In the aftermath of my father’s death, I wanted only quiet. I chased sanctuary through shadows. I walked the vanishing miles. I lay awake in the midnight hours, but even then, a nearby fox would call out for love, or a deer would high-step through fallen leaves, or a squirrel would bumble in the gutter.

I didn’t mind the birds of dawn, but I minded the eradications of tree surgeons—the carburetor rage of their chainsaws, the thonk of severed limbs hitting the ground. I minded the boot of the boy who smashed the trash bins until they crashed—spilling a bell choir of bottles. I minded the neighborhood girls’ pissing accusations—You’re such a thief, you’re such a liar, you stole my phone, you’re such a liar. I minded the keel of the news and the yawp of the sun. I minded the pretension of narrative, words upon words—how, even when no one was near or no one was speaking, there was a terrible howl at my ear. Worse than consonants. Louder than vowels.

I had been reading Virginia Woolf before my father died, before I rushed to him as his final storm set in, the despair of his lungs in their drowning. Turning her pages. I had been reading Virginia, also Leonard. The long swaying arms of the searchlights over their street called Paradise, in their England, 1917. The clattering machinery of the German Gotha bombers and the ascending cries of the sirens and the putter of the Royal Naval Air Service squadrons and the puff-pop of the smoke where the bombs had succeeded. A letter, sent by Virginia, to her friend Violet Dickinson, bearing news: She and Leonard have bought a table-top letterpress from the Excelsior Printing Supply Co. They are about to hand-build books of their own. Manage the text, command the art, tighten the bindings. Although the letterpress is broken when it arrives, and there are but a scant sixteen pages of how-to’s to get them through the early days. They eye the letters in reverse (Caslon), take the quoin and composing stick into their hands, and decide: Virginia will set the type and bind the pages, Leonard will ink and pull. It will unfold in the dining room of the house where they live, a place called Hogarth.

Play, Leonard will one day say of the thing, sufficiently absorbing. Calming the noises inside Virginia’s head.

Type in her composing stick. Ink on her fingers.

A thin red thread in the eye of her needle. Punch.

Sew.

Salvation.

*

In the aftermath of my father’s death, I bought paper, thread, acrylic paints. Needles, brayers, buttons. Instructions I discovered I could not follow on the form and beautification of blank journals. I awled and bone folded. Knotted and snipped. I made my mistakes at the kitchen table and beside the sink, beneath bare bulbs and in swaths of sun, in the early mornings when I would wake to the fox that lived by the shatter of the moon and was bereft with love. I was not setting lines, not administering hyphens, not placing Caslon between margins. Still, I was sufficiently absorbed: color, paper, knots; ghost prints and ephemera. There was stain on my clothes and waxed linen in my needles. My hands were cracked and raw.

When story returns after story quits, it arrives in fits and fragments, rushes west, flusters east, is soft, invincible fury. I punched and patterned, tore and blended, stole flowers from the garden to preserve them. Is it like this, then, or could this be true—the hands matriculating the rage, arting the heart, deposing meaning?

Fractions arranged. Thread kettled.

Red approximating blue. Salvation.

An amateur obsessive.

*

Before my father died, when he already wasn’t well, I grew frustrated with Virginia. I was reading her fiction by then, her To the Lighthouse. I’d sit in my bed, early in the day, and hear myself yak back at her—cut the vines of her sentences, her looping plentitudes, her times passing. I’d find an easier novel and abandon Virginia, and then I would return. Float into her sea and ride: billows and breakers, tide and tug, the nether and the offing.

I’d yield. It was the only way I knew to read Virginia, although sometimes, whirlpooled into the length of a single Virginia sentence, I’d find that I was drowning. That I could not understand Virginia.

And yet: On the eve of covid-19, my father older than he’d ever been, my father in the early phase of passing, I went to the Kislak to visit Virginia. To hold what she’d made with her hands in my hands. To reckon with what remains when those we battle with, and love, go missing. I’d wait inside that clean box of that reading room for Virginia’s letterpress work to be retrieved. At a long table before an assembly of soft supports that hold the archived and retrieved in a non-spine-breaking V, she came.

Her thick and desiccated pages. Her assertions of ink.

Her chipped and fraying bindings. Her nether and her offing.

I held what she’d made with her hands in my hands. I pretended permanence.

We go to books for solace, and for proof, to begin again at the beginning. Handmade books, first editions, inky manuscripts, especially. They carry time forward on their own electric currents. They keep what we can’t keep. They counterweight the dying.

Thumbprints. Center knots. Errors.

That crease in the top corner.

The infuriating riddle.

Hold the old book in your hand, and you are holding something living.

When the famed Philadelphia bibliophile A. S. W. Rosenbach (1876–1952) was eleven years old, he bought, for the grand sum of $24, an illustrated copy of Reynard the Fox. Young Rosenbach didn’t have the necessary cash on hand, but he had the support of a book-obsessed uncle, in whose shop on Commerce Street the boy had been working since the age of nine. A deal was struck. A book was won.

In “Talking of Old Books,” reprinted in Books and Bidders: The Adventures of a Bibliophile, Rosenbach remembers the early undertow of what would become his lifelong obsession:

At that age I could hardly realize, spellbound as I was, the full quality of mystery and intangible beauty which becomes a part of the atmosphere wherever books are brought together; for here was something that called to me each afternoon, just as the wharves, the water, and the ships drew other boys who were delighted to get away from books the moment school was out. 

Rosenbach was, in the words of Vincent Starrett, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, “an excellent bibliografer, something of a scholar, and a bookman who would have lived by books, for books, and with books whatever his station in life might have been. It was his initial love and knowledge of old books that made it possible for him to become the great figure known as ‘the Doctor’ in the auction rooms of Europe and America.”

