On aggregating the trivial, getting reacquainted with reading, and running out of sight
April 25, 2019
Dear Eva,
Your letter last week made me chuckle for two reasons. Number one = “letter babies.” We were, indeed, letter babies back in Week 5, so fresh and inexperienced at this weekly writing gig. We will be wise letter veterans by the time Week 52 comes around. (Whoa, it makes me sad to think about that day! No doubt my stubborn tendency to try to “sum it up” will be in full force as that final week of our year-long project nears.) Your letter also made me smile as I watched you attempt to talk yourself out of talking me out of my feelings around learning and experiencing new things and the inevitable feeling of being behind others, fumbling, not knowing, that comes with it. You’re surely right — shame is too strong of a word for what I mean. Maybe embarrassment? But that feels too light. My word choice probably says a lot more about me and my fears than it does about anything else. I am certain that is true actually. Your letter helped illuminate some deep-rooted (and entirely unreasonable) fears of mine that I don’t think I have ever before been able to see, like a fossil whose contours you can’t discern until just the right dirt and sand are dug up. So don’t go talking yourself out of trying to help solve my problems! I need all the help I can get. :)
It is interesting, though, because I think I have a similar inclination to see everything as a grand puzzle to be solved. I am trying to talk myself out of that mentality, trying to be better about just letting things be, waiting until if and when a piece or two fits together. It seems to me that so much that we take in during our lives comes into our orbits in a haphazard way. A comment from a child here, an equation from a book there. It’s so difficult to see what matters in real-time, what connects with something else.
In that spirit, I am mulling three little anecdotes from last Saturday that I know are connected somehow, but I can’t yet put my finger on exactly how or why.
Number one: After breakfast, Jonah came to get me to ask if I wanted to help him with a project. He wanted to make a series of maps. First, a map of his bedroom. Next, a map of our street. Then, a map of “our world,” he said, by which he meant the city where we live. Then, a map of the United States, and finally “China and all of that.” It strikes me how fitting it is how he mistakes “our world” for that which he sees and experiences every day. He is right, of course. That is my world, too.
Number two: That same morning, I finished the Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I know you read bits of that book awhile back as well, and we had talked about how it maybe felt a little too light, almost as if she was giving too much attention to the triviality of life. I think I said at the time that I wanted her to fold in a little of the dark. I changed my mind. As a whole, there was something really profound about the collection of scattered bits she bundled together in the book. Individual excerpts out of context were trivial, silly almost, but in the aggregate they had meaning. It strikes me that the book is probably a much more honest depiction of most human lives as we live them — most days brimming with tedious, meaningless shit, mundane encounters, dotted with the occasional dollop of drama.
Number three: Later that same Saturday, Jonah and I sat in our driveway together. I was reading about cost analysis for school; he was working on his maps. After a bit, he decided he needed some exercise, so he declared he was going to run around our block. I had a brief pang of worry — was he old enough to temporarily go out of our sight alone? Yes, yes, he was. So I said okay and I watched him run off, wearing bright red shorts, white socks pulled up almost to his knees, and no shirt. He was delighted by the opportunity to run off alone, and he yelled excitedly as he trotted off, “Make sure to set a timer for 10 minutes and 50 seconds! I want it to be precise!” He kept calling out things to me long after I could no longer hear him, and I watched him run off with a lump in my throat, thinking about how there may be 7.5 billion people on this earth but I never want to live in a world without Jonah.
Big worlds, small worlds, ordinary lives, I know there is something here. I guess I am still too much of a letter baby to string it all together, but I am grateful that I have at least paid enough attention to see it while it happens.
I look forward to reading your words tomorrow, my friend.
Yours,
Sarah
Thursday April 25 and Friday April 26
Dear Sarah,
I’m thinking about your letter from last week, and words, and studying words. I’ve been coming back around to my books lately, after a bit of a hiatus — starting to read them again, circling my stacks, adding new goodies in waves (including some literal (in a sense) waves, as I just splurged on a couple of rounds of books of poetry from Wave Books). We’re getting ready to move once more over the next month, and I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with all the books I kept, unpurged, and whose spines and pages I haven’t seen in months. It’s been a busy stretch (see: prior handfuls of letters) and sometimes, while the stretch itself doesn’t seem to lend itself to reading, it is a fruitful time, with new folds getting added to my brain while everything is running along at top speed. I’m plotting a luxurious summer of reading and writing over the long days with early sunrises and late sunsets — my first real summer in more than a decade. (I can’t stop thinking about it!)
I agree with you, thinking on how it seemed at an earlier age that writing was simply about communicating an idea — delivering a package from here to there. This made sense for a while, and I recall my undergraduate writing courses and how they flowed, how I wrote for those classes. Getting an idea in my head and trying to draw up a story that would point toward that idea. I feel that I was forming elements of my identity as I went, as we all must at that age and stage, and it takes a while to realize both the complexity of your own identity and the fact that every other person’s identity is just as complex. Once this complexity becomes more apparent, then ideas feel less like packages to be shipped intact from point A to point B, and more like… what? Like rolling snowballs gathering layers as they traverse landscapes (and don’t melt — please suspend your disbelief with me!)? A network of rivers flowing all around us, each story or idea like a particular pebble from one vein of the river, different in each hand that holds it?
I used to feel (even more) intimidated by writing, the idea of writing as one’s life’s work, feeling the sense that everything has been said, the millions of books on millions of shelves standing as evidence to that fact. I felt disappointed sometimes when I stared at a single book on a shelf — this artifact, perhaps not even a bestseller (gasp!), small and alone. Lately, perhaps in the last handful of years, my view has flipped, and I’m looking out where I once was looking in: each text seems now a nugget to be held, turned in the hand, mined in a generative way. Millions of books on millions of shelves let me know that there is room there for all of us, even me! Even you! Each book a document that, inevitably, can be consumed on a first pass lasting a bare fraction of the time it took to assemble. This becomes more bearable if you can think of a book as an artifact of the whole process — the shareable nugget of the life and time that went into making it. I think I’m thinking lately about books as a writer, where for so long I was thinking about books as a reader. The two positions are not mutually exclusive, but reading as a writer is newer, feels different, contains different possibilities for me.
I love hearing about your coffee shop writing time with Jonah, and I can’t help feeling curious about how many cookie flavors there are to split and share. And I can’t wait to read about the man whose body is covered in mustaches!
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva