I went to Baltimore and fished a ginger ale out of a bowl of melting ice and sat by the bed. My father, dying, came in and out of stillness. He couldn’t hear well, so my brother and I yelled a stream of non sequiturs: “Remember when you ran that marathon?” “Ivy is doing a ballet recital!” “We love you!” I reminded him that he had wanted me to put all his writing online. “I’m going to do that!” I said. He looked straight at me—a last moment of connection—and brightly lit up. “That’s great!” he said. (Or something along those lines. His teeth were in the bathroom.)
What is it about places where the lost things go that bring us back again and again? Part of the reason is that, undoubtedly, this is something we can all relate to on a personal level. We’ve all lost something in the past that we really regretted, and in many cases, still miss — particularly beloved childhood toys, which are often the first things found by heroes who reach the places where the lost things go. When characters in stories find their own lost things, it takes us back to possessions — and people — that we may have lost in the past, and makes us wonder if, somehow, they’re still around somewhere. But our fascination with lands of lost things doesn’t stop there. Like the possessions found in them, there’s much more to lands of lost objects than meets the eye.
Clémence Michallon’s assured debut, “The Quiet Tenant,” is an expertly paced psychological thriller that follows three female characters, each compelled and controlled in different ways by the same man.
Hope and history don’t actually rhyme in any known human language, past or present. However, Sophocles’ words (carried over into modern English) resound for many people, reverberating against our own great longing. They provoke in modern readers what Heaney, in the same translation, calls a “double-take of feeling” — that moment when actors in a distant play become “self-revealing” — that is, when they become figures by which we come to know ourselves.
Heaney translated the poetry of others in large part to discover this self-revealing double-take. Among the most important things that we learn in Marco Sonzogni’s newly collected “The Translations of Seamus Heaney” — an immense and informative gathering of the late Nobel Prize winner’s translations — are the ways that Heaney, as translator, thought less of carrying over the so-called literal, and more of finding the pitch and resonance that help an audience receive a poem.
This sense of haunting, finding moments of fellow feeling through illness, even when your experiences only momentarily correspond, is familiar to me. Reading A Matter of Appearance, I found myself underlining hungrily, littering the margins with exclamation points of recognition and copying lines into my notebook, where Wells’s words now keep company with those of David Wojnarowicz and Audre Lorde, Emma Bolden and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I like to think that this process of fragmentation and collection is invited by the text itself: A Matter of Appearance continually spurs itself towards the collective. “My fundamental task is not to claim the tragic for myself,” Wells writes, “but to acknowledge those who make up the world of the sick; to create a space out of words for us to convalesce in together.” I can’t think of a better literary project than carving out a room for shared convalescence. At the same time, I find myself wondering whether this project might offer more than rest, whether convalescing together could lead us to modify, or even do away with, the conditions that produce this unevenly shared fatigue.
How we manage people’s competing claims to ownership of places is one of the great questions for the world in the 21st century. As Rural shows, the British countryside is a good example of how not to do it.
A watermelon is a fish from a garden
she said and laughed
She had a wide-brimmed straw hat
and sat at the table in the yard