And what a figure Rosenbach cut—a University of Pennsylvania graduate with a Ph.D. in English literature, whose book-acquiring adventures were often front-page news. Over the course of a life that never swerved from rare books, he held the manuscripts of Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, and James Joyce in his hands (not to mention a considerable number of Gutenberg bibles, the copy of Moby-Dick that Herman Melville presented to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a letter from Cervantes); amassed a fortune in children’s books (most of them donated, toward the end of his life, to the Free Library of Philadelphia); fed the bookish appetites of such men as Pierpont Morgan and Henry Folger; named his fishing boat First Folio; wondered why no wife of a U.S. president had become a genuine book collector; and “made it a rule,” as he writes in A Book Hunter’s Holiday, “to look at any book which is directed my way.” His final Philadelphia residence, in the twentieth block of Delancey Street, is now the home of the Philip H. and A. S. W.

Rosenbach Museum and Library, and it is here where book lovers can, by appointment, see some of the books, letters, and manuscripts Rosenbach could never quite part with himself.

Dard Hunter, in his dusty shoes and hat, his workman’s shirt and tucked tie, traveled the world in search of not just paper but rare books written by other paper lovers. Rosenbach—cigar smoke rising, whiskey swirling, millionaires waiting—dominated auction rooms. They were men of their times, bound by the thrill of the chase and the deep reprieve of history and the hope for the eternal.

__________________________________

From My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera by Beth Kephart. Used by permission of Temple University Press. Copyright © 2023 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved.

This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408. For months I’d been reading his poems in their modern print editions with a scholarly disinterest. Then at the Huntington Library one morning, my stomach fluttered when I opened the cover of a fourteenth-century manuscript of his most famous work, Confessio Amantis, to a blurry illumination of a dreaming Gower, asleep. Since that day in Pasadena I’ve been talking about him breathlessly, chasing him through centuries of scholarship, tracking his records across continents in archives from California to Kent.

What is it about the archive that makes us fall in love? Why is it, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, that book supports and acid-free boxes make us dream of “a romance that exceed[s] the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive”? No doubt, archival research is occasionally extremely tedious—transcribing difficult handwriting can be a more effective sleep aid than melatonin—but most of the time it’s a unique thrill. Turning over folios or examining the wax seal of a medieval charter is a sensual encounter; Arlette Farge calls it a “physical pleasure [in] finding a trace of the past.” Parchment, the predominant material for medieval writing, is made of animal hide, so studying Gower’s manuscripts and life records means I’m often encountering him, literally, through the touch of skin on skin.

I’m far from the first person to swoon at the masses of papers, documents, and manuscripts that populate historical and cultural institutions across the globe. A smattering of novels has emerged in the past quarter century that stage a quest for knowledge in the low lighting and tense intimacy of a quiet study room, “unbashedly interpret[ing] the past through its material traces” and constituting a literary genre that Suzanne Keen calls the “romance of the archive.” In these books—A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections, to name a few—the narration of history often intertwines with personal love stories until the two threads become virtually indistinguishable. Lately, I’ve been reading as many as I can get my hands on.

While the researchers (or archivists, depending) almost always fall in love with each other, on some fundamental level, these love stories are always unrequited: a research object can entrance a scholar, but it can never really belong to her. Any encounter with a document in the archives—whether a nineteenth-century letter or a medieval court document—is an attempt to reconstruct the past from fragments that are only touchable and holdable in the reading room for an hour or two. Byatt plays on this paradox in her 1990 classic Possession, when one of the main characters, Roland, finds himself “seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse” to pilfer the previously undiscovered letters of a nineteenth-century poet out of a special collections library, catalyzing the adventure that will lead him to become equally possessed by his fellow scholar, the cold and beautiful Maud. Neither knowledge nor love should be mistaken for ownership, Byatt seems to suggest, though Maud ends up with the letters at the end of the day. Scholarship and romance can operate according to similar logics of jealousy and compulsion.

A quixotic longing underlies these books. Characters may have special access to collections and libraries, but the pursuit of history is nonetheless ingrained with a gnawing sense of loss. Archival romance novels often center on a search for someone or something that is missing; to quote Sol, the trans archivist at the center of Fellman’s fan-fiction-steeped 2022 novel, “in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life… You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite.” Historical research is always a kind of heartbreak; the more I learn about Gower’s works and life, the more I nurse a yearning for all I’ll never understand. And the past can be tremendously brittle; much of what we can know rests in records and account books and literary manuscripts that exist in fragile, finite copies. Perhaps it makes sense then that both Sol, whose love story with Else, a grieving donor to the archive, will lead him to uncover the source of a preservation issue, and the blood-sucking antagonist of Kostova’s book are vampires. Every time we use archival material, the ink fades a little from light exposure, the internal structure of the book weakens a little, no matter how gently we handle the spine. Like parasites, those of us who work with archives slowly leech life out of our materials, loving our subjects to death.

Given that the personal and romantic is always also historical, these novels are often intensely political. For Keen, who focuses on contemporary British literature, the romance of the archive necessarily constructs itself in relation—whether affectionate or antagonistic—to England’s imperial legacy. The multigenerational The Historian (2005), to give another example, centers on the story of two young researchers, Paul and Helen, who fall in love during a sprawling, trans-European quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious stranger who murders Paul’s academic mentor. Along the way, sedimented history, from the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire to the conflicts of the Cold War, constantly shape their lofty pursuit of knowledge and justice. The past and the present mutually construct each other, Kostova reminds us, inseparable from the passions that incite both love affairs and geopolitical strife.

Yet the archive’s sparkle can also leave us misty-eyed, occluding a political vision. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Gower was (it would seem from the texts he left behind) a morally stuffy money-grubber, with a vicious attitude toward peasants, who may have married a woman half his age. If I knew him when he was living, I probably wouldn’t have liked him at all. But from a distance of six hundred years or so, I find myself constructing enemies-to-lovers plotlines. Perhaps it’s just impossible to pay this much attention to someone and not catch an “archive fever,” as Jacques Derrida calls that fierce and consuming nostalgia for the past. Or maybe in a profession as solitary and quiet as academia, it’s all too easy to forget the present and become enamored of an intellectual figment or a ghost.

