There is a word, sad and resonant, for the last member of a dying species. The word is endling. Martha, who perished at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, was the endling for the passenger pigeon—the final representative of a bird once so prolific its flocks blackened the sky. The Tasmanian tiger's endling, Benjamin, froze to death in the Hobart Zoo one night in 1936, when his keepers accidentally locked him out of his enclosure. Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, expired peacefully in 2012, at around 100 years old.
It is entirely possible that the endling for a bashful porpoise called the vaquita is today swimming somewhere off the Mexican coast. Vaquitas dwell exclusively in the Gulf of California, the tongue of the Pacific Ocean that laps the Baja Peninsula, in a tiny pocket of turbid sea that could fit three times within Los Angeles and its suburbs. At just five feet long, vaquitas are the world's smallest cetaceans, the order that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises. They eat fish and squid, which they locate with high-frequency clicks. They avoid the rumble of boat engines, prefer traveling in inconspicuous duos, and refrain from jumping, splashing, or slapping their tails. They are a headache to study. For all their secrecy, they are adorable—endowed with a snub snout, fetching dark eyepatches, and black lips whose coy smile, researchers have written, recalls a marine Mona Lisa. Cross Flipper with a very shy panda and you've bred a vaquita.
My experience of living alone, in other words, was not a lonely one. I learned to relish my freedom and privacy; I was flourishing creatively, joyfully unburdened by other people’s temperature preferences and alarm clocks and laundry piles and bathroom-sink grime. (Your own grime, I’ve learned over the years, is much more tolerable than the grime of others.)
By my mid-20s, I was dedicated to spreading the gospel of living alone, even writing a spunky, service-y essay recommending certain simple steps that would make living solo feel like a privilege and not a punishment—like investing in good-quality bedclothes and treating yourself to brunches and vacations whenever and wherever you could afford to.
When the historian Nell Irvin Painter decided to leave a chaired professorship at Princeton to go to art school — embracing a new field and a new life at the age of 64 — it wasn’t so much the art part that baffled people as the school part. Art sounded like freedom; school sounded like drudgery. If she wanted to paint, why not simply retire and devote her days to painting? Why endure a crowded commute from her home in Newark to sweat it out with 18-year-olds for the minor distinction (for her) of yet another undergraduate degree?
As satisfying as it might have been to my fifteen-year-old self, it wouldn’t have rung true for the men to suddenly gain insight into their own hypocrisy, just as it wouldn’t have rung true for, say, Humbert Humbert. It makes more sense, after the girls try desperately to take back their narrative, that the boys would feel the need to steal it back from them. Any kind of self-realization on the narrators’ part would have cheapened the wonderful ambiguity of the ending, which is intended not to satisfy readers but to gnaw at them until they feel the injustice of the Lisbon girls’ stolen subjectivity
It is sci-fi in its most perfect expression — no robots, no explosions, no car chases. Reading it is like having a lucid dream of six years from next week, filled with people you don't know, but will. And its quietness is what belies any easy attempt to dissect it.
A lot of people say they don’t get poetry, as though poetry were one thing. And there’s still a ton of poetry out there that’s obfuscatory and worse. But these poems light both heart and mind. They stab you with memory’s shiny knife. “Ouch,” you say, and then “thank you.”
One eerie achievement of “Convenience Store Woman” is that the reader is never entirely sure how to think about Keiko. Is she monstrous? Brave and eccentric? For all the creepiness of her cheerful obedience to the manual, she is, at least, choosing a different kind of conformity than the rest of society, which insists that she marry and pursue a conventional career path.
Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings.