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On Exuberance
Classes are in session again, and I’ve spent the first moments of these first two days of class asking my students to tell me about things they love, their quirks and fun facts and most present obsessions—things that have nothing to do with the subject of the class because there will be time enough for those conversations—and now I am thinking of that Annie Dillard quote1:
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Housed in that iconic fifth section of The Writing Life, the one that ends with “Push It,” as the final oft-anthologized section is frequently called, it’s good advice. It speaks so directly to singularity, rather than what is designed to appeal to others; that very quality is what often makes something appealing from the outside: an unabashed interest, an energy that trips past what is tidy, confined, demure. The life in it cannot help but tumble out.
I love this quality in sentences and paragraphs that relish in their clauses and their details, the ones that don’t stint in their maximalist style or shy from the urgent, exuberant heart of things too soon. And the book I am reading now, The Cyclist and His Shadow, a memoir by Olivier Haralambon, translated by François Thomazeau, shies from nothing. Of his first bike, Haralambon writes,
I can see it as in a dream, on some of the Sundays of childhood, constellations of dust swirling around the dim light of a room, a door, or a cellar, between the frames and the spokes. Blades of light cutting through space. And for what remains in me of my childhood calf muscles, I can still feel them harden and, without shaking, lift my heels. And I can still gauge the weight of my hand as I raise it before putting it on the salty leather of the saddle. Falling down on the cold tubes of the machine, my palm slowly runs along its spine and along the whole frame down to the last little bones. The bike that took my innocence still contracts my tongue today. On its cold and metallic body, I was tirelessly opening and closing my sweating skin, stroking the angular shape of the thin figure of steel. It was a Mercier: its white letters were sticking out on the deep pink, the pink color of meat; I can still feel its taste and its smell. I often wonder where it is now, having suffered for so long away from me, having endured different hardships. I imagine cracks and swells on its painted surface.
The paragraph is unremittingly sensual, and the passage even becomes more so as the chapter continues. The prose is so openly feeling and longing; there is no hesitance in the prose to suggest that anyone, anywhere, wants this to be less. (If it was less, it could not be this foundational, bodily obsession with cycling, upon which the whole book rests.) I wish, very much, that I could read it in the original French.
What draws me so much to prose like this is how much I struggle to allow myself the same latitude. The editorial voice in my head—one in which some sage advice about necessity vis-à-vis beauty is distorted by old admonishments to take up less space, less notice, and a deeply ingrained cultural imperative to batten the hatches on intense emotions of all kind—comes to a paragraph like this and cuts and cuts. Pull back, it says. Suggest, it says, more subtly and more subtly, until there’s nothing left of that exuberance that sparked the moment in the first place.
That is a very different impulse from the intentionally spare sentence that is what I imagine from Baldwin’s dictum to write a sentence “as clean as a bone.” The editorial impulse I am describing is one that is hiding the writing, secretly ashamed or afraid to allow the fullness of the work—with its vulnerable edges and sensual strangenesses—to exist. It is the eternal challenge at my desk.
Whose style cracks you open, makes you want to be more brave in the marrow of your sentences?
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What I’m making: Lunch.
Some of you know about this from my Instagram, but I’m in the general habit of packing my workday lunches in a bento box. When the weather gets colder and I have slightly fewer summer produce treasures, I’ll break out the rice and cooked vegetables, the nori and cutely cut carrot flowers that most associate with bento, but for now, I’m content with the desk-picnic vibe. I started doing this during my Ph.D. program, when the long, long days in my library carrel demanded something more interesting than the peanut butter & jelly sandwiches I still default to when time is tight and motivation low. There’s usually an elevenses and an afternoon tea snack to go with lunch—the “don’t bite anyone at 3 p.m.” fodder—but I get a lot of delight out of regular food simply cut into small pieces and arranged in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing.
If you want to know more about bento, one of my favorite resources and one of the originators of this particular exuberance is Just Bento.
What I’m reading: In addition to The Cyclist and His Shadow, as mentioned above, I will also point to the subheading below and light up the NEW ANDREA BARRETT!! beacon.
What I’m writing: I had the absolute privilege to write about Barrett’s Natural History, her new collection of short stories that continues the ongoing tale of the Marburg sisters and others, for the Ploughshares blog. Look for that to go up sometime next week. Playing favorites is hard (I have too many), but Andrea Barrett’s work is a polestar that’s been guiding so much of what I want for my work, and it’s been doing so for more than twenty years now.