Last week, at the Lambeth Palace Library in London, I read Gower’s last will and testament, recorded prior to his death, then walked along the bank of the Thames to visit his final resting place. Pushing through the crowds at Borough Market sampling fruits, paella, and jams, I ducked into Southwark Cathedral. The tomb, to the left of the nave, is a wooden effigy of Gower’s supine body, painted in green, red, and gold. His eyes are open, and his head rests not on a pillow, but on books of his poems. I thought of a line from the Confessio, when Gower imagines his books will endure when he is “dede and elleswhere” for future readers to find in some “tyme comende after this” (time coming after this). I felt shy then, implicated in his transhistorical glance.

Eventually, my boyfriend came to collect me on his way home from the British Library. On our way out of the cathedral, I turned and blew Gower a kiss. My boyfriend laughed at me, then reached out and brushed a piece of hair behind my ear. I was alive, the year was 2023. His skin was warm and soft; it felt nothing like parchment at all.

Ithaca is also inundated with nature, drowned in it. This I can’t quantify, but it seemed to us then that the surrounding gorges, forests, swamps, and bogs were especially thronged with plants and animals. The air seemed thick with the smells of pollen, new leaves, rotting leaves, skunk cabbage, pine forests, and stagnant ponds. It was certainly full of pollen, midges and gnats, bees, wasps, hornets, butterflies, moths, deerflies, black flies, and horseflies. The water my sister, my brother, and I swam in was also occupied by rafts of water striders, water boatmen (which bit us), leeches (which bit us and left uncoagulated streams of blood after we’d salted them off), and water beetles (which also bit, very hard, taking chunks of flesh and drawing lots of blood). The mud we waded in was gooey with smooth green algae, sometimes jellied with clusters of frogs’ eggs, and always potentially mined with snapping turtles.

Our father was a dentist who made an adventurous escape from Brooklyn to upstate New York. He embraced his new home by educating himself in everything at once. He made friends both in Cornell and in the surrounding farming areas, and his parties introduced me to physicists, chemists, biologists, and economists from the university, but also subsistence hunters from the countryside. My father also crossed the line from his Jewish upbringing to real goyishe territory. He took up hunting, and one of the deer he shot was mounted at deer’s eye height in our living room. He once said with pride that he was upstate New York’s first Jewish hunter.

My mother, from a Methodist family, was his accomplice in rebellion. They created a house that was a cross between a cabin, a playground, and an old museum, crowding every available surface with bird nests, pressed ferns, fossils, arrowheads, rocks and crystals, mushrooms, pieces of bark, salted wings from birds that had died by flying into a lighthouse they’d visited, shark jaws a patient had given my father. The front door opened directly into a room with vaulted ceilings, and on their white plasterboards that sloped up to the roof beam, my mother had drawn a timeline of all of history in black and purple felt-tip marker. Visitors were always greeted by the taxidermied deer head. From the roof beam my parents had hung an empty beer barrel as a rope swing, and my friends used to come over and swing as wildly as they could.

Among the ranch houses and Victorian homes, our house was like Edward Scissorhands’s castle. But it wasn’t originally a house at all. It was an ammo depot, a one-storey windowless cement-block structure used after the Second World War to re-arm large-gauge artillery. My parents bought it in the early 1950s and punched windows in it. Because natural history was the household’s main preoccupation, we also had a battery of tools: Estwing rock hammers and chisels for extracting trilobites, a telescope, night-sky binoculars with big lenses, and several microscopes for everything including amoebas collected from the mud at the bottom of the pond.

The house was also full of wild animals. There were generations of dogs. At one point there were eighteen cats. Our prize pet was a boa constrictor named Scrape, after its molted skins. We were always out swimming, hiking, and exploring, and no outing was complete if one of us didn’t bring something strange back to the house. I kept local species of snakes as pets, and also lizards, scorpions, spiders, and toads. One summer I tried to keep a leech, but it refused even the freshest steaks and repeatedly escaped from its Tupperware container and tried to crawl across the carpet, ending up trapped in a ball of lint. Another summer we had a beehive inside the house, safely enclosed in an ant farm-style narrow terrarium. My mother nailed it to the kitchen table, and drilled a hole in a windowpane so the bees could come in and out through a plastic tube. My brother and I even raised moths and butterflies from eggs, collecting all the cocoons and chrysalises to bring back inside. Months later the house would be filled with enormous silk moths or colorful butterflies.

My father’s dental office, a short walk up the road, was a curiosity cabinet. Patients were seated facing a wall filled floor to ceiling with objects and pictures including two jars with animals suspended in them. One had a bat, and the other a frog, and they’d been subjected to some undoubtedly carcinogenic chemical bath that turned their bodies translucent and tinted their bones rose red. My father used to say that they were to start conversation. I imagine some patients never returned, but those who did often ended up being invited to our house.

We knew people who were not just there for Cornell or for work, but were all-in on the idea of Ithaca. One lived in a farmhouse that he’d let go to the point where his kitchen cabinets were spongy and frayed from decades of spilled dishwater. Another had a basement full of large freezers to store the deer meat he got by illegally shooting deer from his porch. A professor at Cornell had built shallow shelves, a couple of inches deep, all around the rooms of his house to store his collection of thousands of small ancient statuettes. My father knew some of the people who lived in yurts and Buckminster Fuller domes in a squatter’s colony in Sapsucker Woods. Their children were part of Ithaca’s young counterculture. I spent one especially unrewarding Halloween smoking grass in a hilltop graveyard with them. Our nocturnal picnic was illuminated by candles in bronze dragon-shaped candleholders, and we spent the evening looking down with fond condescension on the high school football game.

If it were possible to survey Ithaca families to measure their immersion in the place, I think my family would be at the tail end of the distribution. We were extreme Ithacans. Maybe there were people like us in other parts of the world. What are extreme San Franciscans? Extreme Albuquerquians? I have no idea. In Ithaca, being extreme meant being in the landscape.

