On being a virtual groupie, manufactured finish lines, and the pandemic anniversary
March 12, 2021
Dear Eva,
I had a good chuckle at your apology in last week’s letter about implying that you would not want to spend four weeks in a cabin in the Ozarks with me and my family. No offense was taken, not even a pang! And to be honest, the fact that this is true is something I take as a marker of reaching another dimension of maturity, much like my graduation into the recognition that my birthday is just another day. Though I would never have admitted it at the time, I am certain that my younger self would have been a tad sad to hear that you would not embrace the idea of four weeks in a house with me. Now, as a wise old grown-up, I understand that relationships are not all or nothing. In fact, I would venture to say there are people with whom we cannot imagine living day in and day out with whom we might have an even deeper connection with than those with whom we can. The everyday compatibility that is required to fold someone into our day to day lives is one layer of compatibility, but it’s not the only kind, nor is it necessarily the strongest kind. I agree with you, though, that Bill and I are lucky to have friends with whom we can spend so much time and come away feeling the better for it. There is and always has been an ease to being in the company of these particular friends that is truly something special. That said, at the risk of making you feel slightly guilty, I will note that Bill speaks often about how you were quite possibly the world’s best houseguest when you were snowed in at our house that fateful winter weekend. You folded right into our lives, at least from our point of view!
I am intrigued by the phone call/performance with a stranger you described in your letter. Tell me more! I am riveted by the work being done by so many over so many fields of practice to try to find new ways of experiencing digital connection. This week, for the first time in ages, I made it all the way through a long form article and it was about just this topic—how do we reimagine and recreate digital public spaces in ways that spark true human connection, and as a result, help ensure the continued success of our democracy? While they may not save democracy, I continue to think these letters are one successful example of such experimentation. Not everyone can or will write weekly letters to each other online, but maybe that is also part of the point. Not everything can or should scale. This rekindles my desire to do a bit more meta-analysis of this project and what learnings we might be able to extract about publics and more. Not now, maybe later, as you would say.
This is a good segue to something else in your letter last week—your tendency to stop after the acquisition of new artifacts. My interest lies first in the act of finding and collecting; once objects are in my possession I am often comfortable with simply knowing they’re there, you wrote. This feels like it is another way in which we are very different. Though I am just as likely to put off hanging the artwork or otherwise completing the task, knowing the objects are there collecting dust would and does nag at me, like a little thorn that I have neglected to pull out of my flesh. To draw a line back to where I began, I wonder if this is a way in which my child-like all-or-nothing attitude lingers within me? If we are going to do this (and by this, I mean anything from acquiring art to pursuing a new hobby or taking on a new project), I want to really do this. I am yearning to commit, to finish what I have started, but yet there is so much to do…
Last week you described your epiphany that you might be trying to reproduce the school environment with your freelance life. I, too, am drawn to this lifestyle but, I think, for slightly different reasons. You see a connection between your object-gathering and the topic-gathering inherent in a liberal arts education. In school we can dabble in many different subjects, pop in and out. I love the exploration this enables, too. But for me, the true lure of school is actually rooted in the way it manufactures a finish line for each new thread. Once I make my way through the syllabus, I am “done” and have given that particular subject the go that was expected. I don’t have to wrestle with that nagging thorn that tells me I should be digging further and reminds me of all that I am not doing.
I think perhaps the takeaway in this letter is I still have more growing up to do. Thank goodness! I would hate to reach the pinnacle already.
Before I close this letter, I want to make sure to thank you for your words about my unusual obsession with meaning-making. I agree that being “normal” is nothing to aspire to, and in any case, I cannot change who I am!
Happy Friday to you and yours! I hope you can get the respite from work that you surely are due.
Until next week,
Sarah
Friday March 12 2021
Dear Sarah,
On this Friday evening, at the end of a week that I felt should have wrapped on Tuesday evening — a Tuesday that felt like a Friday, instead of a Friday that felt like a Tuesday — I feel like words are slowing for me, evaporating. I think this means that I am ready for bed, and I also think it means that I am a bit sad, feeling low. I mentioned it when we talked this week, the difficulty of this week, somewhat mysterious, except I have to think there is some recognition of the pandemic anniversary creeping into my psyche. A year ago we shut everything down, thinking we’d be able to open back up in a few weeks, in a few months, in a few more months? Now it is one year later, and while we’re on a path toward a resolution that I believe will actually come to fruition this year, to reach the one year anniversary of this experience is wearing on me, is wearing on us all, I am sure. A number of the people I spoke with this week had a glimmer of the fragile about them, although does the word fragile sound like a slight in some way? Delicate, on edge, emotions close to the surface. I saw tears here and there in people’s eyes, felt them pricking at my own. I also just feel tired. February was exhausting in all manner of ways and I thought March will be better, but instead March has had its own challenges.
I can hardly believe my fish fry letter was only last week but here we are, and I have some updates I must share with you. I considered editing my letter last Friday evening before you posted — the events of the evening transpired so swiftly — but instead I let the week unfold, all one million hours of it!
