What did I read (and finish and record) in 2016?

Jan 5.  The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood.
Jan 9.  Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Jan 14. A Thousand Naked Strangers, Kevin Hazzard
Jan 25. The Taming of a Shrew, Shakespeare
Feb. 2 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Feb. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Mar. 6  The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
June 3 The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
June 20 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
June 26 Euphoria, Lily King
June 26 The Flick, Annie Baker
July 8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
July 10 The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
Sept 3 The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (781 dense pages)
Oct 11 The Man of Property, vol 1 Forsyte Sage, John Galsworthy
Oct 28 Silas Marner, George Eliot
Nov 2 The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

Self-Help

…what he most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge….It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

I read a good deal of a book last semester (in graduate school you seldom finish everything, if anything) which impressed me arguably more than it should have. Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is just what it sounds like. It is perhaps the first of what is now a lamentable genre, a genre avoided by all persons with a decent appreciation for the redemptive power of irony, and who generally avoid taking themselves seriously enough to warrant a course in self-improvement.

The appreciation of irony is a virtue in itself.

Self-Help is thoroughly unironic. Naturally, I went and bought another of his books, the moral heft of which isn't difficult to appreciate in the one-word title: Duty. 

But moral heft is what we're going for. Samuel Smiles wrote for "the every man"--men who wouldn't turn their nose up at a moral precept or a zinging cliche (of course, turning one's nose up at a cliche requires an ear for irony. One gets the feeling, though, that Smiles's patrons weren't reading Lawrence Sterne deep into the night). Well, Smiles was full of zingers, old and new. His book begins with an old one: Heaven helps those who help themselves. 

Oh I hear you groan, but those old chestnuts can be damn useful, can move men to action. Written at times in rather rosy ink, Smiles's books are full of anecdotes and hyperbolic portraits of all sorts of men (I do forgive him his exclusion of the fairer sex). Smiles wrote the book for those eager enough, yet unlucky enough, to be born socially below their intellectual station: poor in pocket, but not in spirit. Self-Help in particular was written for--and because of--such willful workers. Smiles introduces his 1859 publication "briefly": "The origin of this book may be briefly told..."

Some fifteen years since, the author was requested to deliver an address before the members of some evening classes, which had been formed in a northern town for mutual improvement, under the following circumstances:--

 Two or three young men of the humblest rank resolved to meet in the winter evenings, for the purpose of improving themselves by exchanging knowledge with each other. Their first meetings were held in the room of a cottage in which one of the members lived; and, as others shortly joined them, the place soon became inconveniently filled....

 Though they were for the most part young men earning comparatively small weekly wages, they resolved to incur the risk of hiring a room; and, on making inquiry, they found a large dingy apartment to let, which had been used as a temporary Cholera Hospital....But the mutual improvement youths, nothing daunted, hired the cholera room at so much a week, lit it up, placed a few benches and a deal table in it, and began their winter classes....The teaching may have been, as no doubt it was, of a very rude and imperfect sort; but it was done with a will. Those who knew a little taught those who knew less--improving themselves while they improved the others....Thus these youths--and there were grown men amongst them--proceeded to teach themselves and each other, reading and writing, arithmetic and geography; and even mathematics, chemistry, and some of the modern languages.

About a hundred young men had thus come together, when, growing ambitious, they desired to have lectures delivered to them... (Self-Help, Oxford pp 6-7)

"[A]nd then it was that the author became acquainted with their proceedings," the author, of course, being Smiles himself.  Like Duty, Self-Help fails often by falling into romances of toil; it positively revels in the nobility of hardship. And yet I keep finding myself moved--minding the pitfalls, Smiles can be damn good reading! It's a kind of philosophy, and much more fun (and...edifying...) than sludging though Heidegger or some other treatise of philosophical hand-wringing.

Duty is perhaps even more heavy-handed than its predecessor (the fourth of five in what eventually became Smiles's Self-Help series). But allow the words (or will them) to be fresh, and they will be:

He who has well considered his duty will at once carry his convictions into action. Our acts are the only things that are in our power. They not only form the sum of our habits, but of our character.