We pushed our way into the caves on the east shore of the lake even when it meant crawling on our stomachs while water poured down on our heads, or inching sideways along narrowing passageways until we got stuck. Most summers I was in bare feet until school started, even in swamps, even in caves. My parents surveyed and maintained trails for the Cayuga Trails Club, but most of the time we didn’t so much hike as explore. Before my teens, I was also a competitive insect collector. After a couple of years I decided to give up collecting butterflies, not because I was too old for it, but because they are too easy. There are about 60 species of butterflies in New York State, but over 1,400 kinds of moths. We got most of Ithaca’s butterflies by spending lovely afternoons out in meadows and forests. To get even a fraction of the moths, we had to spend nights out with UV lights, and nights “sugaring” for moths that don’t come to light. To do that, we made mixtures of rotted bananas, beer, and molasses, and we went out with a bucket and painted it onto tree trunks. Then late at night we went out again, and when we were lucky, our flashlights would reveal tree trunks swarmed by ants, bees, flies, and moths.

Both my brother and sister turned these childhood interests into careers in science: he was a geneticist, and she’s a geochemist and planetary scientist with a project at NASA. I didn’t, and the reason might be that I was always attracted to the strangeness of what we did, rather than the science to which it led.

*

When I decided to write about all this, I tried out some pages like the ones you’ve just read. At first I thought I could just keep going, fill in the people, and I’d have a memoir. But the stories seemed blurry. They were adequate as summaries, but they failed to capture the way we talked.

For example, butterflies. They have common names that sound like people in Dickens: Red Admiral, Tiger Swallowtail, Painted Lady. Moths don’t usually have common names. Beyond the big silk moths like the Luna, there is a wilderness of families: Tineidae, which include clothes moths; Erebidae, including the species formerly known as the Gypsy Moth (now Spongy Moth); and the Noctuidae, Notodontidae, and Lymantriidae, those small brown moths that die on windowsills. They all have Latin names. Many moth species are small, and that was where I parted company from my friends who had no interest in things that weren’t large and colorful.

After several years of studying and collecting, I knew a couple hundred species, along with their caterpillars. They were individuals to me, without character but with sharp outlines in my memory, and always the Latin name: Apatelodes torrefacta, the Spotted Apatelodes moth, which always looked battered; Olceclostera angelica, the Angel Moth, like a Victorian woman in gray mourning; Eumorpha pandorus, the magnificent Pandora Sphinx moth. Those are names that still conjure trembling shadows projected by my flashlight, sharp cold evenings in pine forests, long bicycle rides to forests we’d secretly sugared.

We spoke the languages of our books, and if I write about Ithaca but omit those languages, I’m writing the equivalent of a popular-science account, trying to explain the universe without using mathematics. Our world wasn’t birds, mushrooms, wasps, algae, moths, and stars. It was black-throated green warblers, weeping milk caps, ichneumons, spirogyra, sphingids, and Cygnus. The technical words and Latin names were the prizes, the identifications that came at the end of long sessions with the books.

We had manuals for everything we collected, and each kind of plant or animal had its own vocabulary. For example, you can’t just call a mushroom white. In the old textbooks, you have to know the difference between snow-white, pure white, sheet-white, chalk-white, ivory-white, cream-white, milk-white, and whitish. “Albidus” means the mushroom is white even though it has other colors in it. And all the words for white have to be rigorously distinguished from the absence of color. Mushrooms with no color are called hyaline, glassy, watery, crystalline, pellucid, or diaphanous. If you look carefully, and you keep seeing hints of color, but you can’t be sure, that would be “incolor” or, even more exotically, “achroos.”

Before field guides, manuals of natural history had numbered keys. We worked our way through them step by step. “1. The mushroom has gills. If yes, go to entry 2. If no, 214.” Each fork in the road was another chance to get it all wrong, get lost in the labyrinth. We consulted the old manuals like devout Jews read the Talmud. We knew the answer was in there somewhere, but sometimes it took faith to keep looking.

Our family didn’t often have normal conversations at dinner. Dinners became readings from the encyclopedia. There was the news of the day, and some words about school, or about some county ordinance or pesky neighbors. But soon enough there’d be a problem. My father, who was always reading local history, might tell us something about the Iroquois. There’d be some hitch, some gap in his knowledge, and that’s when we’d push some plates to the side to make room for one of the big volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica that we kept within arm’s reach of the dining table. “Why is the analemma tilted?” my mother might ask, in between bites. Or, “I wonder what path you trace out if you spend all day, from sunrise to sunset, walking toward the sun?” Or someone would ask, always apropos of nothing, “So what was that fossil you found yesterday?” That would be the cue to move more plates and bring out the fossil books.

It wasn’t until years later that I appreciated how dinner parties actually work: people just talk about whatever’s on their minds, and the conversation moves easily from news to memories, from jokes to confessions. Our house obeyed the medieval idea of the Great Chain of Being: at the top were problems that could be solved by looking in encyclopedias: unidentified bugs, astronomical phenomena, cloud forms, infestations, efflorescences, molds, blights, and galls. Humans were last on the list, the bottom of the Great Chain. We almost never talked about how we were doing, our hopes, the people we loved, the hurts we felt. But if one of us had a rash, we’d inspect it minutely. Anything on the outside, anything that could be solved, was a potential topic. What we felt inside was our own business.

I kept trying to solve the problem of how to write a memoir by inventing conversations. They always sounded wrong—naturally, because the interest was always that one moth, that particular fossil. Without the things and the fascination they exerted, we might as well have been a family that spent its evening reciting the phone book.

Eventually I realized that dialogue isn’t the right medium for my childhood. I have started putting excerpts of books and papers right into my book. I quote long passages, even reproduce diagrams and drawings. When that material appears on the page, the plot is suspended, and it’s necessary to pay attention in a different way. Reading slows. And why not? That’s exactly the effect those books had on our conversations. I am putting in some math, and a few graphs and maps. I’m adding sheet music, which is something that never appears in memoirs or fiction, but it seems right because music was a large part of our childhood. We had a collection of scores from used bookstores, some very old. The look of them is another part of those years.

