support, I’ll have to take care of my stuff first.

I’m looking forward to reading again. And sleep. Man, I’d love to sleep.

All the best,
Matthew

Last week, I was between books and grumpy, so I went looking for something to read. I wandered around the room I call my library, lost, like I’d been sent to a supermarket but left the list at home. I was sure there was a specific book I wanted to be reading, I just had to work out what it was.

This is the problem with being, as I am, a mood reader. Sometimes, I can’t find the book to match (or correct) how I’m feeling. It’s also why I avoid book clubs — a month might be plenty of time to read the novel, but it’s rarely the month in which I feel like reading that novel. I wince when someone lends me a book and says, “You should read this.” No, thanks. I’ll read it when I’m ready.

Being a mood reader feels like a failing, like an undeveloped sense of discipline. I see other writers announcing which books they’re going to read in the coming year, which ones they’ll read each month (each week, for the total psychopaths). I’ve tried that, but I get to the third book on the schedule and start to itch with boredom. My inner punk rebels against planning.

This is at odds with how I think about reading. Books should stretch my capabilities to better expand my mind. I believe readers owe something to books, that we should give them our attention even if we don’t feel like giving it — but then I treat them as vending machines of entertainment from which I take, take, take. I feel like George in Isherwood’s A Single Man:

“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly — despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public — to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”

I know that picking up the damned book will be worth it if I can push past my mood. Still, there’s always plenty of great books left to read, and deciding between them has a remarkable amount to do with whim. I listen to the critics to help me sort out my options, but I listen to my gut to choose between those. My mood decides between Moby Dick and Middlemarch.

My choices on this day when I couldn’t work out what to read were anything from the dozens of bookcases around my apartment. I tried to listen to my gut, which told me the book I wanted would be set in a city, an American city, an American east coast city. New York, obviously. It would be about writers. Something like The Bell Jar, but not The Bell Jar because a) I re-read that last year, and b) I didn’t love it. Truth is I barely even liked it.

Was it a shortcoming on my part? Entirely possible — I’d been in a pre-depressive funk for a few weeks, and there’s no accounting for how a mood disorder will affect your tastes. But I like to think I’m a little savvier as a reader, that I base my judgments on more than temper. There have been times when remarkable prose lifted a bad mood, and times when a great mood wasn’t enough to salvage a terrible book. There’s more to reading than feeling. That’s why I’m still thinking about The Bell Jar a year later, trying to figure out what went wrong in my reading: me or the book?

When I first read The Bell Jar some twenty years ago, I found it hard to divorce Plath’s fiction from her life. I noticed the obvious overlaps: the scholarship awarded to Esther (Plath’s narrator) and Plath’s own Fulbright Scholarship; Esther’s desire to write poetry and Plath’s posthumous status as an important poet; the mental anguish suffered by both creator and creation. That kind of Easter-egg hunt is fun but superficial. It’s just recognising details from the author’s life as they make cameo appearances in her book. So, this time reading The Bell Jar, I ignored those similarities.

My mind, being my original nemesis, started recognising different overlaps — this time with contemporary book trends. There’s the small-town girl goes to the big city storyline, and the self-reference rife in autofiction, but the most obvious (and irritating) thing that now litters a certain type of fiction is Plath’s proclivity for single-line paragraphs, the kind designed to shortcut profundity.

Because a line like this advertises its own importance.

It was reassuring to read in The Paris Review feeling apprehensive about Plath’s characteristic melodrama in using the hard return, single-sentence paragraph right there on page one of The Bell Jar:

“Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work. Having read the whole novel, I can confirm that Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work.”

There was another unexpected comparison I kept making — between The Bell Jar and The Great Gatsby, which I’d re-read only a few weeks earlier. I went in remembering that I’d enjoyed Gatsby well enough but it hadn’t bowled me over, and I came out blown away by Fitzgerald’s prose, Carraway’s voice, the ingenuity of the plot, and the depth of its themes. I returned to The Bell Jar believing it to be a work of unadulterated genius, and I closed the book feeling largely unmoved. At an intellectual level, I could see that it’s a fine novel, that it deserves to be considered a modern classic, and I’d understand someone telling me it was their favourite book. I “got” it — I just didn’t feel it.

I haven’t been able to work out why I felt so apathetic about this novel. It’s a hell of a lot easier to explain what you love about a book or why you hate it. Both of those are active feelings about attributes that can be pointed at; articulating why a book fails to connect often means gesturing at absences, trying to name things that aren’t there.

One thing The Bell Jar showed me clearly: being a pure mood reader, only reading what suits a mood and abandoning books when they don’t, is a good way to miss out on greater riches. I didn’t love Plath’s novel as much as I’d hoped to, but it gave me a ton to think and write about. I got a whole essay (that you can read here) out of a book I didn’t enjoy.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering why the book didn’t work the second time, and at some later point in my life, I’ll read it again. Maybe then I’ll be in the right mood.

“What’re you doing?” my dad asked when he called one evening. I was doing nothing, bored, so I sat up straight when I caught the excitement in his voice. “Get over here, I’ve got a haul to share with you.”

When I got to his house, there were cardboard boxes spread across the floor of the living room, and he was rubbing his hands the way you do only if you’re the villain in campy movies. There were dozens of books in these boxes, and they’d been poached from a school library.

Poached is the wrong word. The school librarian wanted rid of them to make space in the library (for more books, I have to hope), and my dad was working back then as a teacher’s assistant, so he was sent home with several boxes full of hardbacks. He called me over so we could go through them together, deciding which of us would take which books.

If a person’s love of reading can be traced back to an origin the way eye colour goes back to a gene from one parent or another, I definitely got my bookishness from my dad. He also handed down to me his love of the pun and of puerile wit.

One of the boxes we looked through had the full works of Anthony Trollope, which neither of us wanted, but my dad and I laughed when I pointed out we had a box of Trollopes. It was the unsophisticated humour of homophones and the asinine pleasure of an archaic insult. It was also memory-making to giggle together like schoolboys. The comradery of the moment was underscored by a well-timed eyeroll from my stepmum. (My wife sided with her by suppressing a grin beneath an unconvincingly straight face.)

All of the books my dad had here were from the Everyman’s Library series, a publishing imprint whose founder promised to publish 1,000 of the world’s classics at a price anyone could afford. He wanted everyone to have Marlowe’s “infinite riches in a little room”. My dad and I spent a fun evening dividing that infinity to share between us.

I took home two wobbling stacks of books including Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Updike’s Rabbit novels, Proust in four volumes, three novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, and Hemingway’s short stories. Each book was stripped of its dustcover — a bibliophile’s sin committed, inexplicably, by the school librarian — but each book’s birthday suit is a fabric that’s nice to touch, in a colour that’s nice to look at. My wife and I agreed the books would look good on display. We had the perfect place for them.

There’s a fireplace in our living room that looks nice but can’t be used unless (an inspector told us) we feel like dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. It had almost killed us once. My brother and I built a large fire the first winter that my wife and I were living in this apartment. We started a blaze, settled in for a movie, and an hour later had lethargising headaches.

“Man, I really need a nap,” my brother said.

“Huh?” I said, waking up.

Neither of us thought about the fact that the apartment has no carbon monoxide detector and no ventilation. All the windows and doors were closed. It was only because we decided to take a walk in the snow to shake off the sleepies that we got reacquainted with oxygen.

The upside of all this is that the fireplace is useless, except the mantelpiece, which makes a great bookshelf. So we lined our Everyman’s collection on top of the defunct fireplace, an unfortunate metaphor for being functionally useless but nice to look at.

I worry about this sometimes when I think about the fact that I have this long row of beautiful books in my living room, a collection every visitor sees as if it’s some kind of announcement about their host, yet I’ve only read a third of them. Maybe I’m a poser, an imposter, one of those people who confuses Instagram for real life. Or: Let me decorate my place as I like, please. I’ll read them eventually, and then they won’t just be things of beauty, they’ll be meaningful additions to my library. There’s just no avoiding that until these books are opened and read, they’re like the fireplace itself — functionally useless but nice to look at.

One that I have read from this collection is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which I’ve re-read a few times since. There’s infinite riches in that not-so-little book. And it’s a book that reliably makes me laugh. Honestly, that’s what I value most about it. I know it’s saying tons about war and violence, free will and futility, and the machines of bureaucratic bullshit, but what I think about when I think of Catch-22 is that it’s funny. It makes me laugh. Simple as that.

Turns out Heller would have been surprised to know his book would make so many readers laugh. He told an interviewer for The Paris Review that he’d supposed what he was writing was funny, but it surprised him to find out it was funny ha ha. He says a friend was reading an early draft of Catch-22 in another room of Heller’s apartment, and the friend kept laughing loudly, which made Heller realise he had a gift for the comic. It took an audience to reveal what he was showing them.

When I think about what makes me laugh in Catch-22, I often think about the colonel in the hospital ward with a “vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was wrong with him”. He has a “pathologist for his pathos” and a “cystologist for his cysts”, despite the fact that there’s no such thing — it’s a misspelling of “cytologist”. Best of all is his “cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard” who’s roped in to help the colonel because of a fault in the machine that allocates jobs. This misplaced expert in whales spends his sessions with the colonel “trying to discuss Moby Dick”.

I’m a sucker for the comedy of upset expectations, of reversals and non-sequiturs, when a punchline takes you by surprise. The humour I like best is like that old adage about playing chess with a pigeon; you’ve got the pieces lined up, you think you know the next move, and the bird just flips the board over, scattering the pieces and your expectations. Catch-22 is full of broken or absent chains of causality that imply a deeper meaning yet never deliver on it — like when Yossarian quits playing chess with the artillery captain because “the games were so interesting as to be foolish”.

Then there are the jokes that are only funny after you’ve seen the shape of the whole book, like the opening line, which I only laughed at when I re-read the novel. It goes:

“It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

Why’s this funny? Because it never comes up again. It has nothing to do with nothing. Heller’s telling us, Sure, Yossarian’s fallen in love, but does it matter? People fall in love every day. When I re-read the first lines and realised that they go nowhere, I giggled at this authorial mischief, the dangled carrot tossed casually aside as if Heller is shrugging at us, saying, This is life: full of things that sometimes matter and sometimes don’t. Blame the inexplicable and esoteric workings of a person’s sense of humour, but I find that funny.

A friend recently picked up Catch-22 to read for the first time, which makes me happy and deeply anxious. Catch-22 is one of my personal shibboleths for assessing nascent friendships: if it can’t raise a smile, we’ll be on two sides of a chasm wondering how the other got over there. This friend is embedded in my life with no chance of losing my admiration, but we’re both the kind of person whose affection is increased by a passionate, well-argued dispute. If he doesn’t find Catch-22 funny, we’re going to have words.

In Howards End is on the Landing (which I wrote about last month), Susan Hill strikes a note of taste-related caution when it comes to comedy:

“Humour in books is a very personal thing and not a subject about which to be superior.”

Superior, no, but occasionally mystified. I meet smart people who enjoy movies that pass off the dullest clichés as jokes, and I can’t make sense of it. Friends who’d throw out any book full of banalities will giggle mindlessly at the same in sitcoms, as if their intellectual nerve-endings are numbed by a laugh track.

Then I remember sniggering at the box of Trollopes and realise there are many, many stupid things I find funny. Laugh and let laugh, I guess.

I have two stories to tell you about one thing.

The first story is about something I read last week, about how it saw into and right through me.

The second story is about how the thing I read is an endangered species. One day, you might not be able to read it.

1.

When we lived in Mexico, my wife went to a language school so one of us would have more than the smallest of phrasebook small-talk. At the school, when US students called themselves “American”, her Mexican teacher would insist, defiant and irritated, that he too was American. We wondered about this because, a few months earlier, a man had won the US presidency in spite of (or because of) talking about Mexicans like a drunk uncle.

Maybe this was an attempt to show that linguistic walls are as absurd as the actual wall Trump had recently proposed. Maybe it was meant to reveal the inherent subjectivity in constructs such as American and Mexican, or us and them. Maybe it was a rejection of yanking the term “American” from people who’d occupied the continent long before the United States was born.

I asked some friends in Guanajuato, and they said that’s how geography was taught in their schools: teachers described the Americas as “the Americas” without (as they do where I grew up) delineating between north and south. Sure, but their sharpness when they corrected you on it? That seemed like something deeper than cartography.

I thought about that again last week when I read “Back to Bachimba”, by Enrique Hank Lopez. The essay’s written with the clear vision of a sharpshooter, and it impressed me so much I kept thinking the word “bravura”, a word I’ve never used in real life so I had to double check its meaning — yes, this was indeed a piece of bravura writing.

Lopez writes about how being born in Mexico and raised in the US bifurcated his sense of self. To describe that duality, he borrows the term pocho. “A pocho,” he tells us, “is a Mexican slob who has pretensions of being a gringo sonofabitch.” However:

“To me that word has come to mean ‘uprooted Mexican’, and that’s what I have been all my life. Though my entire upbringing and education took place in the United States, I have never felt completely American; and when I am in Mexico, I sometimes feel like a displaced gringo with a curiously Mexican name...”

This spoke to something so deep and part of my everyday that I never thought to give it a word. A word like pocho, though, would be a nicely concise reply to the question I get all the time, because of my accent: Where are you from?