 At the same time, the course of duty is not always the easy course. It has many oppositions and difficulties to surmount. We may have the sagacity to see, but not the strength of purpose to do. To the irresolute there is many a lion in the way. He thinks and moralizes and dreams, but does nothing. "There is little to see," said a hard worker, "and little to do; it is only to do it." (Duty, p.31)

This really hits you if you're young, more intellectually inclined than the world has use for, and have a nagging moral urge to do good, useful things with your life. Emerson said that "the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Emerson has more credibility today than Smiles, but they're saying something similar.

Reading a book like Duty is hard if you really haven't done anything yet, and feel painfully aware of the fact. Really, I think you could hardly find a more fitting target of Smiles's ire than a neurotically self-reflective intellectual person who thinks without really doing.

While I don't think I'm as paralyzingly self-reflective as I could be, Smiles pushes us to think about weakness of character. I cringed at those parts of myself I like least: hesitancy, ambivalence, uncertainty, contentedness, irresoluteness, impotent (or empty) self-reflection (and we might add a tendency toward redundancy to the list...). Smiles articulates his vision of the feeble-willed, those with "weak wills":

...or no wills at all. They are characterless. They have no strong will for vice, yet they have none for virtue. They are the passive recipients of impressions, which, however, take no hold of them. They seem neither to go forward nor backward. As the wind blows, so their vane turns round; and when the wind blows from another quarter, ti turns round again. Any instrument can write on such spirits; any will can govern theirs. They cherish no truth strongly, and do not know what earnestness is. Such persons constitute the mass of society everywhere--the careless, the passive, the submissive, the feeble, and the indifferent." (33-34)

"Philosophers discuss," says Smiles, "decisive men act." I'm "discussing" resolve and action. My whole journey in philosophy now seems to me to have looped in on itself to begin eating its own tail--from idealization of the "examined life" through the great Western thinkers; through the narrows of questions of power, identity, free will, ontology, epistemology, skyhook universals of God or Nature; to language games, and slippage, and deconstructing binaries and assumptions and norms and the Human and the Nonhuman, and anything that could have once snuggily belonged under the only seemingly solid rock of Common Sense. The play of language, and puzzles, and more puzzles. It's something we need to do: to never take for granted that the world is what it seems simply because it feels right, or it's comfortable, or doing otherwise is a bit painful. I know this, I really do.

And then I'd go home, and something in the blood recognizes that there will always be binaries to live by. Family and not family; city and country; human and not human. And really, who needs shelves and shelves of philosophy discussing the fuzzy borders of the Human when we already have Darwin? The Origin is surprisingly tedious, but there's no doubting the profundity of the details of that book: he says over and over and over Look, look at this. Don't you see what this means? Isn't this wonderful? 

And so I began reading my way away from philosophy: the pragmatists like William James and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism, φρόνησις, phronēsis. Practical wisdom, experience. All of which I am relatively without, and all of which isn't merely to be found on a college campus. Wisdom is found in books, but rhetorical banalities aside, the plumber really does know something the Emerson scholar doesn't; the man who built the chair he sits in knows something I don't. I know nothing, but that's the jewel of Socratic wisdom I cling to. I don't want to abandon the "life of the mind"; I just want to begin walking in a different direction.

I remember a conversation with my parents. I was an undergraduate and just beginning to really get my head around Nietzsche, and Mill, and Shakespeare. I told my parents that people don't really take the time to think, and to look beyond the surface of their own assumptions. That if more people spent more energy examining the way they operate in the world, the world would be a much better place. I asserted that this was the most important pursuit an individual can take: the examined life of the intellectual. If you don't have that foundation, you simply cannot be a truly fulfilled person.

Or something like that. My father looked over his hamburger at me with brown eyes I inherited: "So the intellectual stuff, that's the most important thing?"

I affirmed this, and I don't think he argued the point; but in my faulty memory he keeps eating, maybe glancing at my mother, and says something about family being his most important thing. I probably pinked up and muttered something about not being able to have a fulfilling family life if you haven't yet pursued your own intellectual pursuits. But he paid for our meal with money from the job he doesn't really like, and we drove back to the house he built himself, the house I grew up in.