I hope the book I am writing won’t look like a science textbook, and I hope it won’t read like an introduction to some dead language written in cuneiform or hieroglyphic. But if it does, that’s the price of admission to that world. Maybe at the extreme, Ithacans aren’t people in the full, ordinary sense: maybe they disappear into the landscape, they become the cold wet slate that tiles the steep sides of the gorges, or the matte green patina of bacteria and algae that covers the ponds.

For a decade or two my brother, my sister, and I were extreme Ithacans. Now my sister and I, the ones who are left, wear shoes in the summer, live in normal houses, and go to ordinary parties.

______________________________

Weak in Comparison to Dreams by James Elkins is available now via Unnamed Press. 

Libraries are sacred space within the unending, unrelenting madness, the profane that is Society, places where the predominant ideology is to inform. The Library of Alexandria was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; the Library of Congress is a wonderfully ( dis )organized repository of all the significant things generations of someones have decided to put there; even the smallest town library, possibly ruled over by a locally-feared, hundred-pound tyrant who has never had a fun day in her life, is a portal to every single piece of undiluted, unadulterated, unpoliticized, knowledge.

Some of my least painful childhood memories are of the half-hour Friday trips to the library in my rural K-12 school—I was always drawn to books that I didn’t yet understand, but would affect me still, Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov; Animal Farm and Slaughterhouse Five; dinosaurs and plate tectonics (both new and hot subjects in the 1970s).

This haven from my dysfunctional formative years was made manifest in my heart through memories of the warm, intoxicating smell of the new World book set; the warm, intoxicating smell of mimeographed copies.

And always, always there was something new, something to discover, and a place to rest. I spent several post-school-day stints of detention in the high school library, my behavior often not matching the expectations of the teachers or administrative staff. I would discover, years later, my sometimes-acerbic wit; my lax attention to class assignments I didn’t immediately grasp; the often-surly attitude that landed me in detention were signs of boredom. The “tough it out” mentality and expectations of a conservative society in the rural Midwest was something I would struggle with my entire life.

But even through this, while other students would gripe and watch the clock intently, I would often simply pick up a book I hadn’t read before and let it carry me to the striking of 3:40 pm, and the return of the world’s intrusion.

The mismatch between my need for room to express myself and the needs of a soon-to-be-entered “Adulthood” gave way to another chapter of my frustration with myself—I ran away to the Marine Corps. I fared little better under the rules-bound, instant-compliance demands of first Basic Training, then the Fleet, although, as was also my wont, I excelled in the Military Occupational specialty (MOS) training.

I loved the learning, foundered in the application.

Again, my prospects, my self, were set adrift in an existence I could not form to.

I last visited a public library in 1987, in Twentynine Palms, California, in search of a Minnesota Tax Schedule. They had two Minnesota and three Iowa booklets—Marines serving there came from everywhere—and the desk attendant smelled of mimeograph fluid. They hadn’t invested in a Xerox yet.

In 1990, after yet another anchorless, contradicting attempt at Life—this time marriage, fatherhood, and a transfer to the East Coast that did nothing for my career—my life went totally off the rails, a train wreck everyone but me saw coming.

I spent a year of pre-trial detainment in a Mayberry-sized civilian jail in North Carolina praying, crying, raging.

And reading.

*

You’d think a library in a small-“t” town Southern jail would be a quite threadbare affair, and for the most part, you’d be right. The bigger jails in the larger communities had slim pickings and much use, but in this whistle-stop of a County Seat, there were twenty four beds and a couple hundred books.

The concrete walls and steel-barred cell faces made no distinction between public and private conversations, and on holiday weekends the population would swell to as many as fifty, sixty people, any over the maximum rated capacity sprawled out on their well-worn shelter mats on whatever floor space they could occupy and not get stepped on.

And we could only have five books in our possession, which we exchanged on Tuesdays, besides one Bible, Koran, or Torah.

So, I read Long Arm, Lone Star, Mack Bolan, Michael Crichton, and King James’ Bible. I read TommyKnockers, It, and The Stand each in one sitting. (Do not try this at home.) Maybe it was because I was barely into my twenties, skinny, pathetic, and facing a long time in prison, but I read many books from private collections, given to me by various staff whose children were in college, with the admonition: “I’ll pick this up tomorrow evening.” Oftentimes these illicit deliveries were on Friday or Saturday, because the Tuesday books were long read by then.

Through these unselfish acts, Ursula LeGuin re-entered my life, as did Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke. Larry Niven and Anne Rice introduced themselves, and I held Margaret Atwood in my heart, although I did not have the emotional language or sophistication to fully embrace A Handmaid’s Tale until many, many years later.

The dystopian world of re-imagined slavery, repressive hierarchies, felt familiar, yet in my own future, my own past, echoes of that type of unbreakable control would be where I dwelt, where I would exist, and I was not prepared for that.

Familiarity does not always equate acceptance.

I was ultimately sentenced to more time than I could do. The stated fact that I would be eligible for parole at some future date meant nothing to me then.

*

You’d think libraries in prison would be pretty dismal places, the sacred overwhelmed by such unrelenting profane that they would shrivel and dissipate to leave only the sticky-slick pages of Black’s Law and State Statutes abstracts, and you’d be mostly right.

The closed-in spaces of jail became open dorms and endless corridors of “real” prison, where men with long sentences and little hope vied daily for their own sense of “sacred,” their own solace, almost exclusively at the expense of another’s. Most times what is portrayed on TV only touches the surface, cuts a glimpse, of the lengths some inmates will go to achieve the ever-elusive “status.”

I would peruse the library—small, as it was an afterthought—in those first years and feel the new tensions of my life bleed away, if only for that moment. Very few books were complete, even fewer had ever been “new,” and some old-timers had collections of their own books as impressive as any in that prison’s library. But still, just that minuscule sense of my own solace was enough.

Yet on one stint in segregation I found the only complete copy of All Quiet on the Western Front I’ve ever seen in a prison library, tucked carefully in the corner of the segregation janitor’s cleaning supplies cart.

He didn’t even charge me for borrowing it.

Transfers happen regularly in the N. Carolina system, and the novelty of an unfamiliar camp soon becomes all there is to experience. My second prison’s library doubled as the “Multi-Media Room” where we watched movies once a week, but when the lights went down and the supervising officer fell asleep, certain sounds, scents, and occasional sights soon sank the illusion of anyone actually watching the movie. Illicit sex—another prison commodity—was also an all-too-often intrusion through the delicate membrane that separated the profane from the sacred, prison from ephemeral sanctuary, the respite used as cover.

The segregation library in this camp was a single cart, a “Tiny Library” long before the concept took off in neighborhoods from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Atlanta. Yet here I discovered a certain Mr. Jordan—Robert, not Michael—and an entirely new, expansive take on the world of Fantasy Fiction.

My last transfer in North Carolina landed me in another Mayberry—this one a 500-bed working camp that was mostly open dorms, bunkbeds with just under thirty two inches between them, one airport-locker “secure space” per inmate, and a cast of characters who came and went at least as fast as they did when I was in jail, but were profitable for the State as low-cost road-maintenance crews, so at least the food was better.

I never went on a road crew, but because of this prison’s significance as a working camp I had access to not only a dentist, but a thousand-volume library that supplied free copies of crosswords that dated from the 1960s to the 1980s.

My Scrabble® scores jumped by multiples.

I applied for and was eventually granted transfer to my home state of Minnesota in 1997 to serve the rest of my sentence. If I could not outlive my sentence, I could at least be closer to home while serving it.

*

You’d think there would be a notable difference in the way books, libraries—education in general—are treated, funded, between the “Old South” and the arguably more progressive Free State of Minnesota, and you’d be right.

Stillwater State Penitentiary, as a 1930s Art Deco project, has concrete walls and travertine floors; steel-bar cell fronts stacked four and five stories high; conversations were never purely public or private; echoes were at times vertigo-inducing; and each cellhall rarely housed fewer than two hundred fifty men from the heavy front doors to the open showers at the rear of each cellhall.

The prison library at MCF-Stillwater is an iconic place founded—and partially funded—by Messrs. James and Younger long before the “New” prison complex was built in the village of Bayport, MN in the 1930s. The theater /chapel building had been renovated as the Education Complex just before I arrived, and the library was, literally, the first room you passed as you exited the Security sally-port, and contained over eleven thousand books, as many—or more—as my school library.

So surrounded by the nearly-deafening silence of carpeted floors, walls of books and not echoes, I would look up from what I was reading and almost, almost, see my High School librarian checking out books, tending the periodicals shelves, pointing patrons to where requested books waited.

This juxtaposition would bring a tiny smile to my aching heart.

I treated my weekly fifty two minute visit as a respite from the endemic stress of life in a predictably-unpredictable Government holding cage, reading periodicals I couldn’t afford to buy like Science News, Smithsonian, The New Yorker; discovering Jim Butcher, Piers Anthony; and finding an odd little book with big friendly letters on the cover that spelled “DON’T PANIC.”

I again visited with Tolkien, McCaffrey, Weiss, Heinlein; heard the call of The Odyssey, the Foundation, The Silmarillion; explored Pern, Two Rivers; and found a quiet place—irrespective of the range of tyranny or kindness of the various librarians—where worlds overlapped, a scent of the sacred in the dank, unwashed profane of prison life. Even though the overall stress levels I endured compared with my time in North Carolina were greatly reduced, I would still feel my shoulders settle, my whole being relax ever so slightly in the sanctuary that was in, not necessarily of, a State prison anywhere.

Within the familiar embrace of a library that was just a library, I rediscovered the curious, interested child I had once been, saw this space as a more permanent fixture in my future. I started college; I earned an Adult Basic Education (ABE) tutor certification; worked with and through the Education Department and its selfless Director tutoring part-time during the years I held an Industry job; then tutored pre-GED classes full-time in the mid-2000s.

I tried to practice what I preached about the utility and uncommon-in-prison accessibility of the Stillwater library, and I often asked my students to pick out books they wouldn’t normally read and summarize them for me.

Occasionally, I would get an essay to grade.

I began to write—intermittently, and badly. The library, across the hallway from the Computer and Testing Lab, was a pleasant haunt for me, even as I was discovering the vast, empty parking lot that was my creative mind, a place where I would stumble across new and interesting things I sought but did not as yet understand.

Eighteen years after I arrived at MCF-Stillwater, twenty five years into my possibly-forever sentence, I found myself, by happenstance, working as a library clerk.

*

You’d think working in a library where about a quarter of the clientele were serving prison sentences they would not outlive would be challenging, and, for the most part you’d be right.

There was a general selection of classic Literary works, a few “Best Of’ anthologies, an abundance of Westerns, Jackie Collins Romances, Paranormal Romance, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, True Crime, and a section of FreeBird Publishing Urban Fiction.

The only complete copy of Gone With the Wind I’ve ever seen in a prison library was on one of the Book Karts we refreshed and rotated from cellhall to cellhall on a monthly basis.

It visited all six cellhalls and, as far as I could tell, was never read.

The Education Department sponsored an annual Reading is Fundamental (RIF) Fair, where eligible inmates could pick out books for their children, and I usually manned the “0-3” age range display tables – bright colors, sturdy cardboard pages and such. We averaged over three hundred books mailed out every November/December.

One important lesson learned: Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!

The week before the 2017 RIF Fair, someone stole our Salma Hayak RIF poster.

Some of the goings-on in the Stillwater library would have been familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in any library any where, some were—humorous and otherwise—peculiar to a prison setting, even one as well-managed as this one. Some examples:

The librarian I worked for purchased the same photo-anthology of the Grunge rock group Slip Knot three times—twice for some of the more explicit depictions coming up missing, once for a “lost” claim—and fielded dozens of angry complaints when he refused to purchase a fourth.