Sometimes I say I’m from Canada, but that makes me feel duplicitous. Being “from” someplace implies singularity, a checkbox on a form to specify one nationality or another, and that’s not me.

Sometimes I explain I was born in England, moved to Canada at three months old, set the concrete of my foundation there, then my family moved back across the ocean to England, just as I entered the manic episode of my pubescent years.

Sometimes they don’t ask where I’m from, they ask where my accent is from, like it’s a scarf wrapped around my neck, a trinket picked up from travels long ago.

Sometimes I call it a “bigener accent”. Bigener means a hybrid made from crossing two species of flower. Take some of the Canadian accent — the parts of its DNA that code for the rhotic “r” and the weird way “bag” rhymes with “egg” — and cross-pollinate it with the genetic information of a West Midlands English dialect, and you’ll get my accent, which in botanical terms is a weed. I’d pluck it out and plant something prettier if I could. Maybe I should do what Lopez did:

“I finally got rid of my accent by constantly reciting ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ with little round pebbles in my mouth.”

When your accent comes from a few places, it’s easy to feel like it’s from nowhere. I don’t sound English to the English, and I don’t sound Canadian to Canadians.

I met an older Canadian once who asked me and my wife where we were from. She said, “England,” and he nodded, eyes closed, fine with this answer. He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I said, “Canada.” His eyebrows dropped, a frown, an accusation, and he said, “That’s not a Canadian accent.” I told him, well, I’m also from England, and he said I sound nothing like my English wife. I gave him an accentless shrug.

Sometimes, when US tourists heard our friends in Guanajuato call themselves “American”, the visitors made it clear that these Mexicans didn’t sound, or look, like their idea of an American. These tourists had let their idea become an ideal, and they couldn’t expand it to contain multitudes; they closed up tighter to avoid uncomfortable contradictions.

There’s a point in the essay where Lopez talks about his idea of Bachimba:

“Though I had been born there, I had always regarded ‘Bachimba’ as a fictitious, made-up, Lewis Carroll kind of word. So eight years ago, when I first returned to Mexico, I was literally stunned when I came to a crossroad south of Chihuahua and saw an old road marker: ‘Bachimba 18 km.’ Then it really exists — I shouted inwardly — Bachimba is a real town!”

Here, at last, he’d discover the reality of the Wonderland he’d imagined since his youth:

“It turned out to be a quiet, dusty village with a bleak worn-down plaza that was surrounded by nondescript buildings of uncertain vintage.”

The miracle of this essay, for me, was the collection of details about his own experience that Lopez strung together like decorative bunting, the whole as remarkable as each of its parts. Reading it, I noticed more of myself in this stranger, then I noticed how much I was a stranger to myself. There was stuff about me I hadn’t understood and stuff I didn’t even know I hadn’t understood. It took a “hyphenated American” to make it make sense.

2.

All of this started with William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, in a chapter about memoir. Zinsser used an excerpt from the “Bachimba” essay that so floored me I became determined to read the whole thing. I didn’t realise how determined I’d have to be, but stubborn is my middle name. (It’s not, but if I decided to change my middle name to “Stubborn”, no bureaucratic migraine would stop me.)

I checked the index in the Zinsser book and got the title and publication date of the Lopez essay. These turned up nothing online except references to Zinsser’s book. Then I quoted a few sentences from “Back to Bachimba” into Google, which gave me a scattering of blogs where others had written about Lopez. From there, I learned which edition of which magazine had first published “Back to Bachimba”, and after missing my shot with that on various search engines, I remembered a site called Internet Archive. So I searched there for the magazine by date. I found it, but most of the scanned pages were available only if you had an account, so I made one, and there it was — the essay as originally printed in Horizon, Winter 1967. (You can find it here.)

I tell you all this only so you, hopefully, have the same half-panicked epiphany I did: that this unique piece of writing, so meaningful that it still mattered to a reader almost sixty years past print date, is on the precipice of eradication. If the Internet Archive goes down, the full essay is just...

gone.

So I highlighted the scanned magazine to copy-paste it into a Word document as an act of preservation. It wouldn’t copy, for some reason only the tech gods understand, so I took a screenshot of each page, highlighted the text from within those images, and pasted that into Word. That gave me a single five-page paragraph missing a bunch of sentences. The rest of my evening was spent manually fixing the formatting, typos, and missing lines. This document doesn’t help the wider world, but the Lopez essay is safe for this guy at least.

I don’t have a call-to-action, because I’m not sure what it would be, short of everyone becoming hoarders and filling our homes with filing cabinets stuffed with magazines, newspapers, and printouts as a grassroots stockpile of literature against a digital apocalypse.

The best I can do is to write about things as a way of pointing madly and shouting, Hey! This thing here! It’s really worth your time! Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s not about immortality. Maybe it’s just about making the most of these things while we have them.

When I was in secondary school, I knew a kid called Tristan who didn’t like me very much and whose company made me not like myself very much. He was my best friend.

Tristan knew how to make me feel small and stupid the way only a certain kind of guy friend can make you feel stupid and small. He laughed harder than anyone when a kid pointed out how big my ears were, he helpfully listed the ways my clothes weren’t cool, and for a whole school year he stopped being my friend when some popular kids let him join their group.

There was also this time when Tristan and I were maybe ten years old, and we were sneaking around the kitchen at his dad’s place. We weren’t doing anything bad, but we liked to pretend we were, like danger was one impulsive choice away. Being stupid was our favourite kind of fun.

Tristan listened for his dad napping upstairs, then dragged a rattan chair away from a table covered in more ashtrays than one man needed and a crumpled box of cigarettes we weren’t yet daring enough to touch. Standing on the chair, he opened a cupboard and took a brown bottle out of it. He showed me how to use a bottle opener. The smell puffed out of the bottle the way bubbles hiss out of a can of coke. Tristan shoved the drink under my nose and said, “Smell.”

I jerked back immediately (I thought it smelled like bad fruit and a fart) and Tristan pointed at me, laughing, describing how stupid my face looked when I grimaced. I wish I’d been clever enough to ask who looked good when they grimaced.

“Lager,” Tristan said.

“Logger?” I said. “Like a guy who cuts down trees?” (In our working-class town in the nineties, we didn’t say things like, “A guy — or girl — who cuts down trees,” but in my late teens, overtly making those distinctions became an obnoxious part of my identity.)

“No, you idiot,” Tristan said. “Lager with an ‘a’, not an ‘o”.”

This was only a year or two since my family had left Canada, and I was still confused about the way people in England pronounced even familiar words. My first problem was the Glottal-sodding-T, an exceptionally ugly abuse of throat muscles in the disservice of the English language. It makes my brain retch every time I hear the T’s dropped out of a buh-in, a sih-ee, or a keh-ul.1

My other big source of linguistic alienation was the Absent R (“aah”). I couldn’t get my head around how the English say — actually, how they don’t say — the letter ‘r’, which meant I thought Tristan was simply not saying an ‘r’ and that the drink was “larger” with a hard ‘g’.

So I wasn’t English enough or cool enough to know how “lager” was spelled. I went on thinking it was spelled “larger” for a long time, until one day I was in a supermarket with my mum and I saw those brown bottles high up on a shelf, and the price tag below them said 6 pack Lager and I realised my mistake. I thought I finally understood the differences between my accent and these foreign locals around me, but this sent me back to puzzling out how I was supposed to say every new word I learned.

I wasn’t allowed to forget my outsider’s incomprehension of the word “lager”. For a while after that, Tristan turned words like “dog” and “log” into “darg” and “larg” with an emphasis on the r that made his mockery sound less like an awkward Canadian and more like a pirate. And one night a couple of years later, we were sneaking around again — this time in the kitchen of the café his mum ran and lived above — and Tristan handed me another brown bottle and said, “Go on, dare you.”

I thought this might be the moment I regained some cool, proving myself as a young man on any rung above total novice regarding alcohol. Tristan pulled a plug from the top of the bottle, and the fumes that came wafting out singed my nose hairs.

“S’good,” Tristan said. “Not like lager.”

“This isn’t lager?”

“Jack Daniels. Much better.”

Having never had so much as the thimble of wine that went around at church for communion (kids were given grape juice), I had no idea about the etiquette of drinking alcohol or that it would burn my throat. I thought I was supposed to drink it like juice. So I chugged it down the way I chugged down juice.

I immediately belched it all back up.

I leaned over a sink and gagged, and spat, and tears came out of my eyes as freely as snot and bourbon came out of my nose, and Tristan was laughing the whole time. He kept his distance, laughing, and said, “You’re meant to sip it!” I started laughing too, to be in on the joke and not the butt of it. The self-deprecating streak in my sense of humour was born with my head over a sink, laughing at myself to drown out the sound of my sort-of-friend laughing at me.

I think Tristan must have been doing something like that, laughing at me to drown out the voice inside that made fun of him. Whatever cruel words were in his internal monologue came out of his mouth like bullets and when I got in the way I got hit. Tristan exploited whatever was broken in my self-esteem, because of whatever was broken about his. But all teenage boys are dicks in their own way, and I could be cruel too, so bygones and whatever.

Tristan and I remained sort-of-friends until we left school at sixteen, and we never spoke to each other again. That was also when I started making real friends at college, and eventually I thought those years with Tristan were purged from my mind and my heart. But those toxic friendships have a radioactive waste that decays slowly over a lifetime.

Decades later, I moved to Mexico and fumbled constantly with trying to translate my personality from English to the local lingo. The hardest part was conveying the particular way irony manifested back home. One night while having cervezas outside a café, I complimented one of our local friends, a handsome young lawyer so well put-together you assumed he must also be dim-witted or boring, but no, God really had given with both hands in his case. “You’re good-looking and intelligent,” I said. “I hate you for that.”

His smile collapsed like a building falling in on itself. For some reason, I thought doubling down might be a good way to back out of this faux pas. “I love you, you idiot.”

My failure to fix the situation was a total success. My friend was dead quiet for a few minutes while the others faked a happy conversation about nothing. Finally, I turned back to him and asked what was up.

“You said I am an idiot.” His voice was quiet, his kind eyes had never looked so sad, and it annoyed me how bad I felt.

“That’s how guys where I’m from show their friendship! I call my best friend at home a dickhead all the time. We don’t mean it. We mean that we like each other, and we show it by saying things we, you know, don’t mean.”

He looked at me like I made no sense, and I realised I made no sense to myself. So I told him sorry and squeezed his arm, and the night went on with each of us doing our best in second languages to say what we really meant.

It begins like this. Susan Hill goes searching for a book she’s lost among the shelves and bookcases filling her country home. Every room the novelist enters reveals “a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred [books] that I had never read”. Then she notices all the books she’s read and forgotten. Then the ones she remembers and wants to read again.

This leads to Howards End is on the Landing, an account of Hill’s plan to spend a year re-reading her home library. She wants to get to know these books again and, by extension, get to know herself. Re-reading a book can be like meeting up with an ex because you want to remember who you used to be, so you can affirm the person you’ve become. Like an ex, the book has seen you naked, argued with you, and shaped a bit of who you are.

Hill puts it like this:

“If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every [book] I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. The Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W. H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Toad. Howards End. What a strange person I must be.”

Howards End is on the Landing became part of who I am back when I was an adult but not yet a grown-up. In some immeasurable yet deeply felt way, it altered how I read — but I can’t remember a word of it today. I don’t like my unreliable mental record of things that matter. Hill has a bit about this too:

“Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.”

The dark stretch scares me. Sleep is sometimes compared to death, but the darkness and absence of forgetting is far worse because you’re aware of it. You know there’s something you don’t know that you used to know. Unlike death, however, forgetting can be reversed.

In December, on the darkest day of the year, I go to a bookshop and buy a second-hand copy of Howards End is on the Landing to remember what I’ve forgotten. This is how the dark stretch of winter is lit up: by reading and remembering.

I pass the finish line of December (soft sigh, body sags) and then (deep breath, shoulders back) greet January with a list for self-improvement. My New Year’s resolutions are like advisories on an MOT — you passed the test, but only just, and we recommend you fix the following so you don’t fail next year.

My resolutions always orbit books. There’s exercise and food, sure, and it’s become a mark of pride to insist on learning how to dance and reaching the end of the year without learning how to dance. But mostly it’s resolutions about how much I read, and the kind of thing I read, and new ways of structuring that reading.

Last year, I announced in these digital pages that I intended to read more books from before the twentieth century. The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men... I planned to read Silas Marner, and it sits on the shelf unread, casting judgmental looks my way. I’d meant to finish Jane Austen’s complete works, yet they remain unfinished. I’d really wanted to read Middlemarch, honestly I did, but... You get where I’m going.

Most of the books I wrote about last year were published in the twentieth century. There was A Single Man and The Bell Jar and The Haunting of Hill House and The Ghost Writer and a bunch of others. I needed no incentive to read them again. Failing my resolution resolved the fact that I am, in my soul, a twentieth century reader. This brought some blurry outlines into focus, revealing with sharper clarity what I’m doing here at Volumes.

So there’s value to these resolutions even as I fail them, because a) they keep my reading intentional — I read more of the classics than I would have without that resolution — and b) I win whether the coin comes up heads or tails. I stick to the resolution and succeed, or I fail and learn something about myself.

Besides, I’m more optimistic about my abilities than my tally of past success and failure should allow. I’ll hear about someone’s reading plan and, leaning close like a customer suckered in by a sales pitch, I’ll think, Huh. I could do that.

