I wanted to, but then I just didn’t
Catching up with an apology letter of sorts, in random bits and pieces
Mid-May has come and gone and this Substack has not been updated. Tricky use of the passive voice there, intended to distract: we all know well enough who has not updated this space. But let’s leave her obscured and obfuscated, for the sake of dramatic effect.
As one often says in times when writing is sparse (if it exists at all), I’ll say it hasn’t been for lack of ideas. And it’s true, to a certain degree. I have had ideas pop into my head at random moments, but it is also true that I have let them pop out of existence just as quickly. Lethargy, moroseness, general disinterest, lack of mental energy—you name it, I’ll take it. Yet, at the end of the day, it boils down to: I was waiting for the moment when I would want it bad enough, but I never did. That silly little expectation of inspiration, of waiting for just the right idea at the right time with the right tone in mind. Back to the terrible, really not great notion that if I sit on my couch and tune out just enough, it will come to me—topic, format, perfect opening statement.
I don’t have to tell you that I know that’s not how writing works.
But I allowed myself to fall into this rut, once more, with feeling. That’s the problem with bad habits, right? They have a way of sticking to your very core and just waiting for the right moment to peak through every reasonable and rational guardrail you might have put in place against them. In my case: thinking that the only text worth writing (or even thinking about writing) was a text that was great in every way.
Except I’m not a great writer, and for several months I haven’t even felt great in general, so there’s that.
Lately, I decided to revisit the whole “writing a diary/journal” thing. I’ve tried this so many times, under so many different headings, in so many different formats for the past decade. And I’ve failed miserably. Opening a notebook (yes, it has to be by hand) and scribbling always feels like a personal challenge—I don’t have anything interesting to reflect on, doldrums don’t make up for interesting notes, there’s only so much poignancy or poetry one can derive from routine, etc.
But for the past ten days, I’ve forced myself to just…write, even if just a factual report of what happened on that day. Do ten days count as habit-forming or is it too early in the journey to consider it such? It coincided with me going back to practicing yoga at home. Sometimes, things just coincide like that, sometimes you make them coincide, but in any case it is not lost on me that both practices have reminded me of constant practice and being gentle to yourself when things don’t go as planned.
And that, no matter the mental image I have, I could really use some work on my flexibility, in more ways than one.
Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion1 (trans. Tanya Leslie) is the type of work that gives a lot more food for thought than its short length would suggest. But funnily enough, the bit that has stuck with me the most is a short footnote to the text. It is Ernaux’s explanation as to why she does not offer many identifying details of the lover at the center of that work: he chose to be in her life, she writes, not in her book.
This short statement has been making the rounds in my head since I read it. I am under no illusion that whatever I write will ever have the same projection as the books of an actual Nobel-prize winner. Nevertheless, I’ve come to realize that I have chosen out of certain topics or of certain specifics because of this very reason. It is a balancing act, when you decide to create a space for “writing about what comes along the way.” It’s about being very aware that the Writer might want to pluck this one bit and unravel it, but that the Person might feel it too entangled with others for that to be her choice to make. In other words: it is not (just, or even primarily) about what I feel comfortable about sharing about myself, but about how others intersect with some of these stories and whether they would be comfortable.
Sometimes I work around that by writing about other things. Books are a safe bet in that sense: no matter how collective of a reading you take part in, it is always fundamentally, unequivocally personal experience. But it is not always that I feel strongly about a piece of literature enough to lead me to a new post. Or perhaps it’s that I don’t always feel like I have something to say other than “please, do read it,” even when I do feel strongly about it. I am always happy to have a conversation about books, but I’m still not sure how much energy I want to devote to writing consistently and recurrently about them. Maybe this goes back to expecting great ideas to strike. Maybe it goes even further back and deeper into not wanting to create a sense of obligation between reading and writing, out of fear that the ugly monster of Reading Slump rears its head and reminds me of the not-so-great years of the PhD.
But here’s a bit I feel I can share without hesitation, because it is about a solitary experience.
Sometimes, you need to get out of the house in order to get out of your head. So, because the weather was nice (sunny, just warm enough, not humid), I packed my water bottle, my book (a collection of short stories by Mia Couto), and my earbuds, and out and off I went for a walk, earbuds softly humming my album for sad days. The same one for the past two decades. Everyone has an album, or at least a song, for those days, right? The one you put on either when you need a good cry but can’t get it out of your chest, or when you need to be reminded of adding a pep to your walk, or both.
I am, at heart, a city girl. Born and raised. Not a fan of insects. Terribly allergic to every type of pollen under the sun. Deadly afraid of chickens (still recalling clearly the time my grandfather thought I was just being silly and threw chicken feed all around me while opening the door to a coop). But even I will admit to the restorative powers of fresh breeze, the sight (if not the touch) of grass and flowers. And I’m lucky to be only a few blocks away from a park where I can get all of that, plus the sight of water, and the occasional happy dog.
And for a split second, despite all the discomforts (physical and emotional) that led to that walk in the park, I felt something close to wholeness. Close to grasping what it meant to be there, in that moment.
Then a biker whizzed by, a little too close for comfort, and the moment was shattered.
But it was glorious while it lasted.
Finally, a snippet I had to share, because it brings together things I absolutely love, including my favorite author.
Last week, over Instagram, Christina (@oboreads) mentioned that “bookstagram has recently forgotten the art of sharing authors from past decades” as she shared Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris (which I promptly added to my to-read list).
I haven’t been poking around the book side of Instagram for nearly as long as some of my friends there, but I can understand the sentiment. When I first started perusing the tags, I was easily greeted by authors I had never heard of and books I had never seen. Fast-forward to today, and either because of the ever-present and ever-haunting algorithm or because of tastes (or, more likely, one feeding the other), more often than not you end up finding the same handful of recent publications and authors. This can be great, of course, because it is humanly impossible to keep up with everything being published, but at the same time it makes it feel that it’s harder to come across those sparks, those moments of discovery and unexpected meetings.
So it was heartwarming, in more ways than one, to see Courtney Henning Novak’s TikTok about her encounter with Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. Courtney is doing a “Read Around the World” challenge (awesome, by the way) and proceeding alphabetically (my scattered mood-reader brain could never), so it was time for Brazil and that was her choice. Brás Cubas is not even my favorite Machado de Assis, but to see my favorite author, from turn-of-the-century Brazil, getting such an earnest boost on social media, was priceless. Enough that I have had to share over and over again.
And here, once more (please click here to see the original, or enjoy it with Portuguese captions below)2:
I have a hundred pages left of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis and this is already my favorite book. End of discussion. I do not care if the last hundred pages is just the word “banana” printed 10,000 times. Best. Book. EVER. #readaroundtheworld #booktok
@courtneyhenningnovak on TikTok
Brazilian Twitter-, I’m sorry, Brazilian X-users have been talking non-stop about the book because of her short video, which leads me to believe (or at least to hope) that more readers will discover or re-discover this classic, either in the original or in translation (and I do recommend Thomson-DeVeaux’s).
I mean, this is the novel’s epigraph, and if it doesn’t make you curious about what comes after it…
I’ll leave you with it. And with the only thing I could add by way of conclusion:
Please, do read it.
A quick reminder that I do not make any money from the Bookshop.org links, but they help support my local indie bookstore!
I would love to embed the original video, but Substack’s integration of TikTok content is beyond suboptimal…
Ok 1. Time to stop postponing my reread of Brás Cubas, and 2. I love the conversation around the special feeling of “discovering” older books. I recently heard about The Enchanted April (1922) by Elizabeth von Arnim for the first time, and in the space of a week I purchased the book, read it, watched the movie adaptation, and it’s now a new favorite!