The solace and the grief

Not sure how I missed this one when it came out, but saw something about it in advance of the publication of Yiyun Li's new novel in coming weeks and thought I'd better read this small collection of essays to catch up. It is a haunting book, it resonates strongly with me: it has the amazing title Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Four bits I especially liked (it is a bleak book about a year of suicidal ideation and multiple hospitalizations):

To articulate it demands honesty that I am almost unwilling to offer. Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision. (In college and as a young scientist the tasks I had most enjoyed were the peripheral activities: to peel everything away and leave only the neural system intact in an insect; to harvest the bone marrow from a mouse’s femur until the bone became nearly transparent; to carefully flush out a mouse’s lungs. Perhaps my deficiency as a scientist, a lack of ultimate purpose, is why I love writing. Precision gives me more pleasure than the end result.) (117)

In an ideal world I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking, and thinking alone. I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words. To speak when one cannot is to blunder. I have spoken by having written—this book or any book; for myself and against myself. The solace is with the language I chose. The grief, to have spoken at all. (152)

Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. (183)

Many drafts were written when things began to feel unbearable. Composing a sentence is better than composing none; an hour taken away from treacherous rumination is an hour gained; following the thread of a thought to the end is better than having many thoughts entangled. In a sense, writing becomes the effort of detecting a warning sign before it appears. There are moments when it must sound as though I am arguing against hope and happiness, against others and myself, but any attachment, even to the most fallacious idea, is an anchor when solidness cannot be felt. (200)

Two books

I read two very good books this afternoon, each one chosen after I read something about it online: this led me to When Breath Becomes Air (very sad, very moving); this led me to My Name is Lucy Barton. It is uncannily good, also very sad and very moving!

Closing tabs

Trying to get school-related tasks done this last two weeks has been like wading through marmalade - that always happens at the end of the semester. I have two more minor tasks to finish this morning before I can guiltlessly (a) go to midday hot yoga [ED. This did not happen - I was interrupted in my post by the need to visit a friend in the hospital, and we ended up staying with his wife for a bit while she waited for scary tests to be conducted] and (b) write the luxuriantly copious blog post about summer writing thoughts that has been percolating for many days now. But before any of that, I think, some tabs to close....

A good Knausgaard interview by Scott Esposito (scroll down and click the link to open).

It really was bound in human skin! (More here and here.)

Documenting the last living Chinese women whose feet were bound in childhood.

Pratfalls

The piece Geoff Dyer filed from hospital. (Via Leo Carey.)

Geoff Dyer's stroke

As noted elsewhere, the most amazing thing was that he filed his New Republic copy.

Catch-up

Mondays are taxing this semester!

Finished reading Victor LaValle's The Devil in Silver.  It is a strange book; I liked it a good deal, but it also made me feel moderately perplexed much of the time I was reading (not a disagreeable feeling).  Wished he did not feature sudden one-paragraph shifts to different viewpoint character, but that is just a tic of mine, to find such shifts induce something like motion sickness.  Made me feel grateful I have never been institutionalized.

Then: J. K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy!  Curiosity makes us do strange things; I could not resist reading it, though it is not so much my kind of book and I think they have priced the Kindle edition too high ($17.99).  It's fine, but lightning didn't strike twice.

(I recommend instead, if you like that sort of thing, one of Jilly Cooper's epic village novels - she is less good than Rowling with characterization, but she gives you more characters to root for, and the dogs and cats in her books are very fully realized! - in fact this novel is sort of the weird double of Cooper's Wicked!...)

Also recommended, as an "instead" rather than an "as well": Peyton Place! (In this case the exclamation point is my own.)

"My rays"

At NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman has an extraordinary interview with Oliver Sacks (link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull). I can't wait to read the new book (I've read and heard bits of it already), which includes an account of Sacks' own vision loss as a result of an ocular melanoma - the whole interview is too interesting to excerpt, but here's a teaser from the preamble:

The geeky moment occurs when Sacks is in the hospital, forbidden to leave his room because his opthamologist has embedded a chip of radioactive iodine in his eye in hopes of banishing the tumor. The tiny plaque of I-125 triggers a storm of hallucinations — including starfish, daisies, and purple protoplasm — as well as ravaging pain. In the middle of all this, Sacks muses about asking his long-time editor and friend, Kate Edgar, to fetch his beloved collection of fluorescent minerals so he can conduct an experiment. “Perhaps I could light them up by fixing my radioactive eye, my rays on them,” he writes. “It would be quite a party trick!”

States of emergency

Sheri Fink's NYT Magazine piece about what happened at Memorial Hospital in the days after Katrina is essential and horrifying reading. It is easy to think that we would each have made different - better - choices, but it is hardly clear. I have just put War Hospital in my Amazon cart, with a sense of shame at the frivolity of much of my reading!