As I re-read Howards End is on the Landing, I consider Susan Hill’s project of re-reading for a whole year. I lean in close and think, Huh. I could do that.

There’s a story about the not-so-well-known historian David Herbert Donald hosting a party at his home for the far-better-known Gore Vidal. Looking over the stacks of books in every room of the house, Vidal asks his host how many books he owns. Donald shrugs and says, “About 12,000.” Vidal, somewhat surprisingly for a man of letters, asks the question non-readers ask when they enter a reader’s home and see all the books: “Have you read them all?” Another shrug and Donald says, “No, but I know what’s in them.”

Could I say the same? How well do I know what’s in the books I own? As Bilbo Baggins said (sort of), I don’t know half of them half as well as I should like. I don’t know the full work of any author the way Susan Hill knows, say, the books of Dickens. There’s a bit in Howards End is on the Landing where Hill talks about her relationship with Dickens and she says:

“His flaws are huge but magnificent — and all of a piece with the whole. A perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one.”

It’s a generous thing to say and an intimate thing to know about a writer. For knowledge like this, you have to read all of a writer’s books (the minor as well as major works) and you have to read them, in Hill’s phrase, “well, widely, and deeply”. This means re-reading.

Reading a book once is like spending an evening making nice at a cocktail party where you meet each guest and find out their name, job, married, kids — the surface stuff that makes an acquaintance but not a friend. For friendship you’ve got to go deeper. You need to be able to see the full sweep of the artistic vision, by placing each book in some kind of context. That means getting to know its neighbours, its friends, its rivals.

It means getting to know a library.

Working horizontally beneath a blanket, instead of upright at my desk, is a half-holiday when I’m not feeling great, so today I’ve been writing from a makeshift bed on the sofa. Now, though, I get up and wander around my apartment, examining the books lined up and stacked and scattered around various rooms. Picking up a heavy hardback with a hessian-textured cover, I wonder how it relates to the books further along the same shelf, books by other writers working in different eras and genres.

They have the alphabet in common, sure, and that’s how Philip Roth ends up at Sylvia Plath’s table with Muriel Spark a few seats over. They’re also together because they fit some scheme by which I’ve organised my books. I wonder if that reveals something — about the books, about me, about anything. I think it’s the particular sequence of books in our own libraries, the ways they interact and catalyse each other, that makes up our literary DNA.

“Literary DNA” isn’t my phrase, it’s Susan Hill’s, and its flirty little appearance in my mind makes me realise that I overlooked a key part of that quote I copied out above, where Hill says that books are a part of who she is:

“But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”

Still wandering from room to room, I casually catalogue the novels, poetry collections, short story anthologies, comic books, and non-fiction on the shelves, bookcases, counters, ledges, and tables in my home. This is my literary DNA.

That should be the challenge for this year — to get to know my library again. To lose myself in the wood of books that’s grown around me over so many years, and to rediscover who and where I’ve been, what I’ve done and believed, with an eye on where it might lead me.

This is my modest though meaningful resolution for the year: to read and remember.

This month, I re-read Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, which meant I got to re-read this paragraph and its laconic last line:

“I know people who own thousands of books and can tell you the exact spot where every single one of them is shelved. They colour coordinate them, or arrange them by alphabet or author or subject. Well, that is what collectors enjoy doing, with books arranged like stamps in albums. Good luck to them. My father’s sock drawer was just the same.”

I’d forgotten the line, so I got it fresh for a second time, and I laughed at this unexpected snark, her graceful derision, a crocodile smile. The unflashy flourish hits so hard because of how softly the punch is thrown. If she’d belaboured the laugh line the humour would sag, but it’s dropped in deftly and moved on from smoothly, the way these things work best.

This is one of my favourite novelistic tricks: when a writer casually shatters your heart or mends one of its fractures with a single sentence, while seeming infinitely chill about the whole thing. They raise a smile in the midst of a bad day with a few well-placed words, or toss a profundity into your soul like a penny into a fountain, and they do it with nonchalant confidence, the way Superman hops over tall buildings without breaking a sweat.

One of my favourites in this category comes in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, when Zuckerman is in Lonoff’s study and he hears voices in the room above:

“I thought of climbing onto Lonoff’s desk; it was easily a foot or so higher than the daybed and would put my ear only inches from the room’s low ceiling. But if I should fall, if I should alter by a millimeter the placement of his typing paper, if somehow I should leave footprints — no, I couldn’t risk it and shouldn’t even have been thinking of it. I had gone far enough already by expropriating the corner of the desk to compose my half dozen unfinished letters home. My sense of propriety, not to mention the author’s gracious hospitality, required me to restrain myself from committing such a sordid, callow little indecency.

But in the meantime I had done it.”

That turn! There’s nothing telegraphed to say brace yourself for the kick, nothing more than those eight words, and no milking the laugh. This kind of writing makes me want to throw pages of it at my friends.

It does more than make me laugh (though that would be enough). This single line exemplifies one of the novel’s central struggles — between the ought and the want. It’s a fight between Nathan’s superego and the writer’s id, reflecting the conflict between Nathan’s father telling him to stay quiet about his family’s faith and Nathan’s urge to display it all on the page, like a dissected frog pinned with skin spread and guts exposed. The writer here is a free-thinking scientist of the soul. Roth shows-doesn’t-tell with this understated one-line reveal.

There’s one of these in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Here, the reader inhabits a character by way of the second person; you are in a hospital, in a coma, aware that your parents are at your bedside:

“Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly coloured origami cranes into garlands. [...] Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them.

This is marriage.”

The greatest of these, for my money, comes at the end of The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro is the maestro of minimalist mood music, saying so much with so little and dazzling us even with mundane sentences. I’m not going to quote it. Read the book if you haven’t already. The context for what he achieves in Remains is the 236 pages that precede this single, devastating line, and I don’t want to diminish this one-sentence third-act climax by reproducing it here.

It’s worth, however, sharing Ishiguro’s thoughts on how the line came to be in his book:

“I thought I’d finished Remains, but then one evening heard Tom Waits singing his song ‘Ruby’s Arms’. It’s a ballad about a soldier leaving his lover sleeping in the early hours to go away on a train. Nothing unusual in that. But the song is sung in the voice of a rough American hobo type utterly unaccustomed to wearing his emotions on his sleeve. And there comes a moment, when the singer declares his heart is breaking, that’s almost unbearably moving because of the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to utter it. Waits sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness. I heard this and reversed a decision I’d made, that Stevens would remain emotionally buttoned up right to the bitter end. I decided that at just one point — which I’d have to choose very carefully — his rigid defence would crack, and a hitherto concealed tragic romanticism would be glimpsed.”

It’s no spoiler to say that the moment absolutely lands, that it’s timed just right without a letter out of place. This is the sort of writing that take years, tragedies, effort-effort-effort to carve out of life’s granite looking soft as silk. It doesn’t land the same way the second time, nothing’s quite like that first surprise, but it stays with you. The joy of it lingers as the freshness fades, a flower pressed between the pages of the book.

A few months ago, I wrote my Notes on Autumn in the warm glow of sweater season. A few minutes after publishing that column, the fuzzy feeling sharpened and the sweetness soured as I thought about what comes next: winter.

Fall might start with pumpkin-spiced everything, but it ends with pumpkin-damned-spiced every-damned-thing. The romantic flutter of falling leaves in September becomes, by December, the stark bareness of naked trees. The waning of autumn means grey daylight, the stretch of nights, and creeping cold, a slow dying that leads to death in winter.

I’d be happier with a three-season climate where autumn doesn’t succumb to winter but rolls painlessly into spring. But winter is inevitable. That might be why the literary critic Northrop Frye saw autumn as tragedy — like a tragic play, the season can’t escape its fate. The inevitability of decline is a hallmark of a good tragedy, but a defining part of watching a tragedy is that, despite knowing that things are headed for an unhappy ending, we hope against hope that things might work out somehow.

Maybe this time we can ignore Shakespeare’s opening Chorus, and Juliet will elope safely with Romeo in the end. Maybe this time the opening line of The Virgin Suicides — where the narrator tells us that all five Lisbon girls will kill themselves — will be a misdirect, and actually the sisters will be fine. Maybe this year, somehow, we won’t have a winter.

This magical thinking takes hold every autumn. For a while, the smell of wood smoke and the mulch of soggy leaves establish an atmosphere I can live with, so long as it doesn’t get any colder, any darker, if the seasonal depression stays quiet this year. Then the darkness swallows the days, and my mood grows less stable than a seesaw and as buoyant as a cannonball, but still I hope this winter will be bearable in a way no other winter ever was.

This is the tragic yearning of tragedy: for the inevitable to be preventable somehow. Philip Roth’s “blessed mysterious somehow!” The same “somehow” that allows us to live lives of inevitable mortality. We know how our story ends (it ends) but we wake, shower, drive places, read Substack, eat lunch, play at life as if we don’t know what we know, or as if it might end differently — somehow.

Unstoppable force, meet the immoveable object of my hope.

This scroogery about the season is, in my experience, best sedated with reading. Books help to resist the bah-humbug of it all. At no other time of the year is escapism more needed and less tolerant of its usual snobbish criticisms. But for some dumb reason, this year I thought I’d show that I was too savvy for Christmas cliché, for the garish sweaters and festive hold music and Coca Cola ads.

So I found an against-the-grain Christmas story that doesn’t take sentimentality as the only sentiment of the season: John Cheever’s “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor”, published in The New Yorker in 1949, in which Charlie, an embittered elevator operator, has to work on Christmas day. As tenants of the building ride his elevator and wish him a merry Christmas, he replies each time with:

“Christmas is a sad season if you’re poor. You see, I don’t have any family. I live alone in a furnished room.”

The repetition of this moment goes from tedious to ridiculous to a blend of both. The ridiculous is something Cheever leans into throughout the story. It’s sort of the whole point.

When the tenants perform a narratively unsurprising act of goodwill by sharing their food and gifts with Charlie, the reader isn’t invited to contemplate what so reliably moves people to kindness, but to laugh at the absurdity of Charlie’s situation. The longest paragraph of the story lists what he receives in exhaustive detail (meant to be more amusing than exhausting):

“There were goose, turkey, chicken, pheasant, grouse, and pigeon. There were trout and salmon, creamed scallops and oysters, lobster, crabmeat, whitebait, and clams. There were plum puddings, mince pies, mousses, puddles of melted ice cream, layer cakes, Torten, éclairs, and two slices of Bavarian cream.”

There’s echoes here of A Christmas Carol, especially Fezziwig’s party, where Dickens writes:

“There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince pies, and plenty of beer.”

When some partygoers start “pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig”, the Ghost of Christmas Past dismisses Fezziwig’s kindness as a minor thing not worth celebrating. “He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money,” says the ghost. “Is that so much that he deserves this praise?” Scrooge, bristling and newly righteous, insists that “the happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Cheever, on the other hand, seems to take the spirit’s side. In his story, every act of kindness is a mere surplus of consumer spoils rendered axiologically empty by how little they cost to give away. The miserliness of Cheever’s vision is snide and didactic. You get the feeling that he didn’t have a story to tell as much as a point to make, and the point is: Don’t buy all that crap about kindness at Christmas. People are self-serving in their efforts to seem selfless.

In the penultimate line of Cheever’s tale (perhaps the best of many well styled sentences here), a woman rushes to perform some charity because “we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over”. Licentious benevolence is the kind of phrase that makes an instant home in your memory and rewards close attention. It suggests that charity might be untoward, maybe even immoral, something to snub in favour of restraint. It’s a phrase that could have come straight from Scrooge.

Having read Cheever’s story, I no longer want to be cool about Christmas. Winter and its nights are terribly long, and I have a daily low-level bad mood brought on by the dark and the cold, and I’m fighting it off with fistfuls of Vitamin D tablets and the glare of a SAD lamp, so excuse me if I don’t scoff at simple things that bring simple pleasure. I’ll take what cheer I can get, wherever I can get it.

Still, it feels embarrassingly basic to write about snow drifts and mistletoe and long walks on Christmas morning. It makes me think I should write a blistering takedown of these single entendre images passed along like urban legends no one really believes yet everyone clings to. I worry the same worries Paul Auster describes in an article for The New York Times, when he had to write about Christmas:

“I spent the next several days in despair, warring the ghosts of Dickens, O. Henry, and other masters of the Yuletide spirit. The very phrase, ‘Christmas story’, had unpleasant associations for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle. Even at their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfilment dreams, fairy tales for adults, and I’d be damned if I’d ever allow myself to write something like that.”

And I hit the same wall that Auster hit next:

“And yet, how could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story? It was a contradiction in terms, an impossibility, an out-and-out conundrum.”

He has a hell of a go at writing what he deems impossible, an unsentimental Christmas story. He tells a story that wrestles with the slippery moral ambiguity of indulging a “happy lie”, an untruth that brings some joy to a deserving person. It’s about stolen cameras and a blind grandmother, but at bottom it’s about the morality and utility of Christmas stories, which might be false in some aesthetic sense but deeply true, or even good, in a humanistic sense.

I liked this story, but I’m not sure about this central idea that pitches the good and the beautiful against the true. What if the sentimentality that Auster rejects in Christmas stories isn’t actually untrue? What if the unadorned hope he dismisses as “fairy tales for adults” and the goodness he brushes off as “mush and treacle” is something truer than true?