I'm aware I may fall into the Smiles fault: to romanticize the practical, and generalize; and certainly I risk being anti-intellectual to make an argument too irrational to stand. But I don't think Smiles is anti-intellectual. He wasn't criticizing scholars and intellectuals; he was criticizing those who never dug into anything, those who ever skimmed the surface, those who never pushed by the feckless pursuits to fruitful results.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to say. I'm not criticizing the intellectual life. Such a life gives the opportunity to throw oneself into a life of books and ideas; to enjoy and contribute to The Great Conversation about things that matter. I do think the pressures of professionalization and publication have pushed many scholars to intellectual dead-ends of trivialities and useless minutiae--the publishing of book that are never read, and of articles no one really cares about. Ever since the Humanities began having fits about needing to justify its own existence (give us results!) was when the Humanities began to wilt around the edges.

Ironically (for myself and for my argument here), that pressure was probably deployed though the rhetoric of pragmatics, the very rhetoric I find myself drawn to these days. The humanities don't really have cash value, and that's okay--that's actually a good thing.

George Eliot talked about "the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in--good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle" (Daniel Deronda, Penguin ed, p157). It's Dorothea Brooke's yearning for a vocation rather than avocation (mere enjoyment, or hobby).

I'm finding I need to get my hands dirty, at least for awhile. I've been in school since I was 5. The idea of staying in school until I die is basically a real soul killer at this point.

And I don't know whether I've come to the point of leaving academia academically, or if this is just a rite of passage for a person in their 20s who hasn't yet found their niche: the place to dig down deep, and find the pains and the joys of doing so. It's not so much finding what you think you're looking for as cultivating some patch of earth to fruition. Maybe life isn't a journey so much as a garden.

You'll pardon that aphorism. But Voltaire had said something to that effect, or Candide did at any rate. Back from the long journey, Candide settled down to a quiet life with Cunegonde. This settlement leaves a bit to be desired since we are told that "At the bottom of his heart Candide had not the lease wish to marry Cunegonde." This generation has been told over and over to achieve, and to shoot for the moon, and reach for excellence; we have been told that we can achieve whatever we can dream. We are told never to settle.

So poor Candide, we first think. Or maybe poor Cunegone who undergoes the narrative inconvenience of a Princess past her rescue plot--she too will grow old, will live beyond the romantic to the ordinary and banal. Pangloss keeps asking his questions; he asks "the best philosopher in Turkey...why so strange an animal as man was ever created." Pangloss gets no real answer, and a door slammed in his face.

They meet an old farmer who knows nothing of the world but is "content...with sending there for sale the produce of the garden [he] cultivate[s]": ""I have only twenty acres," replied the Turk. "I cultivate them with my children; and work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."" The wandering adventurers think about it, and return to the farm on which they had hesitated to settle. Pangloss even beings to philosophically justify such a course. But "Let us work without theorizing," says the cynic Martin; "'tis the only way to make life endurable":

The whole small fraternity entered into this praiseworthy plan, and each started to make use of his talents. The little farm yielded well. Cunegonde was indeed very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry-cook....and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here." 

"'Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens."

[work in progress warning]

On Trollope's 'The Bertrams' and "understanding"

For an assignment in my 1859/60 seminar, we were to track a word throughout our reading of Trollope's The Bertrams. Wonderful novel, hardly ever read anymore. The assignment was fruitful, I think. Here are the results.

The Bertrams and “understanding”

    I chose to track some derivatives of “understanding” in The Bertrams since Trollope, it seems to me, shoos his characters through the plot primarily by means of a repetition of attempts—and often failures—by Trollope’s characters to understand/to know/to acknowledge the hearts and minds of their comrades and also, critically, of themselves.  I began searching recurrences of “understand,” more often than not finding the word in a negative mode e.g. “could not,” “cannot,” “will not,” “did not,” “do not,” or “hardly” understand etc. Other slight variations on this theme did catch my eye, however, and I tried to include a few in my catalogue such as “…he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind” (137).

