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136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2022
‘To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.’
‘Too much time alone is just as risky as not enough, for it allows us to sink into our cyclical patterns of thought and narrative. We need someone to hold up a mirror so we can see who we are when we are taken outside of our heads. We need to hear others’ thoughts too.’
‘What if a work of fiction simply ended with pages and pages of descriptions of plants? If it doesn’t already exist, I think I must sit down and write it.’
‘—but I find myself always returning to Clarice Lispector and Duras, and now Ferrante and Townsend Warner in my thinking, but also when I write, and I’ve realised that it might make sense to focus on them through writing for an extended period of time. It’s said that it only takes a few seconds for the body to tense up, but that to relax completely takes much longer, more like twenty minutes—Regardless, I also like reading these books because of the state of mind in which they put me.’
‘One reads or writes a novel like one goes out to walk in the heat, or into the rain, to buy persimmons and butter.’
‘The flowers that look like bright yellow balls, with soft little pine tree-like leaves, are standing in their bucket of water, not far from a large bowl of tangerines—How could I not think of Lolly, especially in the blustery seasons? I was glad I left my commonplace desk. I went back to it with those images in my mind. For me, fiction is a space of plainness and of excess.’
‘I want to write with that kind of expansiveness, into one’s life and the landscape one is in. It is like a needle piercing the sky. Writing of spending time with one’s mother, the conversations they have in a spring that is really a late brutal winter, not understood by her mother at all. Loneliness on the moors, becoming Emily Brontë, ice and interiors, the house and the mind—in Carson’s writing. I admire it, and I feel so much when I read it, but how can I feel cradled in something so difficult? It’s the writing itself that does that, the details, the setting, the cutting through, taking off one’s clothes.’
‘Even though I’m a writer, it’s not always language I’m drawn to first. When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about landscape painting and literature, and perhaps as an extension of this I have started to think through the idea of character and landscape as similar things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent.’
‘To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood—It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.’
Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts...
In The Lost Daughter, when Leda goes alone...
To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one's life, and a violence all of its own.
As I write this my cat Trout whines loudly