Maybe it’s the kind of thing found, in the words of E. E. Cummings, at “the root of the root” and “the sky of the sky of a tree called life”. Maybe we return to those things, year after year, because the tree “grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide”.

There’s a line I copied out years ago from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Part of the sentence does the rounds every so often on social media. Wallace writes that “what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human ... is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic”.1

This is a challenge to the modern view of irony as the highest evolution of cultural attitude. Intellectual detachment from sentiment might just be an expression of our own deep anxieties about being human.

I don’t think it’s incidental to my reading of Cheever’s story that I’m so weary of the trendy iconoclasm of our age. I think if I’d read it when it was published in the mid-twentieth century, I’d have had a different response. Cheever’s society was saturated in saccharine sincerity, but I read it in an age that’s worn itself out with insistent irony. He and I were both reacting against our own contexts.

There’s a bit in Cheever’s story where he tells us that Charlie resents being an elevator operator and “held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers ... as if they had clipped his wings”. Later, though, he sees his vertical travel as a kind of superpower, and he giddily speeds up and down the building in his elevator. What’s changed? Well, things around his job have changed, from being fed and given gifts to feeling seen where before he’d felt invisible. The context has changed.

How an audience reacts to what they’re shown depends, to some non-negligible degree, on where and when and how they receive the thing. I might re-read Cheever’s story in summer and appreciate it better out of season, just as I once re-read A Christmas Carol in spring and saw it as a little naive and very heavy-handed.

For now, in the darkest part of the year, I want a little light. Maybe not Christmas carols and kitschy knitwear, but something warm, something kind. Even if it’s only a fairy tale for adults.

Today I’m being published by . This is an essay I first ran here at Volumes last year, and it’s one of a few that, if I ever published a “best of”, would absolutely be in it. It was my first serious attempt at bringing a sense of storytelling to my essays, by weaving ideas into a narrative. It features Michael Crichton, Stephen King, seaside reading, and swapping a T. rex desk for pizza with your family.

The essay can be read here:

Inner Life

Put Your Desk in the Corner

We drove out of the city, after five days of weather so hot it felt like concrete could melt. The weekend was finally cooling after the heatwave, and it was my wife’s birthday, so two of our closest friends got in our car and we made for a beach. It was more than the heatwave that I was trying…

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5 months ago · Matthew Morgan

Thanks for reading. See you back here in a fortnight, in the digital pages of Volumes.

Matthew

Take a look at this sentence:

“Writing future the king twilit on park Allosaurus mythology.”

I understand each of those words on their own. I know what “writing” means and “future” and so on. But I don’t get what they mean in relation to each other in this particular sequence.

That’s how I felt when I started reading Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth. Each chapter and its paragraphs are intelligible in their own right, but I kept wondering what one had to do with another. I’d turn a page and think, How did we end up here?

How, for instance, did we get to this lengthy sermon on the impossibility of colonising Mars? And why are we now, a paragraph later, talking about AI systems learning to win at chess? And why is the page-long second chapter a description of how future intergalactic travellers will end up turning “pale and translucent, like outsized maggots”?

Back to the nonsense sentence above: someone could squint at the string of words and interpret (or interpolate) some meaning in it. Somebody else could suggest that I randomly plucked the words from books scattered around my desk. Others might say the sentence took form while I suffered a stroke. They’d all be arguing over what’s true about the sentence.

For the first few chapters of The Future of Truth, I obsessed over what the book means in that final, declarative sense so beloved by fundamentalists and the exhausted.1 Then I reconsidered Herzog’s claim on page one that truth is a journey, and I let myself relax into the flow of his prose, circle the eddies of his anecdotes, hoping the whole thing won’t just topple over the precipice of a terminating waterfall.

I should have said this at the top: I’m writing this in real time, having just finished chapter three. Stay tuned.

The Future of Truth is making me feel, on different pages, exhilarated and frustrated.

The exhilaration comes when I give myself over to Herzog’s decision to recount the entire plot of an opera, or write about a pig that gets stuck in a garbage chute and grows to take on “cubic form, wobbly as a great hunk of Jello”. Sure, I think, I’ll wander this way with you.

The frustration erupts when Herzog tries to get away with writing something like, “There is next to no difference between truth and the imitation of feelings” and moving breezily along. This is a remarkable claim for anyone to make, but to leave it unpacked in a book about the nature of truth is bizarre. Equally bizarre: the mid-paragraph leap from wishing poets were used as astronauts to some business section thoughts on Elon Musk as a corporate player.

Having passed the midpoint of this 110-page something, frustration has tipped the scale. I keep hoping for some deeper insight in what increasingly looks like a grab bag of Wikipedia entries chosen by someone with pinball attention. I’ve just read a series of barely connected anecdotes about Princess Diana’s death, actors hired to be family for the day, and Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic, ending with a hypothetical about the great explorer making pornography. What, I wonder, are we doing here?

It’s hard to escape the feeling of reading lists, especially when Herzog writes, “Let me list just a few here ...” and drops the names of some philosophers. Later, “I will list just a few ...” and we get a bunch of conspiracy theories. You look for something deeper than the list, something that turns it from mundane to meaningful, the difference between story and plot.2

There’s a whole chapter on crop circles and alien abductions that’s kind of interesting if you’ve never read about these things — but if, like me, you had a weird interest in the paranormal between the ages of nine and thirteen, or you have a friend who believes in aliens and talks about them after a few drinks, a page of this is more than enough.

Again, I want to know what Herzog’s going to do with these facts.

I think I get it, at last.

It’s not what I wanted — not that I’m owed anything by any writer — but it’s there: a discernible purpose, scrawled between the lines in lemon juice, and once you see it the book makes sense. It’s hinted at on the first page (before going largely ignored for the next seventy-five):

“I don’t think the truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving.”

Asked once what I think the meaning of life is, I said it’s to ask that very question. I said it in a glib tone of voice, and there’s something self-satisfied and artificially clever about it, but I also meant it sincerely. The truth — like meaning — isn’t a destination, it’s a direction.

This dichotomy sits between how I was reading The Future of Truth and how Herzog intends it to be read. The book isn’t an intellectual argument; it’s an experience to be had. It’s not leading the reader to a conclusion by way of evidence and syllogisms; we’re just going on a stroll. Like a new age guru with no time for new age gurus, Herzog wants us to look around and, like, be here in the moment, man.

I often keep two sets of books as a twenty-first century child of new atheism and someone who sees the world as a work of poetry. My most profound experiences come to me through metaphor and irony rather than facts and mathematics, but I still seek the affirmation of logic. Reading Herzog’s book with the heart instead of the head was a challenge. Still, whenever I demanded Herzog prove his point, or at least spell it out more clearly, I remembered this line from Christopher Hitchens:

“The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke.”

The Future of Truth is definitely a joke, and like all the best jokes, it works because of the relationship between humour and the truth. Unlike comedy, however, there’s no clear punchline here. I’m pretty sure that’s what Herzog is giggling about.

On mornings when my wife wakes up and says she had a dream, I say, “Don’t tell me,” which is what Joan Didion’s husband used to say when she’d had a dream. A second later, also like Didion’s husband, I listen to it anyway.

You know she really wants to talk about it when she says, “It was really strange.” The problem is all dreams are strange, and that’s what boring about them. They’re absurdist and follow no reason, like experimental jazz contemptuously disregarding rhythm. Dreams are a series of things happening with no why for their happening, the way children tell stories — then I did this, then that happened, then she said, and then...

Dreams in novels are tedious things I usually skim. I’ve read them done well in rare instances, but mostly they’re a nothing in the non-mind of a non-entity, a thematic metaphor the writer failed to fold into the dough of the story. I’m just as disinterested in my own night-time hallucinations. Dreaming tires me out; I wake up feeling like I haven’t yet fallen asleep. And my dreams are usually unsettling. Psychoanalysts among my readers can make of that whatever they will.

With all that said: I recently had a dream I want to tell you about. Hear me out (or don’t — you don’t have to indulge my hypocrisy).

I’m in a room sort of like my study, and it’s full of my books and papers, and as the dream begins (the way they all do, in media res) I realise I’ve been poisoned. I have five minutes to live. I call frantically for my wife and we have a tear-filled farewell worthy of a good melodrama. Then I turn to my bookcases to solve the last question I will ever need to answer: What should I read with my final minutes?

I panic, scouring titles lined up in an order that was useful when I had life to live but, now, offers no guidance about what I should spend my last moments reading. It seems like a question of principle, revealing what I value in literature and who I am (was) as a reader. I wake before I’m able to choose anything, which I guess means in my dream I die without choosing. There’s a little more for the psychoanalysts to play with.

The dream stayed with me after I woke up, through breakfast, while I tried to work, while I tried to read. I was re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which features a profound on-the-page rendition of insomnia and a weird tie-in to the dream I couldn’t shake.

In the novel’s footnotes,1 Johnny Truant sleeps with a series of women (instead of actually sleeping), takes a bunch of drugs, goes the coldest of turkeys, and loses his grip on reality. He’s suffering the madness of the waking sleeper, whose each conscious moment feels increasingly dream-like. Meanwhile, a character above Johnny’s footnotes is trapped in a perfectly dark space with a novel and a book of matches. He’s probably about to die.

He lights a match to read by, but it lasts seconds before burning out, so he rips out the page he’s just read, sets it on fire, and reads the next page by that fading light. Eventually, he’s left with one page and one match:

“First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption.”

His eyes frantically track the words across and down the final page to that final word and the final full stop.

This scene of a man reading his last novel before he dies reminds me of Desmond Hume in the TV series LOST.2 Desmond keeps a ratty Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend, bound by heavy rubber bands and not to be opened until it’s sure to be the last thing he does. “I’ve read everything Mr Charles Dickens has ever written,” he explains to another character, “Every book, except this one. I’m saving it, so it’ll be the last thing I ever read before I die.”

Remembering that, along with the still bright embers of the dream I’d had, got me thinking. If I knew a certain book would be the last I’d ever read, which book would I want it to be?

Any answer to that question has basically no practical use. The guy to whom Desmond reveals his reading plan says, quite reasonably, “Nice idea — as long as you know when you’re gonna’ die.” You’re planning for something that in most lives can’t be planned.

It does, however, say something about a person to want their final moments planned out to that degree of detail. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of those productivity optimisers, the ones living life in Pomodoro intervals of life hack podcasts, speed reading Tim Ferriss books, and spreadsheeting their bowel movements. It’s an attempt to exert mastery over mortality.

I recently heard something (admittedly, on one of those “life optimising” podcasts) that kicked me in the nuts then helped me back to my feet:

“Overthinking invents more problems than it solves.”3

I’d always believed that “overthinking” was a superpower. Excessive thinking let me avoid excessive failure. I was thinking my way around future obstacles, planning the perfect route through daily detritus, to eventually reach a resting place where I could, at last, stop thinking. For the last twenty years, month to month, week on week, every day, my mind has run for a finish line I was certain I’d reach. I’d failed to see that the race track was a hamster wheel.

Yet for most of that time, I’ve had living proof that this obsessive fixation on control is definitely not the only way to live fully and successfully. Every day, my wife quietly gets on with taking moments as they’re handed to her, responding with flexibility and good humour, satisfied in each experience without fretting over squeezing out every last utilitarian drop.

I know how she’d respond if she found herself in my dream with only five minutes to read the last thing she’d ever read. Where I’d panicked and ultimately read nothing, she’d go to a bookcase, see a book and think, That looks interesting, then pick it up and start reading. She’d have four final minutes of peace with her book and her choice. That infuriates me.

When I sat down at my desk this morning to write about the question my dream prompted, I thought I’d end up putting the question to you, my readers. I thought “the point” of this piece was to offer a literary ice-breaker for parties. This was the productivity part of my mindset, looking ahead to the future purpose of the thing I’m currently doing. But I felt unfulfilled by the directedness of my words and the artificiality of leading them to a particular point.

Instead, I considered the worry that drives me yet rarely leads anywhere profound. Profundity is probably like happiness, and the more you search for either, the further away they get. So I ended up writing this essay as a description of what is, not what could or should be. Maybe you recognise yourself in something here. Maybe you don’t. But it feels time for me to shed the armour I’ve been clunking around in, convinced it protects me when it’s just weighing me down. Because that’s what overthinking is: the avoidance of vulnerability.

Seven years ago, my brother (who isn’t a big reader) and my wife (who is) were looking at a book that had been sitting unread on one of my shelves for the previous seven years. It was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. They were flipping through its 709 pages of upside-down text, mirror writing, chapter-long footnotes, various typefaces and font colours and storylines, and my brother said, “I wouldn’t know how to read this.”

My wife said, “Where would you even begin?”

“Page one,” I said, facetious yet irrefutable. I remembered the King’s advice in Alice in Wonderland:

“Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

There’s no other way to read a book (to read it well), but even that can stump a person. For all my glibness, I still hadn’t read the thing, because of some anxiety that I’d find myself not up to the task of reading such a strange book. So I decided to just sit down and read it. I started — you guessed it — at page one.

A few days ago, I finally read something else I’d been putting off: “Revolution Man” by , a deep-dive into Danielewski’s unfinished literary boxset, The Familiar, and also the demise of Borders, and also the second Golden Age of TV, and also Danielewski’s father and his relationship with Nobel-winning writer Pearl Buck, and also...

This is form suiting function — a playfully discursive spinning-top circling a playfully discursive writer — even if it sounds like an overstuffed closet you’re too scared to open because all the stuff inside will avalanche out and bury you beneath it. But Sorondo’s a magician: he shows you everything he’s putting inside the magic wardrobe, closes the door to do his abracadabra on the page, then opens it up to show you a tightly controlled, yet loosely gripped, story.

Like I said, I’d been putting it off, but not for the reason it took me so long to get to House of Leaves. This time it was for two boringly basic reasons:

1. I knew I’d enjoy it, so I was deferring the gratification, waiting for the perfect morning with a great cup of coffee and nothing to distract me from the experience.

2. It’s incredibly long for something I was going to read on a screen.

That second one is not, obviously, a creative fault; the piece is precisely as long as it needs to be, to the paragraph. It’s a flaw in my ability to pay attention to word-shaped pixels. I need the flow of writing on physical paper. A strange ocular stigmatism sets in after about fifteen minutes of sustained reading on a screen, so I came up with a solution.

Here’s how Sorondo describes Danielewski’s second book, Only Revolutions:

“It’s 360 pages long, with 360 words to a page, across 36 lines, and after the 18^th line, you have to rotate the book 180 degrees to read the bottom 18 lines, written from the perspective of the other one of the book’s two allegorical young-lover narrators. Thus you’re handling the book like a steering wheel. Turning and turning. Hence its themes, too, of cyclicality: in nature, in culture, in history.”

The physicality of Danielewski’s work is a feature not only of his novels’ intelligence but of their heart. I can’t imagine reading House of Leaves without coming away with the smell of paper on my fingertips.

There’s a similar reading experience, much less serious though no less fun, in S. by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams. The book is annotated by two of its own characters and stuffed with diagrams scribbled on postcards, maps sketched on napkins, and handwritten letters (real items that can be removed from the book, played with, explored, the same way the book’s characters do in the story).

In an author’s note added to the e-version of S., they write:

“The digital version attempts to work with platform limitations to replicate the experience of the physical book. [...] But please know that the experience of looking at the digital reproductions of these items is decidedly different from that of reading and holding the physical book of S.; of flipping through the novel within it; of holding and examining the ephemeral clues throughout it.”

This is what I decided to bring to reading Sorondo’s essay. I printed it out, stapled it together across the right angle of the top left corner, and finally stopped waiting to read it.

Sorondo’s essay was published in , an online publication near the heart of what many see as a revitalised book scene in the digital pages of Substack.

One of the things I most appreciate about The Met Review (besides — cards on the table — their having published me earlier this year) is that they take a much longer-than-usual view of what deserves reviewing or writing about. The novel I reviewed for them came out a year-and-a-half earlier, and many of the books you can read about there have been out for longer. This gives books greater lifespans than they ordinarily get, by keeping a novel in the public’s consciousness or bringing it back to life. Not all books that fade quickly deserve to; sometimes it’s not a problem with the literature but with our cultural attention span.

There’s an article in (also a player in the resurgence of something like a literary culture on Substack) that shows how a more patient model of criticism defies “hot take” culture. The piece is called “Why Viral Literary Criticism is Very Very Bad” and its author writes about how online virality teaches some very very bad ideas:

“[My] upbringing on the internet has instilled in me some core tenets: my opinions need to form quickly (lest I lose the chance to benefit from the cultural conversation), and my thoughts need to be punchy and digestible (even if it means reducing a work to some key takeaways).”

What’s at stake in all of this?

“What lies at stake, then, is our own capacity for consideration: how do we sit with art and let it enrich our lives — how do we find meaning in literature beyond whether it is Good or Bad?”

Because of what I do with turning reading into writing, I’m occasionally gripped by the well-dressed yet ultimately insubstantial idea that I should be reading The Latest Thing, the novel that’s still warm from the press and bound to be kept warm by the hottest takes. So I pre-ordered a Very New Novel, had it delivered on publication day, read it that evening, and spent the next few days bleaching it out of my head with other, better, older books.

The Very New Novel was a rogue’s gallery of all the worst contemporary literary fads. Nothings happens, except for the tediously documented introspection of its characters for whom nothing exists but their own feelings. This kind of thing is the outcome of a culture obsessed with self-improvement, whose dialect is built out of jargon straight from the therapist’s office. At a thematic and conceptual level, the Very New Novel ran out of steam about a third of the way in. Then came this try-hard line (which even gets the forced-profundity of a single-sentence paragraph):

“Discover was one letter away from divorce.”

This is the kind of half-observation leading nowhere for which Ocean Vuong has recently been called out. (See: “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”) For the rest of the book, I kept sighing so hard it sounded like my soul leaving my body. And here’s the kicker: that Very New Novel generated zero discussion anywhere I hang out online or among any of the people who I read for their thoughts on books.

But nothing close to that happened when I read House of Leaves, twenty years after it was published. After two decades, people were still talking about it, still writing long, wonderful essays about this Not New Novel. My advice is to read that old book you’ve been putting off reading, and let the new stuff wait a little longer.

I hate the phrase “first world problems”, if only for its cringe-inducing note of virtue signalling. Still, there are problems and there are problems. Like the other week when I was blank-faced staring at my books for an unmentionably stupid amount of time, because I couldn’t decide what to read. I thought, ‘Okay, this is a first world problem.’

There’s north of a thousand books bending the shelves of my cheap bookcases, so it wasn’t a lack of something to read. It was a surplus of novels calling for my attention. I had to extinguish all the possible worlds of reading to keep one actual universe alive. I’d pick a novel, think about the other novels I’d be missing out on, then put it back and repeat the process with a novel two or three doors down. All while dead-eyed staring at a wall of books.

I read a story in a memoir (maybe) by a professor (I think) about going into a store and finding one of his (or her) students paralysed in front of a wall of pens. The student had been unable to choose a pen for twenty minutes. This was America soon after the Cold War. She’d grown up in Soviet Russia. Back home, she said, there was one type of everything and your only choice was yes or no. Sometimes you didn’t even get that. Here, with ninety versions of two types of pen, she was overwhelmed. Stuck.

Bored of indecision, I grabbed the nearest novel that might match my mood: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. A re-read perfectly suited for that moment — because Hill House is about ghosts and haunted houses and family trauma, sure, but it’s also about being unable to choose a pen.

Hill House opens with that near-perfect paragraph that gets everyone excited and, rightly, tops many lists of literature’s best openings. It’s so widely discussed that it’d be a little boring to discuss it much further (but it’d be even more boring to pretend it doesn’t deserve that attention), so we’ll skip to the start of the story, where a death sets a young woman free.

Eleanor Vance — actually thirty-two, emotionally closer to a teenager — has spent her adult life caring for her mother, until her mother died. Nothing now will stop Eleanor finally exploring the world. Luckily, the previously unknown Dr Montague invites her to investigate “psychic disturbances in a house commonly known as ‘haunted’.” Eleanor gets in her car, leaves behind her cage in the city, and heads to Hill House, the place she’ll never leave.

Driving cross-country, Eleanor daydreams about other lives she might live, imagining a garden where she’ll “live happily ever after”, then a kingdom that turns into “a soft green picture from a fairy tale”. She could travel down this road or explore that lane, pick this life or that one, but instead she keeps putting it off. “Another day,” she thinks, “I’ll come back and break your spell.” For now, she wants to remain dazzled by the enchantment, preferring the open road and its endless choice.

This is what freedom looks like to her: an endless open road. To Eleanor, deciding on something looks like getting in a cage. She stubbornly kicks her feet and waves her arms against anything that feels restrictive, but she fails to see how this restricts her.

Later on her journey, she watches a little girl in a café refusing to drink milk from an ordinary glass. She wants her “cup of stars” that she left at home. Eleanor also wants to drink from a cup of stars. When the girl’s parents try to cajole her into using a plain cup, because it’s milk from this one or no milk at all, Eleanor wills the girl to rebel, because “once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again”.

Eleanor’s turned the absurdity of cultural relativism into something that’s somehow worse: personal relativism, which insists on a cup of stars for each person, or a cup of planets if you prefer, or no cup at all if your tastes go that way. An individually tailored view of reality at any cost, even though we usually end up paying the price ourselves. The little girl wins the battle over drinking from the ordinary cup, but that means she doesn’t get anything to drink. She’s sort of free, but she’s left thirsty.

Eleanor arrives at Hill House, where she meets Theo, who moves with laughter and “a rush of floral perfume”, and Luke, who’s “a liar” and also “a thief”. They’re overseen by Dr Montague, who uses his title “to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education” because his investigations are “utterly unscientific”.

On their first night in Hill House, they play a game of making up autobiographies for people they’ve never been, from a princess to a bullfighter to living “a mad, abandoned life ... going from garret to garret”. This is a game Eleanor plays by herself throughout Hill House, slipping in and out of personalities and lifestyles as if changing her clothes.

Re-reading this scene, I remembered how much Eleanor irritated me the first time we met. She reminded me of myself when I was a sixteen-year-old goth, and I thought my identity wasn’t just expressed by piercings and make up and clothing, but could be strong-armed into existence by those things — like styling my hair into a mohican instead of a long fringe changed me from a shy kid to a confident one as easily as it turned me from an emo to a punk.

This time I felt more patient towards Eleanor (towards my younger self?) and thought her shapeshifting identity was a response to anxiety. Maybe, I thought, she’s worried about losing her newfound freedom from duty. If she can become someone new when a responsibility becomes a burden, she can “free” herself from unwanted burdens. There’d be no need for soul searching — she can just torch the old soul and pick a new one.

Later in the story, Dr Montague says, “I think we are only afraid of ourselves,” and Luke says “No ... Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.” Not bad for a thief and a liar who cheats at cards. Maybe it takes a liar to see the truth. Hill House can apparently see them clearly and without disguise. Montague says the house “can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses” in all of them and break them apart:

“We have only one defense, and that is running away. At least it can’t follow us, can it? When we feel ourselves endangered we can leave, just as we came.”

There’s that idea again that if you want out you can just leave. Eleanor’s scared of being locked up like she felt in her mother’s house, so she runs from anything that looks like it has bars, and she’ll be running forever until she works out that not everything that keeps you in one place is a cage. Sometimes it’s an anchor keeping you where you need to be.

When I think about the people who seem most free — by which I mean unburdened by indecision, directed toward a purpose, deeply satisfied — I notice they’re people who give themselves over completely to something bigger than themselves. Parents, artists, teachers, students, the spiritually devout and the secularly devoted — they’re all, in one sense, less free than the libertine but, in a better sense, so free that they’ve stopped obsessing over freedom.

When I think about when I’ve felt truly free — the kind of free where you’ve stopped planning to live and you’re just getting on with living — it came only when I’d traded my self-centred “libertarian freedom” for a small place in something big. That deep kind of freedom comes when I’ve chosen instead of when I’m choosing. It’s the difference between having arrived and aimlessly wandering.

Imagine Eleanor at a roundabout in her journey to Hill House. There are other roads she could take, but choosing one means losing the others. Like a spinning top, she circles uselessly around until she runs out of gas. Or she takes road number one, but she’s bothered about what she’s missing down the other roads, so she turns back and drives down road number two, until she gives up on that one to try road number three. She winds up at the roundabout again and again, circling the drain.

What if she sacrificed some freedom of choice by choosing one road and committing to it? She might as well; she can’t go on indefinitely into an infinite sunset on a perpetually unrolling road. Eventually, she has to arrive somewhere, and if she doesn’t choose the destination, it’ll choose her.

And — as Eleanor finds out in an ending that earns the word haunting — she might not like what chooses her.

There’s a great clip from an interview where James Lipton explains the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the film’s own director, Steven Spielberg. He starts by pointing out that Spielberg’s father was a computer scientist and his mother a musician.

“When the spaceship lands,” Lipton says of the film’s final scene, “how do they communicate? They make music on their computers, and they are able to speak to each other.”

A visibly pleased Spielberg replies, “I’d love to say I intended that, and I realised that was my mother and father, but not until this moment.”

The scientist/artist dichotomy is everywhere in Spielberg’s filmography. It’s there in Close Encounters; it’s in Alan Grant’s traditional palaeontology versus the modern computer modelling he hates; it’s in the feud between primal Quint and academic Hooper in Jaws. Spielberg goes back to the source again and again.

A couple of years back, I trekked out on a bitter evening to see Spielberg’s lightly fictionalised memoir, The Fabelmans, and the first scene took me back to that interview. The movie opens with a young Spielberg — pseudonymised as Sammy — standing in line outside of a cinema, waiting to see a movie. His father stands in front of him, explaining the science of the cinema, describing how the illusion is created. Sammy’s mother crouches beside him and assures her son that the movie “is a wonderful dream”.

Here are the scientist and the artist, harmonising to sing their own parts of the same song.

Here is Spielberg, returning again to the source.

In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock remade his own 1934 movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much. François Truffaut said that the second pass was superior to the first, and Hitchcock told him, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”

I think about that quote when I read an author or watch a filmmaker who, book after book or film after film, orbits the gravity of a central preoccupation. I think about it when I watch a new Wes Anderson film, which looks just like his previous films but hopefully, though not always, pushes the look somewhere new. I think about it when I re-read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, especially any of his first three books.

