"Thing is, we're a community, and we got each other's back."

Intimations

By Zadie Smith 

Zadie Smith read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations early in the pandemic for practical assistance (her words). A few months later: the publication of Intimations, a series of essays inspired by his musings. In addition to "The American Exception," which was published in The New Yorker last April, her book includes "A Woman with a Little Dog," which she read aloud during a fantastic conversation with Ashley C. Ford. It is so specific, humorous, and a moving reminder of what we've lost and would miss so much: the seemingly insignificant exchanges that made up our lives before everything went down. Ashley describes it as foreboding. I loved it.

"There she sat on that last day—I was passing with my little dog; a final chance for Maud to pee before we put her in the rental car—and I could see Barbara was preparing to bark one of her ambivalent declamations at me, about the weather or a piece of prose, or some new outrage committed by the leader of a country which, in Barbara's mind, only theoretically includes her own city. Already missing New York, I was keen to hear it. Instead she sucked hard on her cigarette and said, in a voice far quieter than I'd ever hear her use: "Thing is, we're a community, and we got each other's back. You'll be there for me, and I'll be there for you, and we'll all be there for each other, the whole building. Nothing to be afraid of—we'll get through this, all of us, together." 

"Yes, we will," I whispered, hardly audible, even to myself, and walked on, maintaining a six-foot distance, whether to conform with the new regulations or to avoid Beck biting me in some vulnerable spot I couldn't tell."

(p. 51)

She starts reading "A Woman with a Little Dog" at 24:55—oh and just before then she describes her relationship with writing. ("I do need it. I'm not particularly proud of the ways I need it, but I need to organize my ideas, I need to set things down, I need to feel like life has meaning. And so that's why I do it. I do need those things.")

Their talk filled me up and it's well worth the watch. 

But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe.

© Penguin Books

Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame

By Mara Wilson

One thing I intensely dislike about myself is my terrible memory, but I distinctly remember the feeling of realizing I had a favorite book. It was after I'd read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was seven years old. I felt this incredible sensation tied to "oh! I like this book so much more than I like the others!" and the idea of having a favorite was something new and exciting to me.

Once I discovered Roald Dahl and got a sense of his recurring themes, I fell in love with the rest of his stories.

I didn't watch many movies when I was young, but the ones I did see, I watched over and over again. Matilda was one of those films. So ingrained in my brain are the scenes of Mara Wilson's Matilda: a kind, bookish, witty, caring, magical girl whose powers I wished I'd possessed. 

Mara Wilson is a good storyteller—about her experiences filming Matilda and being a child actor, but also about more relatable things like adolescence and young adulthood: feeling like the weird girl, trying to fit in, discovering who you are. She is also refreshingly honest about her experiences battling OCD and anxiety. I read this on a flight home and alternated between crying and laughing the way through. (The best.)

“But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe. I know who I am now: I am a New Yorker.”

“Live your fear." Why didn't we teach kids that? Why wasn't that in a graduation speech? Commencement speakers should start telling the truth: "You're going to fuck up, but most of the time, that's all right.”

“If you’re worried you have a psychosis, you probably don’t, but even if you do, there’s help for it. Fighting with anxiety makes it worse; instead, accept the anxiety, and it will become less scary. Take a moment to breathe and take stock of your surroundings. Remember what’s real. Say, “This sucks, but it will pass.” We aren’t responsible for our thoughts, we are only responsible for what we do with them. Mental health care can and should be taken as seriously as physical health care. A diagnosis is not a bad thing.”

"On a March day in 1995, our mother told me my grandfather was coming over with his camera, and we were going to take some pictures out in the backyard.

"Pictures of me?" I said.

"You, me, and Anna."

"Do I have to?" This was during post-Miracle publicity blitz, right after the Golden Globes and the Oscars, where I'd performed in the opening number alongside Tim Curry. I was tired of having my photo taken, and in the past few months, I'd become used to getting my way.

"Mara, I really think you should." She had a strange look on her face.

"Mom, I don't want to."

"I want you to." I didn't understand why she was pressuring me. She hated having her picture taken.

"But I really don't want to!"

"Mara, will you please just do it so that even if I have cancer, and all my hair falls out, you'll still have a picture of me looking normal?" She started crying.

My breath had gone. "Mom, what...what are you talking about?"

"I might...I have breast cancer."

I don't know what I'd said to her after that, only that I agreed to pose for the photos.

I've never forgotten what our mother's voice sounded like, or what she thought and felt, but sometimes I can't remember exactly what she looked like. So many of my memories are of her looking the way she did when she was sick. The picture of us my grandfather took that day, the last time she looked healthy, was in my bedroom for years. Me, my sister, and our mother, all wearing red, all with shoulder-length hair, smiling in the sunshine."

(pp. 103-104)

“Before I went to bed that night, Danny and I talked about my mother. Matilda was easily the movie I'd made that she was most excited about, but she had died while we were doing postproduction. I'd always felt sad that she wasn't able to see the completed film.
I was floored when he told me he'd brought my mother the film while she was in the hospital. It hadn't been fully edited, but she had been able to see what we had. I feel such a sense of peace knowing that, and I'll always be grateful to Danny for it. You, and your story, were a part of her life till the very end.”
(Letter to Matilda, p. 95)

My relationship to New York City—home—is and has always been about my relationship to yearning.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York
Edited by Sari Botton

It's been a year.

2016: an emotional, rollercoaster, depressing sh*tstorm of a year. Filled with needed revelations.