We went to pick up our fish fry dinner Friday evening; we had reserved a single meal, thinking of midwestern portions and assuming the bounty would be great. I went into the church — it was a church and not a school as I had described in my letter; perhaps I was trying to subdue the religious layers of this dinner plan even to myself? — and waited for my meal to be brought to me, waited in the church vestibule, looked at the various materials on the surfaces around me. I saw a flyer noting that those billboards — those baby billboards that always catch my eye on the highway as they are meant to, with their adorable babies smiling out — those pro-life billboards were going to continue to be supported by an anonymous donor. I felt worry in the pit of my stomach — what kind of deal was I making with the church to enjoy my fish fry dinner? Were my thirteen dollars going into a pool supporting those billboards in some way? I shifted my weight from foot to foot while I waited there in the vestibule with a few other people. My dinner came out, brought to me by a teen running meal calls back to the kitchen and returning with takeout bags. My bag with its single meal was suspiciously light. M and I went home, I worrying along the way about even the sliver of funds we’d given to the church, this church in our neighborhood; M reassured me, suggested the Catholic church has also done some good. Thirteen dollars certainly wasn’t going to make or break things. We arrived home and opened our bag to reveal a single piece of fried fish, a medium-small baked potato, some chopped and wilted green beans (were they from a can?), a broken brownie. Sarah, I don’t know if you know this, but a Catholic church is not a restaurant! We gobbled the small amount of food in our single meal, put our shoes back on, and zipped away again to pick up a burrito. A coda to the tale: on Saturday we were still hankering for a true fried fish experience and so we took out from a restaurant nearby we’d been wanting to try, and that fried fish was very tasty, and filled us up, and helped soothe the experience of the fish fry gone awry. On Saturday I talked with my mother about the single fish fry we’d attended together, and she said that we’d gone to a Veterans Center, and that they’d piled her plate of fried fish so high she’d had to keep eating and eating, she couldn’t eat it all. A different experience; my fond memory forged in some other place altogether. Lesson: the Catholic Church is no restaurant!
This week, and the last few, have been tiring and trying in their own ways, and I wanted to share that one thing I’ve been doing, one thing that has been keeping me afloat, is following Patricia Lockwood’s virtual book tour — upon the release of her novel, No One is Talking About This — as a sort of groupie. I love her work, I love her sense of humor, her facility with words, always dancing at the crazy edge of language and ideas but at the same time exacting such control, like riding wild horses. I pre-ordered her new novel weeks ago, ordered it from England for some reason, forgetting she’d obviously sell books here, too, and just received the book in the last week or so. I haven’t yet read it, have instead been going to free and paid conversations, between Patricia and John Lanchester at the London Review of Books, where PL is a contributing editor; between Patricia and Jenny Offill, a glorious and funny conversation with two writers brought together under the auspices of the fragmentary novel, via Brookline Booksmith; and between Patricia and Lauren Oyler, two writers brought together under the auspices of novels couched in the spirit of the extremely online, via Guernica Magazine. I reserved a spot for Patricia’s craft talk with The Writer’s Center that I wasn’t able to attend but of which I’ve received a recording; I’ve bookmarked Patricia on an episode of Maris Kreizman’s podcast; I’ve marked my calendar for this Sunday’s airing of City Arts & Lectures in which Patricia is in conversation with Sheila Heti. I’ve reserved a ticket for this coming Wednesday’s event with Patricia and Jen Spyra, brought together under the auspices of humor. Being a groupie is made much easier during our digital era and particularly during a pandemic, when all events are online, nothing but online. I searched back in our letters because I felt sure I must have mentioned Patricia Lockwood somewhere along the way in our conversations, and yet I had not. (I think perhaps I’ve emailed you about her work.) Her humor, her way with words (the New York Times Book Review called her a modern word witch, which sums it up pretty well), her odd and compelling personal story, her way with the short form that is Twitter — all combine to make her one of my faves. She is one part of the raft to which I’ve been clinging over these past few weeks!
I was envious last week of your Friday that felt like a Tuesday — I can’t wait for a week to feel short again! And I thought your words about reality bubbles were right on. I think the concept of our reality bubbles and how quickly we can shift attention from one space to another is exacerbated by our increasingly online lives, but I think these reality bubbles have existed perhaps as long as we’ve had imaginations, or the ability to be together with some people while we are away from others; two people can be in a room together and one person’s thoughts can be a million miles away. A faraway daydream can be interrupted by a physical reality in the moment. A phone call can suck a person out of a shared space and into a distant happening. Now I’m not certain I’m fully interpreting what you feared you were not fully articulating last week, but I understood what you were getting at and I think you conveyed it well.
This evening I’ve eaten Vietnamese takeout; M and I finally finished our latest Louise Penny audio book, The Brutal Telling; I’ve enjoyed a maple lime bourbon sour; and I’m ready to settle in with a fresh episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Happy Friday and I hope this weekend is full of rest and relaxation for you and yours, as I hope it will be for me!
Until soon,
Eva