I was getting increasingly concerned because I couldn’t find it. Or I could find it, but just for a few seconds and then it would vanish and then it was lost and I was lost without it.
It had to be somewhere though. You couldn’t live without attention, could you? I figured it just must be somewhere I hadn’t looked yet–like in between the couch cushions, just under the melody of my children’s three-part harmonic yelling, in the corner of my outdated prescription glasses, or with the lost socks. Because those had to be somewhere too, didn’t they?
Maybe it was stuck in the lonely that sat in the middle of my romantic relationship. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote that “thou loneliest sits in the middle of thee, betwixt thou lofty love and naked intimacy”?
Early on in the pandemic, when we had nowhere to go and so much more time than we knew what to do with, I used to take my two sons on long drives with no particular destination. The point was to drive and not to arrive. I had thought these drives were something I chose in order to contain my two children–to have them seated and belted with nothing to do but look and nothing to complain about but the endless quiet. Now though, I think these drives were also part of the containment of my attention, a refocusing where my brain set itself only on which way the road ahead turned and how to get back from whatever unknown we ended up at.
It has been years since I have read a book. God, that is embarrassing to admit and even more embarrassing to write down, reifying the permanence of that multi-year void. And, in that time, as my world itself has shrunk and with the requirements of remote work and child care, I have barely left my house, my thoughts have whittled as I have continued to attempt to carve new thinking out of the same wooden block. Before it became a toothpick of thought–unidirectional and extremely pointed–I returned to books with a desperation. I must find the kind of attention I used to have to read, I thought, but I was not confident of the possibility of success. When I have tried to read in the past few years, the words slide off the page past my eyes and fall to my toes before I even realize that I am thinking of something else–what I need at the grocery store, how to approach a grant report, why the aging process seems to be so rapidly speeding up.
Shame can indeed be a powerful motivator and, truly, I was ashamed that I could not call myself a reader anymore. I also did not know how to fix the problem. Finally, I picked up an old friend from graduate school: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, a book from one of my favorite classes analyzing the concept of the nation through film. This was one of those classes that had burst open my intellectual world as I had never before considered the idea that that nation itself was just an idea. The book is dense, though not unapproachably so, or perhaps just denser than my toothpick thoughts were ready for. But I persisted and found I was enjoying the immersion in my own ignorance of world history, in particular that of southeast Asia. And then, somehow, I had finished it. And so I started a new book, The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, one of the few of his that I have never read. After finishing that short read in a weekend, reading suddenly felt easy again. Why had I thought it so hard?
In the first month of 2024, I finished 5 books–more books than I have read in the past few years combined. And turned back on, my mind was hungry for more. I felt intellectual again, as I had back in graduate school in my twenties or when I was an English teacher in my thirties. And what became interesting was the way the thoughts or characters or sentiments in one book would echo in another. So here I am to report on that journey, because perhaps it will be of interest, but perhaps more because my memory is terrible and if I don’t document these connections, I will lose them. As I get older, loss seems to be more central and perhaps this is just my way of holding on to something, anything–drawing constellations out of the stars as I float adrift, knowing deep down that the ocean will wash over my words and me too as it reaches onward for the limitless horizon.
Along the spine 