In many ways, I've been preparing to leave New York for some time. In my reads alone, what's resonated with me most over the past couple of years have been brave voices encouraging similar bravery of their readers; the fearless pursuit of one's full potential. I never want to feel as lonely, as depressed or as disappointed as I did earlier this year. A number of circumstances made it easier for me to take the leap. Timing. I decided it was no longer worth denying myself purpose, happiness, clarity and good vibes. I want to be better in a myriad of ways and I found I could no longer in the city.

It was not easy to leave. Once I came to terms with my wants and needs, and, subsequently, my impending move, I became so sentimental—with simple moments inspiring tears. Walking down Broadway in Astoria as the sun set. The embrace of late summer's warmth. I'll never forget that golden light: the way it illuminated the buildings and the path home through twilight. A vision of beauty and grit. The best borough. I love New York fiercely, rep Queens 'till I die, and I hope to return someday and not too late. There's so much I was sad to leave behind. But I wondered whether other places could become part of my fabric, too.


---

Some of my favorite words about New York documented in this blog have been written by E.B. White, Patti Smith, David Carr (I'm a little tired of the fight). I didn't love this compilation, but here are some passages I liked:

"Leaving home does something to your sense of identity. Either you become more of that place than you ever were while you lived there, or your identity calcifies around the rejection of this place. It is challenging to inhabit the space between these two positions. All of these perspectives on the same place. It's dizzying. " (p. 131)
- Losing New York by Lauren Elkin

"To talk about New York--living there, aspiring to live there, having lived there—is to talk about currency. Not privilege and not money, mind you; money is simple. Money is straightforward. Money can give you choices, options. Privilege skews how you see yourself and others, fucks with our head. Currency is something else. Currency is terrifically complex. Money and privilege can make you comfortable, but only currency gives you real power. You can't buy currency; it eludes plenty of rich, entitled people. Beauty, originality, fearlessness: these are some of the currencies of New York." (pp. 138-9)
- Currency by Elisa Albert

"There is that ache of not having another place in the world where I might ever feel so alive and alone, invisible while visible, ever again. Alone in exactly the right kind of way. My relationship to New York City—home—is and has always been about my relationship to yearning. But this is what I understand about leaving New York: I have to leave, or I will never be able to restore my own capacity to write about home." (p. 235)
- Captive by Dana Kinstler

We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future.

The Night of The Gun
By David Carr

Zipped through this one without ever writing a page number or notation--that's how engrossed I found myself--but I skimmed through to find the passages that lingered with me days after.

David Carr will be dead one year next month. These passages of course don't encapsulate the memoir: his drug and alcohol addiction, raising his two twin daughters, his journalism career(s). I am so impressed by his ability to delve so deeply into the fog & pull out the truest version he could of his life. I knew him best for his work at The New York Times, and am saddened he's no longer here.

Memory is a theme I'm drawn to time and time again:

"Shakespeare describes memory as the warder of the brain, but it is also its courtesan. We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future. The prototypes of the lie--white, grievous, practical--make themselves known when memory is called to answer. Memory usually answers back with bullshit. Everyone likes a good story, especially the one who is telling it, and the historical facts are generally sullied in the process. All men mean well, and clearly most people who set out to tell the truth do not lie on purpose. How is it, then, that every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?"
(p. 23)

"Memory is the one part of the brain's capacity that seems to be able to bring time to heel, make it pause for examination, and, in many cases, be reconfigured to suit the needs of that new moment. Long before TiVo, humans have been prone to selecting, editing, and fast-forwarding the highlights of their lives. Even if every good intention is on hand, it is difficult if not impossible to convey the emotional content of past events because of their ineffability. Even in an arch me-as-told-to-me paradigm, the past recedes, inexorably supplanted by the present.
Memory remains an act of perception, albeit perception dulled by time, but it is also about making a little movie. Remembering is an affirmative act--recalling those events that made you you is saying who you are. I am not this book, but this book is me.
Episodic and semantic memory each lie in different ways, but each is eventually deployed in service of completing a story. Stories are how we explain ourselves to each other with the remorseless truth always somewhere between the lines of what is told. In this way, memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world."
(p. 183)

All words can be meaningful:

"Eden House was brimming with slogans. This was the main one: "The answer to life is learning to live." We would say that, loudly and with a great deal of emotion, at the conclusion of each group meeting.
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing ironic about being a crackhead and a drunk, or recovery from same. Low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque, a theater of the absurd that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost."
(pp. 192-3)

Because I love love & when people unabashedly express it***:

"Everything right about her was wrong for me. I had generally gone out with women who had a lot of dark hair falling into their faces, bee-stung lips, and remarkable leather jackets, with more tattoos than jewelry. As my friend Eddie once observed, "The women you date don't just look bitchy. They are." This Danish-Icelandic-Norwegian-Irish girl had worked in the U.S. Senate for a Republican, had her own house in South Minneapolis, and was just coming off a sales job and getting ready to go to grad school to become a teacher. Not. My. Type.
My kind, though."
(p. 312)

New York:

"When I moved to New York, I asked my pal Amanda how she thought I'd like it. "It's a fight. And if you want the fight, it's great. And if you don't want the fight, it sucks."
I liked the fight. Unlike Washington and Los Angeles, where people rise and fall based on some secret chart, New York is a place where the wiring diagram is very visible and fundamentally, oddly, just. If you are good at what you do, work hard, and don't back down, you can make a place to stand on the island.
The trick of enjoying New York is not to be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that put all human endeavors in their proper place."
(pp. 336-7)

Life:

"I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon."
(p. 382)




***In ways that are not cheesy or corny, but poetic and true.