We’ll beat this crisis through robust testing, social distancing, and, for some, heavy doses of William Dean Howells. But what we’ve learned is that any reading will work. Our rapid shift from laser-focused self-improvement to read-all-the-things omnivorousness is a welcome reminder of something that’s long been true of modern civilization: All reading is quarantine reading.
That is, we use reading not just as a means to educate ourselves, or to “explore other worlds” and suchlike, but to literally keep our distance from others. And though curling up in a corner with a book seems like an obvious, natural act, reading alone and in silence is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Alzheimer’s gets called “the long goodbye” but it’s not even as decent as that. It’s a stolen goodbye, a missed goodbye, a sham goodbye, as the person you love dissolves in unseen pieces until they’re completely gone. It’s impossible to pinpoint, even to the year, when your last conversation with them may have been. The ability to say goodbye to someone on her deathbed suddenly seems like getting a pony for your birthday, compared with this quiet drift into the mist.
But the pony does come. Nearly immediately — certainly within hours of her passing — my mother emerged from that mist. Rather than the person who had so subtly and completely slipped away, the mom who sprung back to life in my mind was engaging, witty, capable, subtly hilarious and limitlessly kind. The happy memories of her that flooded back made me smile without a twinge of guilt, inadequacy, anger and all the other things I had felt for so many years. Yes, I was sad, but it was a pure, uncomplicated sadness of loss. Right by my side, soothing me as I tried to sleep, reminding me in the hardest moments that yes, this is the time to laugh, was the mother who had always lived in my heart.
Mom first dipped her toes into spiritual waters in the early ’80s, after I was born. While working on her master’s of education, she signed up for a Transcendental Meditation class. She would leave the house with fruit and flowers (offerings for some deity) and come home with a secret mantra. Mom said she became interested in meditation because her fight-or-flight signals were constantly spiking. “I was always on the defensive. I needed to slow down,” she told me. But she was soon turned off by TM’s hierarchical structure, so she moved on to Zen meditation—and then found it too restrictive. “They made me sit cross-legged on the floor!” she complained. Mom eventually settled on Vipassanā, which is all about seeing things as they really are: “I took to it like an anxious duck to clear water.”
She was also into Iyengar yoga when I was little. Mom was always folding herself into various poses around the house—doing a more comfortable version of downward dog, for example, where she’d bend forward and rest her outstretched hands on the kitchen table. Or she’d drop down on the living room carpet and kick her legs up into a shoulder stand. There are baby pictures of me climbing up on her, mid-pose, as if she were a human jungle gym.
Mom’s proclivity for meditation and yoga was considered odd back then. We lived in the mostly Jewish, upper-middle-class Cedarvale neighbourhood, where head-to-toe Lululemon and an over-the-shoulder yoga mat were still decades away from becoming de rigueur. Mom was a teacher. We lived in a nice house with a pool. We certainly passed as normal. But I always had a feeling that Mom wasn’t like other moms.
Samanta Schweblin is not a science fiction writer. Which is probably one of the reasons why Little Eyes, her new novel (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) reads like such great science fiction.
Like Katie Williams's 2018 novel Tell The Machine Goodnight before it, Little Eyes supposes a world that is our world, five minutes from now. It is a place with all our recognizable horrors, all our familiar comforts and sweetnesses, as familiar (as if anything could be familiar these days) as yesterday's shoes. It then introduces one small thing — one little change, one product, one tweaked application of a totally familiar technology — and tracks the ripples of chaos that it creates.
You remember how it felt
to be
in the presence of your mother.
As you take your rings off to knead the bread, you remember –