This particular “lost” claim was the incident that convinced him to reinstitute a Replacement Fee for “lost/damaged” books.

I did notice a bunch of really cool new tattoos that looked remarkably like the “missing” depictions.

Some patrons would pick up a book, peruse it while wandering around, totally forget where they got it, and put it down on the nearest empty shelf space. I gave great credit—and some grateful praise—to the patrons who would actually ask me, “Where did I get this?”

One patron insisted on rearranging every shelf by the heights of the books thereupon. I did make some headway with him, but he would still wait until I was somewhere else during his time and have at a shelf or three.

I helped unload over six hundred books donated to the library by an estate whose benefactor had spent time in Stillwater in the 1980s—this was not the largest single donation, but it was from a single donor, a penance not necessary, but appreciated.

Space, especially in prison, is finite, and keeping the inventory arranged, current, and in good shape took up our time as clerks on Wednesday mornings and when one or another unit was locked down for whatever reason.

The top corner of certain pages of certain books were torn off, prison slang for “sex on this page.” Most Long Arm and Lone Star books were pretty ratty, but, strangely, the Romance novels were mostly untouched.

Travelogues also took a beating for the maps. People serving time anywhere come from everywhere. A young patron from Kenya asked for a copy of a map of the Home Country that showed- unbelievably- his village. He was heartbroken when, after his next paycheck (we charged $0.25/page for copies, he made $0.50/hour as a GED student), this page was torn out by a Nigerian who disliked him.

That travelogue had been out of print since 1993.

We checked out every single Isaac Asimov book we had three times over because he was a featured author in a college Writing in the Disciplines class.

We lost over a hundred books to a patron who removed the last dozen or so pages for reasons he would not, even under threat of sanctions, reveal. He was eventually charged some $200, but was released on probation before he could put a dent in the fees he owed. He was still out when I transferred two years later, but the bill will be waiting for him if he ever comes back.

I inadvertently spoke with a librarian in Stillwater (the town) when she overheard me asking my librarian in Stillwater (the prison) about a book he’d ordered for me through the Inter-Library Loan (ILL) Program a week earlier. “You guys order the most interesting books,” she said, “and I’ll sometimes order copies for display here because of that.”

Even the verbiage on certain signs and posters was, at times, a mildly-hilarious distraction—when our two Research computers forgot they were on a network, my librarian and I made two different informative signs.

His read, “Due to a Network malfunction, this station is out of service.”

Mine read, “Broke—Do Not Use.”

A dozen and more patrons tapped on his station’s keyboard while seated at mine.

*

There would still be times when I would look out from behind my desk at the several patrons busily perusing the shelves or noses buried in periodicals too expensive for them to purchase themselves—as I had done for so many years—and I would watch their shoulders settle ever so slightly from their usual protective hunch, I would let the quiet, the respect, the sacred, remind me that there are human beings here, seeking the same haven I have cherished.

I would catch the scent of the aging World Book set on the other side of the shelf chest next to my desk, and I would feel my own shoulders settle, just that little bit, again.

*

I now hold Associate’s and Bachelor’s Degrees, Microsoft Office Specialist certification, Toolroom Machinist Diploma, American Welding Society certification, over two dozen related vocational certificates, all earned in prison. I attribute those achievements to the patience, persistence, and open-mindedness it took for a quiet, awkward child to expand his world far beyond the small school library he first fell in love with.

That library no longer exists, its contents emptied into the community when the school closed, its bit of sacred space, the launchpad for so many hundreds of kids like me, rent asunder by the consolidation of resources referred to as Progress. I shed tears when I found out the school had been shuttered, the heartbeat of another small community lost, another sacred space I’ll never be able to rest in, to take shelter in, again.

One less gossamer thread to bind my soul to what is Real.

*

When someone asks me to rate the various libraries that I have experienced over my fifty-some years in this life, they will look at me funny when I simply say, “Sacred.”

I fear for a world that cannot—or feels it is beyond the need to—ground itself in such nondenominational, nonjudgmental, nonpartisan space as a Public Library where the only thing that counts is the simple question: “What’s News these days?”

A very intelligent, sophisticated friend of mine argues that the online revolution (evolution?) is an unalloyed positive, allowing for instant access to every piece of information available with only a few keystrokes, a few keywords.

I vehemently disagree.

I recently read that, even before COVID, Public Library patronage was declining by large-single-digit percentages year over year. Is this, as my friend asserts, because more people are searching for and finding the myriad minutiae of intellectual pursuit on-line, lessening the need for the hard copies that are, by their very nature, obsolete even as their metaphorical ink is drying?

Or, and I fear this is closer to the truth, is the population writ large forgoing the tangible, the reliable, the peer-review that is the essence of the sacred that such public storehouses of knowledge contain for the saccharine of “click bait,” the too-agreeable drug that enflames partisanship over such fundamental tenets as Public Service, Private Decisions….

Over what is Real.

I have rather unfettered access to what passes for Knowledge, Information, Reality (sic) that exists on the three or four major Cable News networks—the sacred is now so nearly overwhelmed by the profane of populist “Ideology” that I sit in awe of what we have lost in the Digital Age.

I have missed the vast majority of the IT progress that has saturated the DNA of most of Society, so I have both an inside and outside view of how this easy access to unfiltered, unverified information has affected the world – people are much more prone to jump to conclusions; to decide “our side” is right and any “other” side is wrong; to vilify any opposing opinions, even if those opinions only differ in nuance, in scale, in personal experience.

What used to take hours to research, the need to wade through many differing stances to find, is now instantly at hand, distilled to a fault.

It’s the exploration, the rubbing elbows with those who are fellow seekers of a different stripe, a different destination, that, in my life’s experience, define a library as sacred.

*

You’d think that each library, like the prison—or civilian—community it calls home or the varied librarians it employs, would be its own entity, alive and evolving to its own tune, its own contents, its own space, yet with the same promise of respite, of sacred.

