Is writing worth it? Does it make any sense at all to pursue literary glory? Are the writers we praise really the best anyway?
In 1824, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi decided to take on the subject in a thirty-page essay, of kinds. In fact, he puts his reflections somewhat playfully in the mouth of Giuseppe Parini, perhaps the finest Italian poet of the eighteenth century, a man from a poor family who spent all his life seeking financial and political protection in the homes of the aristocracy. Leopardi imagines Parini—“one of the very few Italians of our times who combined literary excellence with depth of thought”—responding to an exceptionally talented and ambitious young writer seeking advice. What follows here is nothing more than a brief summary of what he says; I take no responsibility for the ideas expressed. Readers can decide for themselves how much of this rings true today.
Young man, literary glory, or the fame that comes from learning and then writing, is one of the very few forms of glory presently available to the commoner. Admittedly, it’s not as impressive or satisfying as the glory that derives from public service, since action is much worthier and nobler than thinking or writing, and more natural. We weren’t made to spend our lives sitting at a table with pen and paper, and doing so can only be detrimental to your health and happiness. All the same, as I said, this is a glory that can be achieved without initial riches and without being part of a large organization.
Theoretically.
“What’s a hundred years?” McPhee has asked, elsewhere. “Nothing. And everything, it doesn’t evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it’s going to do. It makes you think you’re living in your own time all right. It makes the idea of some kind of heritage seem touching, seem odd.” Perhaps. But in his own quiet, meticulous way, McPhee’s built a body of work that will stand.
After we completed the assignment, our teacher went around the room, asking each student to read aloud a poem and identify its author, justifying the reasoning behind the answer. I was given “Air and Angels,” which I had had to read several times to be able to parse the sounds of the language. I didn’t quite understand everything in the poem, but I was excited by the sounds, especially the alliteration, and the way the poem defamiliarized language. I felt giddy “hearing” its cadence in my head, as if I were hearing music.
Band and music class were my favorite things at school, but sometimes, just sometimes, a poem made me feel the same way that hearing and playing music did. I’d had this experience with work by several poets that semester: Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Donne, the latter of which had no less than twenty-one poems in Perrine’s. We had spent considerable time in class discussing Donne’s “Love’s Deity” and “Death, be not proud,” and had had a coded discussion about the salaciousness of “The Flea.” On my own, I had read and read again “Song: Go and catch a falling star,” which I could hear as if I had spoken it aloud in my bedroom.
The first text came in at 12:01 on Nov. 1, as I was scarfing the fun-size chocolate bars out of my daughter’s trick-or-treating bag. Outside on the streets, fake cobwebs and skeletons were still swinging limply in the trees. On the screen: a screenshot of the song “Santa’s Coming for Us” playing in a music app. Maddie Ziegler’s giant blue eyes. A deranged red and green Christmas wig, glowing brighter than any jack-o’-lantern in the city. The message: “NEVER. TOO. EARLY.” It could only mean one thing: It was past midnight, Halloween was over, and it was therefore finally, officially, Sia Christmas Album Season. This text, the first of several similar messages I would receive from friends over the next 24 hours, was just the initial shot across the giant hairbow.
Sia’s Everyday Is Christmas was released on Nov. 17, 2017 to mixed reviews, which I will do my best not to refute line for line here, but … “joylessly sane,” New Yorker, really? What an unfair characterization for this relentlessly, ridiculously enjoyable collection of howls, whistles, barks, jingles, sobs, and full-lung belts disguised as Christmas music. I am here to testify that even a whole year later, Sia’s holiday album has a cult, of which I’m a member. If loving Everyday Is Christmas is wrong, then I—along with a select group of other worshipful enthusiasts—don’t want to be right.
It's hard for me to understand when cooking became more repression than liberation, more act of obligation than act of creation. But I knew it then. This thing that had sustained me now felt like a prison. And whose fault was it? It certainly wasn't all my husband's. After all, hadn't I wanted to cook? Hadn't I enjoyed it? Hadn't I found purpose in the texture of the cinnamon rolls, the ache of my arm as I whisked a French silk pie over a double boiler? But who had that ever been for? I couldn't remember.
In the tangle of performance and purpose, in my quest to make a home and love, I had created elaborate offerings, which were consumed and judged, and yet afforded me no redemption, no grace, no more than four out of five stars.
The waiter is an anachronism and he knows it. The modern world that is at the doorstep of the Hills has devalued his style of careful service work, even as it needs more of it, and makes more intense demands on the people who do that work. Those who make the lives of the comfortable even more comfortable are society’s shock absorbers. They may start to screech, but the car keeps rolling along.
Americans who love trains above all other forms of travel will sigh loudest during a chapter on the glory days of the Santa Fe Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, whose décor was inspired by the Native American tribes in the areas the trains traversed. Here the abundant photographs make it particularly difficult to ignore the fact that all the customers were white, or the cultural appropriation that both glorified and exoticized the locals. But it isn’t so hard to conjure a vision of more equitable journeys where the food keeps pace with the ever-changing scenery.
This novel’s ideas about shame, constraint, lust and abandon are as subtle as the sex is frank, conveyed through insinuation and metaphor. “The Governesses” is not a treatise but an aria, and one delivered with perfect pitch: a minor work, defiantly so, but the product of a significant talent.