A Pale View of Hills shows us a woman who returns to her memories because she struggles to look clearly at her present. Ishiguro’s second (more creatively successful) novel, An Artist of the Floating World, features an artist who returns to his memories because of a clash between what he once believed and what’s presently true. Ishiguro’s third (and most successful) novel, The Remains of the Day, which came out of his desire to entirely rewrite the second book, has a butler returning to his memories to make sense of his romantic life.

In all three stories, memory reveals and hides a lot.

In an interview with The Paris Review, the interviewer commends Ishiguro for showing a “chameleon-like ability” in transforming one theme into three separate novels, but he waves off the praise:

“I’ve written the same book three times. I just somehow got away with it.”

Not often, but sometimes enough, instead of reading a book I watch a film. Quite often, of those times I watch a movie, I re-watch something I’ve already seen. There’s a lot of reasons to revisit old movies and books, but one decent reason is to see how it’s done.

So the other day I re-watched The Fabelmans. I wanted to know how Spielberg keeps refrying the same ingredients without losing any flavour. I was also thinking about that Ishiguro interview in The Paris Review and wondering how he got away with writing the same book three times.

The film has a lot of the usual Spielberg fare. We get wide-eyed wonder; reaction shots in place of the thing being reacted to; mid-century Americana; suburbs and suburban families; and in the end, all is forgiven and everyone is redeemed or ultimately redeemable. The novelty in The Fabelmans — the new recipe for familiar ingredients — is self-consciousness. Spielberg knows who he is, what he does, and he’s ready at last to play with that knowledge.

Sure, we get the origin story of the director we know and love today, the expected bildungsroman of the boy discovering himself through cinema and becoming the man (and something of a myth). The too-pleasant-to-be-real nuclear family presented to us in the film’s first act is pure Spielberg, at his best and his worst — sentimentality saturates the screen. And then Spielberg spends the whole film picking this family fabric apart.

It’s like he needed fifty years and thirty-five films to get enough distance to go beyond eulogy and get into criticism.

Late in the film, Spielberg sets up a familiar scene from teen movies where the bullied genius wins over the jock who made his life hell, using his own brand of mild-mannered superpower — except nothing plays out the expected ways. The jock has a complex reaction to being flattered in Sammy’s short movie, revealing a fear of failure beneath his bravado. In a quietly masterful scene, the two boys experience rage, confusion, envy, self-doubt, scorn, respect, and, finally, a cynical rejection of the kind of simplistic, happy ending Spielberg’s lesser films are known for (E.T. and Hook, I’m looking at you).

The scene takes Spielberg’s newfound self-consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of a Spielberg film. When the jock insists that Sammy never tell anyone about his intense reaction to the short film, Sammy swears he won’t. “Unless,” he adds, “I make a movie about it.” I sat up straight at this flirtation with the postmodern from a distinctly traditional filmmaker.

Then there’s the final moment of The Fabelmans, which I’m not going to reveal here. It’s audacious and self-satisfied and probably too clever for its own good and it’s wonderful. I thought I knew what a Spielberg film was, and with a single shot, I had to rethink everything.

That’s how you get away with it.

I grew up in the mountains of British Columbia, in a town called Mission, a place that reminds me of Bill Bryson’s line about his own origins: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” I’m not the only person to come from Mission; the singer Carly Rae Jepson is from there. Mission is also where some of a show called Riverdale was filmed. I’ve only just about heard of the singer or the show, but this is fame of a kind.

When I look up Mission on that site you’re not supposed to trust for information (rhymes with “schmicky-schmedia”), I find out that my hometown is, in fact, a city. Either it grew in my absence or it seemed smaller and pokier when I was little. Kids are solipsists, and I was no different: Mission existed only as far as I explored it, like a video game rendering the world only when you move your character to that part of the map.

When you’re doggy paddling in the choppy waters of memory, objectivity feels like a branch to cling to, so I google again: Mission was reclassified as a city in 2021, a quarter century since I left. I guess the place had ambitions I was unaware of. But facts like that don’t move me; I’m interested in how I remember my hometown, correctly or not.

Mission was the kind of place where your mum might tell you to look out the window to see a grizzly bear sniffing around your garbage cans, or you’d get up to pee in the night and hear the haunting, haunted howl of a coyote. In Mission, the urban abruptly gave way to the wild. You’d be walking through a car park and cut through a gap in a bush and there you’d be in the inarguable wilderness — forests that felt like they went back to the time that all stories are once upon, with trees that reached so high and wide you were sure they’d outlast us all.

My dad and I went hiking on a wet Saturday morning. I was maybe eight years old, and I was wearing one of those raincoats that keep out the water but not the cold, and I hadn’t put the hood up like my dad told me to, so the rain was running under my collar and down my back. The earth writhed with water and worms. I almost stepped on a juicy, yellow banana slug. I can still smell the skunk cabbage at the edge of the deer trail we were following, a weed with one of those awful pongs you feel compelled to sniff twice. We were on an adventure.

Then my dad said something unexpected and magical. He told me, over his shoulder, like it was no big thing: “We’re going to have to climb across a cliff face.”

The remembering me knows this wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds — I was a kid, we weren’t free soloing — and we were only going to pass over a path many hikers followed across the top of a stony slope. My dad probably phrased it the way he did to get me excited. It worked. What he wouldn’t have anticipated is how spectacularly I misunderstood what he meant.

I followed my dad deeper into the forest believing I was going to see a hidden wonder of British Columbia: Canada’s version of Mount Rushmore. When my dad said something about us having to go over the lip of the rock face, I imagined us shuffling, side by side, along the mouth of whatever face was carved into the exposed mountainside. We’d be rugged explorers seeking handholds in each nostril as we travelled from one cheek to the other.

Frustratingly, and in violation of the desire for narrative closure, I have no memory of actually reaching the cliff, nor my reaction to the reality. I can’t picture a thing about the real rock face — but nor do I remember any disappointment. What I do remember is the fantasy, the unrestrained belief and largeness of what I’d imagined. I remember it in a single image: an absurdly large face that never existed, carved into a cliff I’ve otherwise forgotten.

In her memoir, Penelope Lively notices that “childhood memories have a high visual content”. It’s true that what I remember most clearly is what I can see most clearly. There are no passages of memory where audio plays over a black screen with footage not found stamped on it. The things I recall are always anchored to an image.

Sometimes the memory is a video, sometimes it’s a snapshot that shimmers and shakes. I used to have a picture that came with Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, a 3D image of the Jurassic Park logo, and turning it side to side made the T-rex smash through the picture in a stop-motion movement of limited range. That’s what these snapshots of memory are like.

These images are tricky things. Their memories seem more reliable because I can “see” them, like the swing I flipped off of backwards, accidentally, while the flesh of my middle finger was trapped in the links of the chain and the skin tore as I fell, leaving the V-shaped scar I’m looking at now, thirty years later. The scar proves it happened, and the picture in my head shows a red swing, so that proves it was red. But if I tell myself to picture it green, I’m just as sure it was green. The inner testimony of the courtroom sketch artist in my head is unreliable.

Still, much of it can be trusted. Lively writes about returning to Egypt after decades away and finding “that words and phrases of Arabic came swimming up, that I must once have known and had not forgotten but had put away somewhere”. I only lived in Mexico for half a year, so my Spanish was weak and has since abandoned my conscious mind — but, as Lively puts it, “the ghost of it is there in my head.” Sometimes strangers talk Spanish to me in my dreams, and I respond with a breezy, “¿Cómo puedo ayudarte?” The stranger and I shoot the bilingual shit, and when I double check in the morning, I find I was making perfect sense. It turns out I remember things that I can’t remember.

I wonder what other memories have settled beneath the sediment of my subconsciousness. That’s one reason I keep mementos scattered around my daily life, anchors to things I’m scared to forget. This is tangled up in a ton of nostalgia. Like everyone who was a kid in the nineties, I get happy-sad at the sound of a dial-up modem. The absence of smartphones in old movies feels like a temporary, vicarious detox. And there’s something reassuringly simple about a ring binder stuffed with papers, or a finger-staining newspaper folded under the arm, or a heavy encyclopaedia that cracks when you open it to look up some necessary fact.

But the way I choose to remember this past isn’t how things really were. I look back at analogue life as a wonder, as if the kid I used to be was blissfully complete with his lack of digital marvels. Back then, however, I looked forward to the MP3 players, social media, and video on demand that I didn’t even know were coming. In recreating those days in memory, I forget how bored I was while I was living them.

To tell the story I want to tell out of my memories, I have to trim back scenes here, shuffle chronology there, squash context to make today’s values fit yesterday’s social constructs. It’s what the author Daniel Kraus once called creative taxidermy, and it’s why the poet Joanna Kyger said, “Myth is the practice of memory.”

I don’t worry that I can’t picture the precise path my dad and I followed to the cliff, or the details of the actual rock. I’m just glad I know he and I went on that hike, and that I remember the face that was never there.

If you’re not a regular reader of ’s , you’re doing it wrong (where “it” is digital reading). I promise you’ll love the substack, unless you’re allergic to smooth writing peppered with sharp expressions of sharper observations.

A recent piece on the revival of autumn argues against the idea that the objectively measurable is the only way to experience life and “that the equinox is a more meaningful marker of time than the children going back to school”:

“Supplies appear in stores, the yellow buses are back on the road, and likely you itch to buy a new jacket or shoes or notebook. A new season, despite what the thermometer or earth’s rotation have to say about it.”

Here’s what I wrote in reply to that post (a comment that has the endorsement of the author’s “like”, which, as we all know, is shorthand for “what a brilliant observation surpassed only by the rare eloquence of its noble expression”):

“I’ve always trusted the seasonal barometer of the soul more than the calendar on the wall to tell me when autumn arrives. In our household, it’s already sweater weather, and I’m pleasantly haunted by the phantom scent of pencil shavings every time I hear the shush of a car through the puddles in the street.”

Current Enthusiasms is always short and straight to whatever point Alam is making, like he’s swept the clutter from his desk except for one small object that he hovers over with a magnifying glass. You look closely and clearly at that thing until it’s burned into your vision. That’s why I spent the rest of the day thinking about when autumn actually begins and how it announces itself.

The arrival of Autumn is a kind of call-and-response. The leaves that begin to litter the pavement sound, under boots, like crisp paper scrunched in a toddler’s fist: call. Then I return to a certain set of beloved films and books: response.

To celebrate the cosy sweater of autumn, my wife and I have an at-home week-long film festival. The line-up typically incudes It (a comfort film more than a horror movie) and Sleepy Hollow. There’s You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, and Moonrise Kingdom. The Holdovers recently made the line-up, and this year we plan to add Good Will Hunting. If it’s set in a college, or New England, or (the holy grail) both, the lights go out and we lean into cliché with glorious abandonment of self-conscious snootiness.

Then there’s all the books. I return to Shirley Jackson, but not the obvious choices. Hill House is for Halloween; her two-part memoir (set, no surprise, in New England) is for September. There’s The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson (Toronto, but close enough), anything by Stephen King, and chapter eight of The Great Gatsby (New York, more than close enough, and set during the fall).

I also go to “Fall in New England” from Bill Bryson’s essay collection, Notes From a Big Country. Here, he describes hiking in the seemingly continental expanse of forest in his New England backyard, where he makes two discoveries.

First, Bryson finds that only the language of hyperbole is rich enough to express the grandeur of fall in Vermont:

“It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow — flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermillion, fiery orange.”

Second, he realises that it’s only hyperbole at first glance, that the product lives up to the hype:

“For one thing, the New England landscape provides a setting that no other area of North America can rival. Its sunny white churches, covered bridges, tidy farms and clustered villages are an ideal complement to the rich earthy colours of nature. Moreover, there is a variety in its trees that few other areas achieve: oaks, beeches, aspens, sumacs, four varieties of maples, and others almost beyond counting provide a contrast that dazzles the senses. Finally, and above all, there is the brief, perfect balance of its climate in fall, with crisp, chilly nights and warm, sunny days, which help to bring all the deciduous trees to a coordinated climax. So make no mistake. For a few glorious days each October, New England is unquestionably the loveliest place on Earth.”

Those sunny white churches and covered bridges make frequent appearances in my autumnal daydreams, which are coloured by the fall foliage of this distant land I’ve never been to but yearn for every September.

Something strange: most of the things that give me the autumnal warm and fuzzies don’t relate directly to my own life.

The smell of pencil shavings wafts like a ghost smell from nowhere and transports me to my favourite season — but I don’t remember the last time I sharpened a pencil. The smell is related to the school supplies in Alam’s list of seasonal markers, the pencil cases and erasers and notebooks showing up in stores. Except I don’t have a kid, and I left school more than twenty years ago (cue the vertiginous realisation of time passing, age increasing, remaining life decreasing...).

Then, there’s the yellow school buses Alam says herald the arrival of fall. Picturing them jumpstarts the synapses permanently wired to September, except I’ve never seen a yellow bus outside of a movie. They’re not used here in England, where I’ve spent most of my life, and I don’t remember seeing any in Canada, where I spent my youngest years, though I suppose I could have just forgotten. What I’m sure of is that yellow school buses are a distinctly North American thing, just like calling autumn “fall”.

