On a journey you can take with your mind’s eye, a backdoor into time travel, and ourselves written by other selves
January 22, 2021
Dear Eva,
The sun is situated lower in the sky, and the light is pouring through my west-facing office window at a beautiful diagonal. In other words, it is that time again—the hour when I sit down to put thoughts into words for you as the week comes to a close. At the start of your letter last week you said, I’m pleased to be here on the page with you! This struck me as a delightful little phrase, getting at the together alone vibe we have constructed for ourselves with these letters. Writing is a blissfully solitary act, but knowing the words will be read by the specific You means you are here on this page with me now. Have we manually built a backdoor into time travel? Perhaps! This ancient technology of letter exchange is full of wonders.
I wonder what additional wonders we unlock by publishing our letters on our technically public but practically semi-public site? In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit says, [W]riting is speaking to no one, and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk. Maybe that is a good way for us to wrap our minds around that extra little layer of something we owe to the “publicness” of these words—we are in a cosmic conversation with the absent now, too.
Last week, you asked me to elaborate on what I meant when I said we should experiment with additional, immersive ways of creating. What did/do I mean? I think I was stewing on how to replicate that feeling of deep absorption that comes from binging a TV show or writing a book, where the characters and places even seep into your dreams. It is different from the slow drip of these letters, which I love in a different way. The letters are not a season, they are more like a form of steady sustenance. What if we took one week, blocked our calendars from all other obligations (except parenting, I can’t really pause that one), and made a thing? (children’s book for grownups, I’m looking at you!) Obviously it would be better to do this together in person, so maybe we wait until that is possible. But maybe we improvise! It’s been remarkable to see all the ways we humans can connect and create from a distance these past 11 months of the pandemic. Anyway, I am not wedded to this idea, nor do I know if it is feasible amid our other professional and personal obligations, but think on it. I’m in a the time is now kind of mood!
Actually, it is funny that I now feel that way because earlier today I was feeling the bubbling up of an amorphous kind of worry, the kind which in past times would sour my mindset and make everything feel impossible. I thought back to your words from a past letter, maybe instead of things being hard, they could be easy. And voilà! (I’ll note here that the way I found my way to that quote was to search for “brushing my teeth” in our letters because somehow stuck with me that you had that particular epiphany with a toothbrush in your mouth. Ha!)
On this fourth weekend in January, I think we are finally starting to settle into our Dry January life. Bill is readying the pizzas, and we have plans for peanut butter and chocolate milkshakes during our weekly Facetime chat with friends after the kids go to bed. Last weekend, for literally the first time in our marriage, we spent Saturday night doing a puzzle and drinking tea. And the funniest part of it was that we ended up staying up until 1 AM so we could finish it! Wild times.
You wrote about sprouting speeds and tomato varietals last week, and it made me tingly with excitement. Summer sounds like a distant dream! Earlier in the pandemic, I have felt like I didn’t want to think much about future days. Maybe it was out of necessity; maybe it was because the future felt too uncertain. There were even times I think I have relished the way pandemic life focused all of us on the now. But it is starting to feel like maybe I can look out to the horizon with a little hope! Today my parents were able to get vaccine appointments for early next week, and my sister (a teacher) signed up for February 1. It almost seems dangerous to dare to look ahead to brighter days, but Amanda Gorman told us this week, there is always light, if we are brave enough to see it.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday January 22 2021
Dear Sarah,
I am sitting in front of a positively roaring fire in the fireplace, I’ve eaten a dinner of linguine with clam sauce (oddly hard to believe my last clam linguine was six weeks ago! When M and I plotted to eat it this Friday I felt sure we had eaten it just a couple of weeks ago, but instead it was early December!) albeit without the generous side of red wine (January! Dry January!) and I am feeling much more peaceful and well-rested than I was when I wrote to you last week.
A new feeling that has only begun to manifest this week: I am pleased to take a step back from the news, knowing that an increasing percentage of the stories I may encounter are becoming something like “regular” news, ups and downs that don’t represent the bedrock of the country crumbling into the ocean stone by stone. I am also pleased to catch an occasional article (I know there are more out there and I know there will be yet more) about our most recent former president — some awful thing he did newly coming to light — and to read the story with a bit of a past-tense feeling: we are just beginning to edge out of his reality and into something different and, I hope, more humane.
Yesterday I went to a Headlands Center for the Arts program online, Headlands Landscapes: Artists in Conversation, discussing three artists’ maps of self-guided hikes of the Marin Headlands, commissioned as part of Headlands’ Key Room installation created by Carrie Hott. (As I write this, I realize I have questions for you that I’m not sure I’ve ever asked: Have you been to the Marin Headlands? Have you been to Headlands Center for the Arts? Did your San Francisco life ever feature drives through the long tunnel into the Headlands, the tunnel you encountered when you bent left instead of right toward Sausalito after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and taking the Alexander Avenue exit off 101?) I recommend spending time with these maps for a touch of California and for a bit of a virtual creative vacation, embarking on a journey you can take with your mind’s eye at the wheel.
I loved your description in last week’s letter of the everyday amnesia that is the experience of reading over our letters, reading words of your own that might as well have been written by a stranger. Earlier in your letter you appreciated [my] point about each new day being a chance to establish a new pattern, and I think your everyday amnesia fits in here: I think we are different people from day to day, in a way. We have captured ourselves on the page here for each other, week after week — the you and the I and the us that exists here for a few hours out of each week — and if we don’t quite recognize ourselves in our respective words, perhaps it is because they were written by different versions of ourselves, the selves that existed on January 8, on December 25, on November 27, and on any other day we wrote each other.
It’s been many minutes since I first started this letter — my mind has wandered casually and comfortably on this Friday night — and now the fire sounds like the glass of a lightbulb quietly shattering, or perhaps it is like the sound of shaking a burnt-out lightbulb and hearing the elements tinking inside the bulb. Perhaps the sound I am hearing is that of minute shards of wood incinerating, craggy splinters of split firewood catching fire one by one, infinite elements.
Now the fire is burning out and I will be in trouble if I don’t get M’s attention to rekindle it! This is my fire duty: not to let it burn out completely! Wishing a cozy winter weekend to you and yours, and goodnight!
Until soon,
Eva