    Thus we have a knowledge-problem spawning much pain and confusion for our lovers and friends. Though sometimes rendered brilliantly comic (as when Miss Todd and Adela visit Mrs. Leake) misunderstanding usually leads to suffering. And Trollope all the while gives us the sense that this suffering—by “stricken harts” and stricken hearts—is needless. In other words, this complex pain could have, indeed, should have, been avoided if George had tried harder to understand the complexity of Caroline; if Old Bertram had better known his own nephew’s character, or recognized better his own miserliness; if Arthur would have actually looked and actually understood Adela’s deep unswaying love (a love that had always been there for him); if Caroline had recognized her own capacity to love George, and her own need to be loved. This profound inability to know, to understand, to acknowledge one’s self and one another I actually do not find to be resolved by the end of the novel. Our lovers do find each other, do find a kind of understanding with one another. Recognition scenes, after all, are not absent from this very English tragicomedy: “Caroline Waddington had once flattered herself that that heart of hers was merely a blood-circulating instrument. But she had discovered her mistake, and learned the truth before it was too late. She had known what it was to love…” (445). But one senses from Trollope’s novel an inevitability: that to live is to suffer, to struggle, and to misunderstand.

    Two characters, Trollope’s heroes, escape this somewhat tragic condition: Adela and Miss Todd. Adela, “pure, true, and honest” always understood Arthur, and always understood herself. Similarly, the Falstaffian Miss Todd sees through the deceptions and misunderstandings of her friends and neighbors: all but once. Miss Todd does fail to understand Miss Baker’s attraction to Sir Lionel, and yet we might see here the success of that misunderstanding: Sir Lionel’s iniquitous seductions, we feel, are better kept far away from Hadley. Miss Todd we are told “does more good to others than others do to her”: to do so is to make a kind of heroic effort. Unlike Arthur’s orthodoxy, Miss Todd’s ethics requires not creeds but only an effort of understanding. 

The Bertrams and “understanding”

Volume One

·         Adela had never before known him to be solicitous about money for himself, and now she felt that she did not understand him. (Chapter 4, p44)

·         Indeed Mr. Bertram did not think very much about degrees. He had taken no degree himself, except a high degree in wealth, and could not understand that he ought to congratulate a young man of twenty-two as to a successful termination of his school-lessons. (55)

·         They did not understand each other; perceiving which, Sir Lionel gave up the subject. He was determined not to make himself disagreeable to his son. (89)

·         “…But you hardly understand me, or him either.”

“I think I understand him, George…” (91)

·         “…I hardly think you know or realize what my feelings to you are. I can only meet you to tell you again and again that I love you. You are so cold yourself that you cannot understand my—my—my impetuosity, if you choose to call it so." (135-136)

·         …he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind. (137)

·         "Ah! my dear fellow, you do not know her…” (166)

·         "Ah! you say that because you do not understand her…” (166)

·         "And occasionally cheese," said Harcourt, who could not understand that any rising man could marry early, unless in doing so he acquired money. (176)

·         "Yes, I do; at times very, very much; but I fear the time may come when I may love him less. You will not understand me; but the fact is, I should love him better if he were less worthy of my love—if he were more worldly."

"No, I do not understand that," said Adela, thinking of her love, and the worldly prudence of him who should have been her lover.

"That is it—you do not understand me; and yet it is not selfishness on my part. I would marry a man in the hope of making him happy." (184)

Volume Two

·         "But it was a fault of yours. Do you think that I cannot understand? that I cannot see?...” (238) 

·         …she had acted foolishly in that, certainly; had not known him, had not understood his character… (244)

·         "Trouble—trouble! But I will not make a fool of myself. I believe at any rate that you understand me."

"Oh! perfectly, Mr. Bertram."

But she did not understand him; nor perhaps was it very likely that she should understand him. What he had meant her to understand was this: that in giving her up he was sacrificing only himself, and not her; that he did so in the conviction that she did not care for him; and that he did so on this account, strong as his own love still was, in spite of all her offences. This was what he intended her to understand;—but she did not understand the half of it. (251)

·         Bertram did not understand her, and he showed he did not by his look. (253)

·         Mr. Bertram turned towards the table, and buried his face in his hands. He did not understand it. He did not know whence came all this opposition. He could not conceive what was the motive power which caused his nephew thus to thwart and throw him over, standing forward as he did with thousands and tens of thousands in his hand. But he knew that his request was refused, and he felt himself degraded and powerless. (314)

·         "I believe much that I do not understand. I believe the distance of the earth from the sun. I believe that the seed of a man is carried in a woman, and then brought forth to light, a living being. I do not understand the principle of this wondrous growth. But yet I believe it, and know that it is from God. But I cannot believe that evil is good. I cannot believe that man placed here by God shall receive or not receive future happiness as he may chance to agree or not to agree with certain doctors who, somewhere about the fourth century, or perhaps later, had themselves so much difficulty in coming to any agreement on the disputed subject." (334)

·         "Ah! you do not understand, George." (336)

·         “I do not know what you wish me to understand, Mr. Bertram.”