Speaking of Americanisms, here’s my current wallpaper on my Macbook:

I’ve never played American football in my life. I don’t watch it on TV. I care about it as little as I care about all forms of sportsball. I was never popular enough as a kid to have the number of friends in the painting. The house looks nothing like any house I’ve lived in or that line the streets of the little city where I live. So, nothing in the painting looks anything like my life. What it does look like is autumn, as autumn looks in my head.

In “Fall in New England”, Bryson doesn’t have time for the intellectual blockheads who traipse around Vermont “with the scientific equivalent of a paint chart” and proclaim “with a grave air of discovery that the maples of Michigan or the oaks of the Ozarks achieve even deeper tints”. This is, of course, to miss the point of the experience. He describes, with the love of a local and precision of a skilled pen, what makes New England’s fall display unique.

And then the article turns, subtly, distinctly, to reveal what we’re really doing here.

Bryson tells us how “trees prepare for their long winter’s slumber by ceasing to manufacture chlorophyll, the chemical that makes their leaves green”. Now, other chemicals get to show off by “creating the yellow and gold of birches, hickories, beeches and some oaks”. For these chemicals to work, the tree must keep feeding the leaves even though they’ve ceased to be useful. Some trees expend even more energy manufacturing an additional chemical that accounts for “the spectacular oranges and scarlets that are so characteristic of New England”.

“Just at a time when a tree ought to be storing up all its energy for use the following spring, it is instead expending a great deal of effort feeding a pigment that brings joy to the hearts of simple folk like me but doesn’t do anything for the tree.”

Without this section, Bryson’s article would be well-written and diverting enough, offering a few wonderful sentences ripe for a harvest of Instagram quotes about the charms of autumn. Instead, a pretty anthem becomes a deeply thoughtful hymn to the stuff you can’t measure in a test tube. It’s a celebration of experience. If you want a ten-dollar word to lend intellectual credibility to what can seem new-agey, philosophers call this “phenomenology”.

Speaking of ten-dollar words, I sometimes think of this as moving aside the sublunary to make room for the sublime. A band called Silent Planet put it better: “I’m learning what it means to trade my certainty for awe.” Bryson shows how the academic comes along and says, We can quantify beauty, measure the seasons, put numbers on feelings, and the world says, That’s what you think.

I had a whole thing planned for the conclusion of this column. I was going to write something about how pencil shavings and pumpkin pie like my mum used to make are about nostalgia, and the stuff imported from leafy, post-summer New England are about fauxstalgia, that melancholic joy for a place you haven’t experienced first-hand. I was going to write about how nostalgia and fauxstalgia offer the comfort of escapism from the coldest, darkest part of the year, a chance to roleplay at living in a world of cosy colours instead of the dismal, drizzling blue-grey that warns us winter is coming.

There’s probably something to that, but, honestly, I get tired of trying to find answers at the end of everything I write. I kill a lot of time reordering paragraphs and deleting-reinserting-redeleting words so I look productive while I try to find a ta-da! to end each essay with. I’m always looking for a thesis that explains, when really what I need is a theme to explore.

I went back to the start of Rumaan Alam’s article. I thought again about how he finds it tiresome “when people insist that the equinox is a more meaningful marker of time than the children going back to school”. There’s a lot in this of Bryson’s irritation with the pointy-headed know-it-all chucking aside first-person experience for universal absolutes.

In his essay, Bryson reminds us that even in science there are unknowns. It’s not that this leaves room for the subjective (I don’t want to argue for subjectivity of the gaps), but it moves us towards humility. And in humility, experience speaks more loudly because we stop assuming we’ve accounted for everything, that life can be tidied into neat categories. Instead, we let experience out of the box and tell it, Go ahead, sing your heart out.

So I’m not going to try to “solve” anything here, not this time. I’m going to throw my hands up and accept that autumn starts, for me, whenever I want it to start; I’m going to find most beautiful whatever place in the world I happen to find most beautiful; I’ll celebrate the season however the hell I want and you probably should too. And I’m trying to remember, as often as I can, to trade my certainty for awe.

Ta-da!

If I were a superhero (writing faster than a speeding bullet, with similes more powerful than a locomotive, able to read big books in a single sitting) my origin story would include at least these two novels: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which I first read twenty years ago in my late teens, and The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, which I first read in my early-twenties (and which I wrote about last week).

The Ghost Writer shaped how I thought of myself as a writer. The Shadow of the Wind changed my identity as a reader.

The Shadow of the Wind was my first book about books, the kind filled with wonderfully grand statements that inevitably end up copied into notebooks and social media. One of the many quotable lines in The Shadow of the Wind is reproduced on the back cover, axiomatic enough to serve as a blurb for any good bibliophile:

“Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart.”

True enough, and part of the reason I returned to both books last month.

In The Shadow of the Wind, a young woman waxes unashamedly poetic about the first book that took seed in her heart:

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recess of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me, all those things were born with that novel. […] That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely.”

Of course I loved reading that paragraph. This is my whole thing with Volumes — learning to live the good life, or at least a better one, through reading. Building a life out of books. I’m not immune to confirmation bias; it’s one of my favourite biases. So if a book does some of the aggrandising I normally have to do myself, if it applauds what I spend my time doing, and if it happens to have a fun literary-thriller story to go with it like The Shadow of the Wind has, I’m in.

I just have to ignore that nagging feeling I get when I’m in agreeable company that warns me I’m probably missing something, some important critique through which I might grow if I could hear it, the kind of the thing a supportive friend (or book) might not tell me but a critic will.

If The Shadow of the Wind is a celebration of readers and reading, The Ghost Writer celebrates writers and their frequently weird ways of seeing the world and living in it. Or — as is the case for Lonoff, the great-writer character in Roth’s novel — not living in it.

If the young woman in Zafón’s book learns “that by reading, I could live more intensely”, Lonoff in Roth’s novel has learned that by ignoring life, he can write more intensely. He barely goes out of his house, rarely has any guests, and he expects silence and stillness from his wife, just as he’d demanded of his children before they grew up and escaped the stifling boredom of his existence.

So how (I wondered as I re-read The Ghost Writer) does Lonoff have anything to write about? From what raw ingredients does he bake his books? There are two hints at how he achieves success in the novel:

1. He insists on questioning the narrator about his “unhallowed life” of day jobs and girlfriends outside of his writing career. No doubt Lonoff is storing away these accounts of real-world drudgery for future retelling as stories on the page.

2. The narrator discovers that Lonoff has extensively underlined some articles in a magazine, and if you collected just the noted sentences together you’d have “a perfect precis of each piece and would have served a schoolchild as excellent preparation for a report to his current-events class.”

Lonoff is learning the world like a student — from books and research, rather than from living.

There’s an essay I read a few years back called “Theology and Self-Awareness”. It’s by a theologian called H. A Williams, who writes:

“[There] are no supersonic flights to the Celestial City or even the Palace Beautiful. Increased awareness can be obtained only by a journey on foot by way of the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, Doubting Castle, and the rest.”

He goes on later to blow wet, insulting raspberries at the wound already dealt to my pride as someone whose work life is made up of his reading life which in turn forms most of his daily life:

“There is a type of thinking which remains safely at home, merely receiving reports, maps, and photographs of what lies beyond the garden wall, and speculates, often with great cleverness, on the basis of such dispatches received. Thinking and living are thus divorced, or rather, thinking is made into the instrument of escape from involvement with life.”

Fine, it’s possible to take the whole “reading life” thing too far, or to let it take you in an unhealthy direction, to a life less abundant. Of course, the extremes of things are rarely their best manifestations. How, then, to read like the woman in The Shadow of the Wind, who learns that with books she can “live more intensely”?

She (why haven’t I named her yet? She’s called Clara) is blind. When she and Daniel, the narrator, walk through their neighbourhood in Barcelona, she asks him “to describe the façades, the people, the cars, the shops, the lampposts and shop windows that we passed on our way”.

Taking in his words to form mental images, she’s able to see both the Barcelona her eyes can do nothing with and, as Daniel says, “our own private Barcelona, one that only she and I could see”.

Clara says something else about the first book she loved: “It could give me back the sight I had lost.” The world comes to her, in part, through books. Stories, whether read in silence or heard out loud, grant access to the real world and to imagined ones.

Last year, my younger sister got married, and though I tried to be “present” as the lingo has it, I kept filtering it through language. I got home and wrote about what happened that day. One of the things I wrote is useful here, because it gives us a decent metaphor for the relationship between books and the world:

“Maps, as the saying goes, are not the territory — but maps are still instructive about the nature of the territory. They can be useful guides to the terrain.”

Books are maps that guide us through the world they describe (even when they describe unreal worlds). The point is to find the world through our reading, to access it in new and useful and vibrant ways. Or, if books aren’t maps, they’re keys that unlock doors that lead to life out there.

It’s not that you need fewer books in your life, just more of the other stuff to go with it. You can write about writing, and you can read about reading, and life itself is for living. I think I read that somewhere.

There’s a certain kind of question people like to ask writers. Readers queue up at book events, like day-trippers at a zoo waiting to watch the bored lion get fed, so they can finally ask, “What kind of pen do you use to write your first drafts?” (Here, a number of people drop out of the queue, their question asked for them; those remaining shift to their second question: “Where do you get your ideas from?”)

This kind of reader is, apparently, fascinated by the details of how a writer writes. You have to assume these people are budding authors, or living an imagined life in which they will one day write the book they’re convinced lives within them.1 I get it: there are few better ways of not writing than fantasising about how you might write, one day, when you get the perfect chair, the perfect desk, the perfect pen. Author interviews become the go-to for guidance on solving this puzzle of perfection.

“When you admire a writer you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle.”

This is the view of Nathan Zuckerman, narrator of Philip Roth’s minor masterpiece The Ghost Writer. For some reason, Nathan is best described in the German language. He is “a Bildungsroman hero”, whose Bildung is just beginning at the start of this Roman; he’s also a Wunderkind, and very aware of the fact; and the young, unmarried Nathan was the source of some Maskenfreiheit for his ageing, divorced author.

Nathan is the number-one fan of the reclusive E. I. Lonoff. When the young man arrives at the older novelist’s snowed-in hideaway (“the home of an unchaste monk”), he plans to become his idol’s protégé and surrogate son. Nathan has no questions about writing routines or penning a great query letter to agents. (Much of the content on Substack would no doubt bewilder him.) He wants to know how great writers build lives in service to Art, aggrandised through insistent capitalisation.

Forget where you get your pencils or your ideas; what matters here is which side you pick in a battle of life versus art. Sorry — Art.

It’s easy to mock the young writer-as-devotee worshipping at the altar of Art. I was one of those young men (they’re usually men, for whatever reason) so I feel granted some freedom to be fairly derisive about them, because really I’m looking down on who I once was. It’s a salve to the shame of recognising the younger me in Nathan’s unembarrassed self-description as “an orthodox atheist and highbrow-in-training”.

But it’s not all turtlenecks, and correcting people’s grammar, and finding reasons to mention Goethe and over-pronouncing Goethe, and scoffing at people who think that modern absinthe is anything like real absinthe, the kind Baudelaire drank, a poet you consider your literary antecedent if only the world would finally recognise it. (See, it is easy to make fun of them.)

There’s also a real sincerity about these kids. They’re true believers in all the worst ways, yes, but also in the best. Their faith might often manifest as youthful naivety, but they also stand as a bulwark against the weary pessimism of age. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan relates how the trendy scene-shapers back in New York dismissed Lonoff as a mere comic figure of Jewish out-of-placery in the American wilderness:

“However, since everybody else of renown I mentioned at the party also seemed slightly amusing to those in the know, I had been skeptical about their satiric description of the famous rural recluse. In fact, from what I saw at that party, I could begin to understand why hiding out twelve hundred feet up in the mountains with just the birds and the trees might not be a bad idea for a writer, Jewish or not.”

I still remember how, back then, cynicism seemed to be the mere vinegar stench that came off of once-ripe talent left to sharpen and sour. In opposition to world-weary cynics masquerading as worldly pragmatists, and their pessimism passing for prescience, is the enthusiasm of the cultural initiate. For them, optimism is a kind of credo and idealism is a worldview.

It’s a religion that rejects the vulgarity of cynicism and its misguided course-correction in poptimism (you’ll never catch one of these young men taking a Marvel movie seriously), a faith that unabashedly aspires (in Nathan’s words) to “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion”:

“All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the gruelling, exalted, transcendent calling.”

The question for such a person becomes: How does a writer find that seclusion, that sacred space for the holy act of devoting one’s life to Art?

Here’s Roth telling David Remnick for The New Yorker about the shape of his solitary life:

“My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning — this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens — and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”

And here’s the daily life of the great E. I. Lonoff, whom Nathan wants to emulate:

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.”

If he takes even a day away from this routine, his wife suffers the terrible mood and sulking that result from his becoming “frantic with boredom and a sense of waste”. Just to underline that: Lonoff is describing time spent with his wife as wasted. Here’s a typical Sunday, when he forces himself to take a walk with his wife in the woods behind their house:

“I’m restless, I’m bad-tempered, but she’s a human being too, you see,2 so I go. To avoid trouble she makes me leave my watch at home. The result is that I look at my wrist instead. We’re walking, she’s talking, then I look at my wrist — and that generally does it, if my foul mood hasn’t already. She throws in the sponge and we come home.”

