If you hate heresy, stop now.
This is a story of illness, madness, and the end of what we are. I don’t recommend it. If you want to come along, we have to start with poetry and our betrayal of ourselves.
After landing at Keflavik airport and being baptized into the Icelandic way of life by basking in the geothermal Sky Lagoon in Reykjavík, it was time to head toward my destination, the Gullkistan Center for Creativity, where I’d be spending the month of September on my sabbatical writer’s retreat.
Gullkistan is located in the Southwest countryside 70km east of Reykjavík, in Laugarvatn, between mountains and a lake. A quiet village of around 200 people, Laugarvatn’s main tourist attraction is Fontana, a geothermal spa on the “Golden Circle,” a loop of landmarks not far from Reykjavík. Gullkistan provides lodging and working space for visual artists, composers, filmmakers, and writers, and has hosted more than 400 people from all over the world since the residency began just over 10 years ago.
I’m going to describe an image for you; maybe it’s something you’ve seen before. It’s a canvas filled with amorphous daubs of warm, bright color, intersecting with one another to form different hues in the overlapping spaces. There’s no discernible pattern, but the blobs still feel intentionally placed—if you squint hard enough, a few of them may converge into the implied shape of a braid, or an eye, or the side of a woman’s face. On top of the canvas, a blocky but refined sans serif spells the title and the author’s name, while much smaller text in a handwritten script reads “a novel,” or, “a memoir,” or, perhaps, “a New York Times bestseller.”
As much as anything, this July trip to Las Vegas would be a way of commemorating Erin and Neal, a means of wringing some joy from the heartbreak of losing them.
When I was young, the church folk were fond of admonishing me (seldom without my heathen lips upturned) to be thankful that God woke me that morning. Though no one has said it outright, this trip is an expression of that gratitude, of acknowledging the incontestable truth, that, with no warning whatsoever, whatever power we believe in could leave us sleep. Therefore — we damn well better appreciate one another while we still have the precious time. Therefore — what better time than the present to celebrate, with all the middle-aged abandon we can muster, the fact that we persist, at least for now. That we’ve got one more day to live.
“Cloud Cuckoo Land,” a follow-up to Doerr’s best-selling novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” is, among other things, a paean to the nameless people who have played a role in the transmission of ancient texts and preserved the tales they tell. But it’s also about the consolations of stories and the balm they have provided for millenniums. It’s a wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates. It also pulls off a resolution that feels both surprising and inevitable, and that compels you back to the opening of the book with a head-shake of admiration at the Swiss-watchery of its construction.
We live in an age dominated by our possessions. Capitalism, the internet and Amazon have ensured we can have anything we desire (and can afford). What if all our acquisitions, effortlessly acquired, started talking back to us, their voices crowding our heads as their presence clutters our lives?
The philosopher Ian Hacking memorably describes the emergence of multiple personality disorder as a classic instance of science “making up people” — creating, through its power to label, a class of humans that hadn’t really existed before. In “The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness,” Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist, is also concerned with how science makes up people. She, too, cites multiple personality disorder as a condition whose birth can be pinpointed in time but also in order to emphasize its social origins.
In the warmth of water’s caress, I lay
in a kiddie pool without plastic
walls. Upturned, my head rests