“Yes, Adela, you do; I think you do. I think I am honest and open. At any rate, I strive to be so. I think you do understand me.” (344)

·         She was in a twitter of sentimental restlessness, but she did not understand the cause of her own uneasiness. (377)

Volume Three

·         “Ah! you little know me.”

“I should but little know you if I thought you could esteem me in that guise.” (449)

·         "What is it you mean?"

"I will not deserve the name again—even from you."

"Nonsense; I do not understand you. You do not know what you are saying."

"Yes, Sir Henry, I do know well what I am saying. It may be that I have done you some injury; if so, I regret it. God knows that you have done me much. We can neither of us now add to each other's comfort, and it will be well that we should part."

"Do you mean me to understand that you intend to leave me?"

"That is what I intend you to understand."

"Nonsense; you will do no such thing." (455)

·         “But, Adela, do not misunderstand me…” (461)

·         “Well, I don’t suppose you know your own mind, as yet.”

“Oh, sir! indeed I do.” (464)

·         "Well, all things are possible; but I do not understand how mine are to be cured. They have come too clearly from my own folly." (471)

·         But he knew himself to be a handsome man, and he could not understand how he could be laid aside for so ugly a lout as this stranger from England. (484)

·         Much as his uncle understood, he had failed to understand his nephew’s mind. (516)

·         His lordship had given directions at the lodge that she was not to come up, and could not understand how it had come to pass that the lady had forced her way to the hall-door. (534)

·         “My lord, if you’d only give yourself the trouble to understand me—“

“I don’t understand a word you say...” (537)

·         She felt sure that if Lord Stapledean would only be made to understand the facts of the case, he would yet take her part. (538)

·         “…Now we may fairly trust that we do know our own minds…” (541)

·         His uncle, he knew, had misunderstood him. (555)

·         “Father, you do not understand this matter.” (566)

A rather abstract abstract proposal for ACLA Conference in March

(It's at Harvard! i.e. the only reason I'm applying is to gain access to Houghton library's William James papers...)

Thinker, Soldier, Justice, Die: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Pragmatisms of Ending

In 1911, a seventy year old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write that “the best way [to cope with mortality] is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead.” He would live to 93.

In his Introduction to The Essential Holmes Richard Posner writes that “a diverse cast of moderns….have been concerned with the…implications of taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks…” Pragmatism and Existentialism, in Posner’s figuring, stem from identical impulses, pragmatism being “typically American,” and existentialism “typically European.”

As has been observed by such critics as Posner and Louis Menand, pragmatism is both a post Darwinian and a post Civil War philosophy. Holmes, serving in the Union Army for three years, was wounded three times. Thus, as Menand argues, “the war was the central experience of his life.” Consequently, Holmes’s jurisprudential career was largely spent combatting those moral abstractions we might call universal principles or natural laws; such abstractions were, after all,  what called a young Holmes to enlist. But however “horrible and dull,” Holmes also found war necessary “everywhere and at all times.”

What I hope to contribute to this conversation on the interconnectedness between writing and death is an exploration of a particularly American voice of this soldier-philosopher judge. What are, for Holmes, the ends of pragmatic philosophy at the ends of life?

Monozygosity

An essay always under revision for me. I was reading too much Joan Didion at the time (first draft in 2012) and it certainly shows. My first draft contained an absurdly pretentious pose--I plopped in the entire Shakespeare sonnet without explication of any kind: figure it out! I must have thought. I hope this version is more humble. 

We were at one time a singular being. This is a curious feeling.

We were born on the same day in March of 1990. About nine months earlier, for a certain period of time, were were a single individual. Did we itch to be two? As monozygotic twins—identical twins—we come from one egg, one strand of DNA. What possible combination of cosmic motivations, global environmental factors, genetic susceptibilities, evolutionary hiccups, astrological alignments, and regional weather conditions could transform one person into two people? More simply put: what split the egg? To counter a common question put to me—usually unthinkingly—What is it like being a twin? I will often play the cynic: I don't know, what is it like not to be a twin? This is both coyly humorous and strategically avoidant. But after all, what a stupid question. Nevertheless, I will deign: What is it like to be a twin? In truth, it’s wonderful.

