Then one day she looked up the pudendal nerve, which provides sensation to the vagina and vulva, or outer female genitalia. The term derived from the Latin verb pudere: to be ashamed. The shame nerve, Ms. Draper noted: “I was like, What? Excuse me?”
It grew worse. When her teacher handed her a copy of the “Terminologia Anatomica,” the international dictionary of anatomical terms, she learned that the Latin term for the vulva — including the inner and outer labia, the clitoris and the pubic mound — was pudendum. Translation: the part to be ashamed of. There was no equivalent word for male genitals.
That’s when she really got fired up.
Here’s what I think was happening: It hadn’t been too painful, initially, to settle into a small, circumscribed life — going grocery shopping, volunteering at our local vaccine clinic, getting together with friends outside. But it meant I’d never been forced, or forced myself, to acclimate to the virus as much as other people seemed to have done. I wasn’t learning to live within the odds. This made me uneasy — personally uneasy, because I interpreted it as a lack of toughness, but also ethically uneasy, because I knew that in a broken society like ours, my comfort came at the expense of other people’s demoralization and discomfort. Still, that’s what happened. And while I’m sure this left me with an exaggerated sense of the risks of leaving my particular bubble, the real problem was, I’d started chronically undervaluing the rewards. I’d been forgoing so much that forgoing felt easy. Too many things I imagined doing began to feel skippable, arbitrary, not a tragedy to decline. Either I was approaching some new state of equanimity and contentedness or I was depressed.
Then, as if I’d won a sweepstakes, this magazine offered me the seemingly wide-open opportunity to fly somewhere for its travel issue. By then, I’d spent almost 17 months parenting two demanding children on an insular island. I needed to get back to work. And so, I considered the befuddling risks, stresses, uncertainties, child care complications, psychic agitations and relative irresponsibility of traveling anywhere at all and asked, “What if I drove to Spokane?”
In dreams, they anticipated the moon. They anticipated flinging themselves away from the earth up to the glowing pearl in night space. They’d been dreaming this for a long time, who knows how long. The moon, earth’s shadowy white sister, is the ultimate dream object. Even if not dreamed of directly, the moon is dreamtime’s overseer, companion; it’s the quiet warden of the night mind.
Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet.
After a long hot summer of drought, plague, smoke and fire, this is a book that hymns our planet’s terrible moment — not a wake-up call but the first grim chords of a requiem.
Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling. He takes the mundane stuff of life — the need to take a leak, the joy of killing pesky flies — and essentializes them. About the details of daily existence, he manages to be, without ladling on lyricism, twice as absorbent as most of the other leading brands.
What is interesting in Leave Society, however, is not the truth or falsity of its arguments — this is marketed as a work of fiction, after all — but how such arguments inflect character.
Believe In Me is a generational saga, articulating how understanding one’s past can be a salve for the present. In many ways, it is also a story concerned with love’s opaque hues.