And how does Nathan respond to this?

“The life [Lonoff] described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.”

There’s the defence, the wall built between the ego within and accusations of narcissism from without: it’s not just for me, all this self-centred living, it’s for the good of the world. So it’s not only Art that gets the grandeur of a capital letter — so does the Artist.

Philip Roth left twenty-five books as a legacy when he died; he won America’s four major literary awards in one decade, the nineties; he wrote not only some of the best books of that same decade — at least one of which sits among the greatest of the 20th century — but also the toweringly phenomenal American Trilogy in a mere four years.

Maybe this is the devil’s bargain required to achieve what Roth achieved. Any good Faustian pact has an upside bought at high cost, and some would point to that upside in defence of Roth’s ascetic lifestyle.3 The upside for Roth was his prolific and high-quality output.

Maybe he had to make the same choice as Nathan, who “chose perfection in the work rather than the life”. Maybe it was worth it.

Maybe.

Of course, it’s easy for me as a reader to say I’m glad Roth wrote the books he did, that if it cost him what it cost him, so be it. But would the people who knew him say that? What would (did) the people who had skin in the game of his life say about it?

Lonoff’s wife makes her feelings clear. Over dinner, she loses her cool with his incessant coolness about living, throwing a wineglass against a wall. She screams at him to throw her out of the house, before collapsing in a chair and insisting he take up with one of his young students. “If you want her, take her,” she cries, “and then you won’t be so miserable, and everything in the world won’t be so bleak.” By the end of the novel, she’s delivering this sermon of damnation against her miserable husband:

“Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four...”

The actress Claire Bloom was living with Roth while he worked on The Ghost Writer, and in her memoir, she tells a story about how he came out of his study one day to ask what it was like to live with a writer. He wanted to add texture to his portrait of Lonoff’s wife, and he was happy to take that texture from Bloom. Her response was as certain as it was immediate:

“We don’t go anywhere! We don’t do anything! We don’t see anyone!”

Here is art imitating a life that imitates life. Here, as Lonoff’s long-suffering wife puts it, is his religion of art: “Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!”

In an interview with The Paris Review, Roth described his writing career like this:

“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.”

Twenty-four-year-old me would find that idea and its phrasing — “a half-imaginary existence” — both romantic and sad. Present-day me, who went and lived the life that youthful writer planned to avoid, would say he’s only half-right. The actual drama of life seems like the place to be these days.

Because who’s the art for if not for other people? Is the idea to live alone to write stuff for yourself? You’d have a better time of it just staying in your room and masturbating. The writers who want their writing to connect with the world, who want their work to interact with life, who even quietly hope like a prayer to possibly-maybe-if-you’re-very-lucky change one reader’s life in some small way — those writers eventually trade their resentment at non-writerly obligations for gratitude that the world exists to inspire and receive their art.

I don’t mean to sound depressingly upbeat about the dynamics between mundane life and the effort to be creative. I spend a lot of time cursing my day job, and there are days when I’m too busy daydreaming about walking out of there to think about writing. But then I read someone like turning the straw of his job at a grocery store into the gold of his Substack essays, and I remember the Stoics telling us that the world is the world and the best we can do is change our response to its intractable facts. So I go back to the day job with gratitude, and it lasts a few days before I’m pissed off again. Thankfully, Sorondo publishes often and regularly.

And that’s how this writer lives. Now I’m off out for a walk with my wife.

Until my mid-thirties, I wasn’t a “gift person”. I loved giving them, when I occasionally did, but I hated (still hate) receiving them, and my dad was always clear with us that he didn’t need a present on Father’s Day or his birthday to know he was loved by his kids, so I ended up as someone who generally doesn’t give gifts and please don’t bother giving me anything.

Then I saw a beautiful little documentary called Hello, Bookstore.1 It’s about a guy who runs an independent bookshop where he answers the phone with the film’s title, every time. The documentary is a visual stream of consciousness built out of wonderfully mundane daily moments. In one of those moments, the guy tells his daughter, “Last night I found a book for you, on my shelf, and I’m gonna’ give it to you for your birthday.”

This bookshop owner connects everything he reads to the life he lives and the people he meets. He has a quote for all moments, a book-related story for any audience, a reading recommendation for every person. When he reads, he sees the friend for whom that book would be a perfect fit. This seems like a gift in itself: to look at books in the context of people you care about and see a novel as a compliment to a friend’s best qualities, or a challenge they’ll enjoy, or a companion they deserve.

I decided right there, before the film was over and the lights came back up, to start giving books as gifts to the people I love. I thought maybe the people I hate should get mystery novels with the last chapter torn out, but for now it’s just good books for good people.

Last month, my niece turned five and I went hunting for the right book for her. I knew that — in the moment of ripped-paper unwrapping — a book would be far less exciting than the toys she’d get from others, but I was hopeful that my gift might last in a way that flashing lights and plastic don’t. I chose a book called What We’ll Build by Oliver Jeffers. It’s a picture book about a dad and his daughter who use their hands and tools to build a life together.

The book is pretty wonderful in how it plays with the idea of “making”. Your world is what you make of it, and it’s filled with what you make in it. Sometimes you put together a piece of furniture out of the jigsaw slats and dowels and screws that come out of the box; sometimes you put together the pieces of your life left strewn around your feet. You create meals and games and toys and opportunities.

My brother is a handyman, and his daughter loves playing with his tools, so he got her a plastic hammer and plastic screwdriver, and the two of them paint their house and put up shelves together. For my brother and my niece, building a life is both a metaphor and a reality.

I don’t care that the book was written about the author and his real-life daughter — the book is absolutely about my brother and my niece. With What We’ll Build, fiction reached right into fact and put it on the page.

I gave my brother and my niece a book about making things because I hoped it might be a part of how they make sense of their life together, hoped it would add to the meaning they make out of what they’re building. That’s one of the main reasons I buy books for anyone. Yes, also because they’ll enjoy it, that too. But I always gift a book with a reason in mind for why this book and this friend.

Sometimes I leave the reason implied, or I gesture at it with a note scrawled on the title page or a scribbled quote that hints at something. Sometimes I tell them outright — I saw this and remembered you said you were interested in... or You told me you never laugh, and that seems a miserable way to live, so here’s some Wodehouse.

Actually, somebody did gift me a copy of Wodehouse once and it did teach me how to laugh after I’d forgotten what laughing felt like.

I was in the hospital, having suffered what used to be called a nervous breakdown, though it probably has some technical terminology now, but I just say I was so depressed I was thinking about dying until I stopped just thinking about it. (This is where, if we were talking face to face, I’d insert some self-deprecating or incredibly dark joke to break the seriousness of the moment. Please pretend I said something disarmingly witty and let’s move on.)

My dad came to visit and, despite never wanting gifts for himself, he brought me two books. The first was a collection of journalism from a guy who’d reported from Iraq. My dad might have mentioned why he’d brought that one, but other people’s voices went in and out of my head without leaving any mental residue. I had to work hard to read, but reading took me out of the hospital ward. I got to leave reality for a bit, got to forget that I was smoking bummed cigarettes in a walled-in concrete garden or sitting alone on a hard bed with thin sheets.

The other book from my dad was some Jeeves and Wooster stories. I read the first one and nothing inside me moved. Over the next few stories, I started recognising punchlines as punchlines, and something in my brain told me, That’s a joke right there. Eventually, I snorted a few times, a sharp exhale that’s not quite a laugh, more of an acknowledgment of humour. Then I started laughing. Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves (not a butler, though he “can buttle with the best of them”) had me smiling, grimacing, giggling like an idiot.

I guess it’s true to say that the first book let me forget and the second helped me remember.

I don’t know if Wodehouse coaxed me out of the depression that had stopped me laughing, or if I was already coming out of it and his writing accompanied me along the way, but it didn’t matter.

The book was with me like a patient friend and reminded me that there were worlds apart from my sadness, and there were other lives to be lived out there, and other feelings to be felt, and that my dad cared about me, that’s why he gave me books.

I found out recently that someone I love is going through IVF. For them, for now, that means hospital appointments and hormones and waiting-praying-hoping. They’re living with desperate immediacy in every present moment, while I keep thinking in the future tense, looking forward to when a new baby will be in our lives.

It’s not only the IVF that’s got me thinking about kids. I’m thirty-eight and my wife just turned thirty-three, so babies are always in the next room over in our minds. We think we’ve shut the door to that room, but the catch is unreliable and the door keeps creaking open. I wish I could put a lock on the handle.

I love being an uncle though. My ever-growing troupe of nieces and nephews is made up of my siblings’ kids and the kids of my close friends. I keep a decent-sized collection of books that I loved when I was little so there’s always something for the niblings to read when they visit. I also keep that collection for nostalgia’s sake and the sake of comfort when grown-up life is too difficult to face head-on, but having all those nieces and nephews gives me an excuse.

So, I’m thinking about this new kid who might be joining us in the not-near-enough future. But it’s too soon to be thinking about a specific baby, with its own name and future personality and one-day taste in books, so I distract myself with thinking about babies as a concept and how strange they are.

Such as:

Humans are useless when we’re born. I think it has something to do with the fact that evolution gave us big brains that require big skulls, and the female pelvis isn’t built to push out a bowling-ball made of bone, so we have to be born before the skull gets too big. But that might not be true. It sounds like the kind of pop-science thing you learn as a kid and when you read about it as an adult, it turns out no one believes that anymore or maybe never did. Like that thing about bumblebees being too big to fly.

Whatever the reason, human babies are born early, before the loaf has fully risen. We come out as half-baked, doughy, barely functioning, eat-food-make-shit machines that are wholly dependent on others at the start of our lives.

One of the ways in which we’re underdeveloped is our vision. According to a book I found in my study and which I have no memory of buying, a newborn baby sees in black and white and only as far as eight inches from their face. After six weeks, that expands to about ten inches. That distance keeps growing over the following months. That means the whole world for a baby is about eight inches around, at first.

A baby’s world is also remarkably unpopulated. There’s only one person in existence; other people (a non-concept for the baby) are just animate objects that bring soothing sounds and food. Basically, in the beginning, we depend entirely on other people for our survival and are incapable of even knowing they exist.

Like I said, we’re useless when we’re born.

Eventually, the baby perceives the divide that brings “I” and “you” into the picture. They’re introduced to someone called “self” and someone else called “other”. The visible world expands, and the invisible inner lives of all these other people multiply, and it becomes clear that there’s more to reality than first-person experience. The universe has suddenly become a multiverse. The next step is working out how to move through these worlds.

In The Magician’s Nephew (chronologically the first in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis), the rules for moving between worlds is laid out with the fuss-free clarity of children’s fantasy. There’s two kinds of ring, a yellow ring and a green one. If you touch a yellow ring, you vanish from our world and wind up in a strange forest full of pools. You put on a green ring and jump into one of these pools and the water takes you to one of many fantastical lands.

This realm that joins one world to all others is called “The Wood between the Worlds”. The wood is a little like this growing awareness infants have of all the possible worlds people could inhabit, at least in their imaginations. The pools of water, then, are books. Or maybe the rings are books. Either way, books transport us to those other minds and the worlds that exist in them.

Here’s my first memory of reading:

I’d guess I’m about five years old; my family is living in a small city in the Canadian mountains; I’m on the kitchen floor early in the morning — the memory is washed in dim blue light — and I’m putting together the letters of a newspaper headline. When I read it out loud and understand the words, I run into my parents’ room to wake them up and announce the achievement. I’ve discovered the Wood between the Worlds.

Part of my private mythology about myself as a reader was that reading a headline at that age made me terribly precocious. That myth went the way of dragons and a flat Earth when I grew up and discovered that my feat of intellect fell well within the normal range of childhood development.

But that didn’t bruise my self-belief as much as reading about Roald Dahl’s eponymous Matilda, who discovered reading, the public library, and that Charles Dickens could make her laugh, all by the age of “four years and three months”. When she and I first met, I was twice her age and had read half as much, certainly none of the grown-up titles in the literature she’d read before the end of the first chapter.1

Still, the pin-prick to the balloon of my ego was offset by the joy of being transported into Dahl’s world, Matilda’s universe, and discovering I wasn’t the only one who knew about the Wood between the Worlds. Dahl tells us what the books Matilda borrowed from the library did for the “sensitive and brilliant” little girl:

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

Matilda had her travelling companions, and she became one of mine.

People like me (book botherers, professional readers, page pushers, call us what you will) like to say grandiose things about what books are and what they do. It’s probably a side effect of living so intimately with language — all the noisiest words that clamour for attention have a tendency to come out when we’re really passionate about something. I know it, I own it, and I stand by the next paragraph without shame:

For the imagined kid whose progress we’re tracking here, learning to read isn’t only a matter of a skill attained, not just a qualification or a tick in a box for child development — it’s an infinite library of new worlds to explore and a guide to exploring them. It’s both the territory and the map.

For the imaginary Matilda, reading expands her world, which would otherwise be as small as it is for her parents. Their brains are trapped in the TV set they stare at, while her mind roams free in her books. “All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

There’s another imagined child, the one I’ve been trying not to imagine this whole time, the one that might be joining us soon if the gods of medicine smile on the IVF. I will allow myself this much thinking about that possible future and no more: I really can’t wait for that kid to discover reading.