*

My sister and I are walking up the hill to campus for final exams. We are arguing about music, bickering and bantering in our own shorthand, and I wonder if I could ever do the same with a romantic partner. I have showered and been up since seven, I dress in an affected manner, deliberately (ashamedly) academic; she has rolled out of bed and thrown on a hooded sweater. I am headed to an English Lit. exam, she is headed to History of Rock and Roll. Our argument is preposterous: The Ramones vs. Glenn Gould. I am saying things like, “What did the Ramones do for music? They knew three guitar chords,” and she cannot believe we are related. Even I realize I am full of it, but I enjoy (as does she) the back and forth.

For as long as I can remember, my very identity has itself been a conversation piece, a nice icebreaker if you will. Hello have you met Laura? Did you know she’s a twin? Identical. They look exactly alike. A lazy but accurate skeleton of the conversation I will have with a previously unacquainted stranger for possibly at least the next ten minutes. Topics we are likely to cover:

-Do you fight a lot?

-Do you share boyfriends?

-What are the key differences in appearance as well as personality?

-Who is Baby A?

-What’s it like?

-Did you ever switch?

-Has your being defined as ‘one of two’ ever resulted in a sort of anxiety-ridden identity crisis?

I was only asked the latter once by a psychology major deeply interested in Jungian archetypes. I think I answered yes.

I remember being struck by the story of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Helen of Troy (they are often conflated under one label, the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus. One wonders whether they—if any Castor and Pollux ever existed—would have felt their individuality erased by such a label, or whether they would have cared at all. Or perhaps the common name would have been a comfort). Whether they were born out of one egg or two varies; regardless, the two are never depicted without the other. The two fought in battle together until Castor, fatally wounded, called out to his brother. All-powerful Zeus offered Pollux either a full ticket to Olympus, or merely half time, sharing his immortality with his brother. Pollux chose the latter; the brothers split their time between Hades and heaven. I do not imagine the choice was much of a choice at all for Pollux.

Imagine if you will having someone around, with whom you may always converse and bicker and banter and yet never tire. Imagine having the privilege of claiming: I am a solitary person, I require space and quiet and myself alone with my thoughts, and yet always knowing to the very pith of your being that you are not, and have never really ever been, alone in the world.

*

She is, once again, telling me about the greatness of The Beatles. The record player makes its revolutions in the background, the diamond needle moving against the miniscule ridges of a vinyl copy of Rubber Soul. We take turns flipping the finished record over, not bothering to put on something new. Her animated face will never grow old, not like this, not when expressing her admiration for Lennon-McCartney. Prosaic moments such as these are when the mind, relaxed and open, wanders down paths without particular intention or chosen destination. I feel the warmth of this moment, the darkness of the winter evening outside exaggerated by the bronzed light within the room. We will live like this forever.

We are permeable beings, porous, full of holes at the microscopic level. What is it, exactly, that separates one person from another? We have never been far apart, always like Castor and Pollux, in relation to the other. I am never really alone. This is a comfort. But while you are half of a whole, created and formed in the same moments, there is unfortunately no precise way to determine who will die first.

I think of a Shakespeare sonnet, number sixty-four. When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age…loss, death is inevitable. I worry too often, the thought creeps up in the places I am most comfortable, unreasonable scenarios. I wonder who would cope better, which survivor? When I have seen such interchange of state, / Or state itself confounded to decay: the worst scenario. Norman Rush calls it the “hellmouth,” the “opening up of the mouth of hell right in from of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my love away. Living involves loss, but loss always shocks us. The injustice of it, the utterly unwelcome, yet wholly predictable facts of life seem still distant to me. I am young but already sense, abstract and foreboding, a shortness of time.

Who will die first?

Families, people in love have the same thought, but I cannot help but wonder whether the knowledge of a common origin, a onetime shared existence, might increase the loss; or am I exaggerating my own tragedy? Nevertheless, two possibilities: who will be left behind?

Since I first conceived of her mortality I have never not been afraid.