You’d be right.

My hope is now, that the world is opening up and so many societies around the world are finding the stress, the comfort, the necessity of being around others, maybe even talking to one another face to face (what a concept!), that we would find the small, quiet space where other fellow seekers meet, discuss, debate, and learn; that there would be a small, quiet space for another young, awkward child to find something to be interested in, maybe a passion to explore.

To treat that experience not as an escape, as I had so many years ago, but as a starting point, somewhere that will always be there, waiting for that child to return, now as an adult, with that same curiosity, that same…

Tranquility.

Yeah, that’s the circumstance I’ve been chasing all these years.

There would still be times when I would look out from behind my desk at the several patrons busily perusing the shelves or noses buried in periodicals too expensive for them to purchase themselves—as I had done for so many years—and I would watch their shoulders settle ever so slightly from their usual protective hunch, I would let the quiet, the respect, the sacred, remind me that there are human beings here, seeking the same haven I have cherished.

______________________________

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion is available via Coffee House Press.

The first time I slept with my future husband was in a beach house an hour north of my childhood home. My boyfriend had been given the keys to it for the weekend by its owner, Camilla, a retiree he’d worked for in the New Zealand government. The house was a modest rectangular modernist box, raised off the lawn, wood paneled inside, except for floor-to-ceiling windows at the front with a wide view of the coastal sky. Neither the building nor its contents seemed to have been updated since the sixties, and the atmosphere inside was super cozy. A pair of recliners upholstered in nubby beige angled toward each other in the lounge, around a low table crying out for matching teacups and scones fresh from the oven. When my boyfriend mentioned that Camilla’s sister was often at the house with her, I instantly saw them sitting there, two old maids in cardigans and sensible shoes, tut-tutting over the papers and arguing over who’d pick up the cold cuts for their afternoon guests.

My boyfriend and I had only just started dating, but he was handsome, smart, and kind, and I was optimistic about our future together. I was also, technically, still a virgin and knew I was likely to rectify that within the next half hour. As I moved through Camilla’s house, I should have been consumed with excitement, capable of attending to nothing but our two young bodies and what we were about to do with them. Instead, a different thought was forming in my mind. It reached its climax as I laid my valise in the sunny bedroom, where my childhood would soon officially end. Omg—my chest thrummed—what if Julia and I bought this place when we retired and lived here together till we died?

I earned my adult badge, had a nice weekend, and told Julia about my vision as soon as I got back down the coast. She signed up for it instantly, as I knew she would. Whenever bad shit happened in the years to follow, one of us was likely to sigh, “Won’t it be so relaxing when we’re living at Camilla’s?” Car accident, dislocated foot, rejected manuscript, extramarital infatuation—to cheer us both up, I’d remind Julia of the comfy chairs overlooking the sloping lawn, how the late-afternoon sun sent a gentle glow round the room, what a perfect place it would be for knitting and reading, while our baking rose contentedly in the oven and our aged ankles swelled companionably in our slippers. After Julia got pregnant, we imagined her fetus arriving to deliver us groceries, introduce us to its partner, and clip the backyard roses with its fully developed hands. Our husbands were trickier to manage: it was hard to envision them on-site. But they were a decade older than us, and male life expectancy is lower. We were hoping, I guess, that they’d be dead.

*

Later, in the midst of my divorce, I began to see all of this as not having been a super-great omen for my marriage. When dragging boxes from the conjugal home to my car, for transportation to my sad little rental across town, or when exchanging crippling glances with my soon-to-be ex-husband in the offices of therapists or lawyers, I’d sometimes think of my blissful vision of twin retirement at Camilla’s with a more critical eye. “Jesus, Lena,” I recall puffing to myself once midstairs, while re-homing my half of the liquor cabinet, “what was that about?”

One thing Camilla’s offered to my younger self was a reassuring existential guarantee. Even if this new kind of intimacy with my boyfriend didn’t work out, I was likely telling myself, with more prescience than I knew, I’d always have a backup in place: a permanent home by Julia’s side. The idea that twinship provides a uniquely secure solution to loneliness and alienation is probably the biggest attraction of being a twin, for twins and singletons alike. One woman in a collection of photos of twins, Judy, reports, “Even if you’re unsure of God, you do know that, because of your twin, you are never alone.”

On first reading this, I wanted to say, “Judy, that’s so schmaltzy!” But I have to admit I’ve experienced a similar feeling, and I’m not sure what my emotional life would be without it. (How do singletons live?) I can count on Julia to want to hang out with me, but the reassurance she provides goes beyond that. Some part of me seems to believe that the mere fact of Julia validates my existence. She makes me feel my membership status in the universe is active, as if I’ve already passed some crucial cosmic test and every later qualification is optional. Just thinking of her calms me down, the way I imagine the thought of God, Gaia, or eternal flux does for believers, mystics, and Buddhists.

Alongside that, Camilla’s represented, maybe, a return. Julia and I began our lives together in the snug, dimly lit, twentieth-century lounge of our mother’s womb. Wouldn’t it be perfect, I imagine my younger self thinking, wouldn’t it just be right, for us to end up that way, once all the stressful subplots of life had played themselves out?

Though I didn’t know it that weekend at the beach, this conception of the ideal relationship as a reunion of two parts once sundered has a long history in Western culture. It appears most famously in the creation myth told by Socrates’s fellow dinner guest Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. We humans were originally egg shaped, Aristophanes says, with two faces, four legs, and four arms, which allowed us to tumble head over heels at speed. It was great for a while, but made us too powerful and arrogant for the gods’ tastes, so Zeus split us neatly in two. Ever since, we’ve felt existentially bereft and have yearned unhappily for reunion with our other half. We can never fully manage it, but we can come pretty close if we’re lucky enough to relocate our primitive soulmate, somewhere out there on the planet, equally lonely and yearning for our embrace. “And when a person meets the half that is his very own…then something wonderful happens,” writes Plato, “the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”

The idea of ideal love as a terrestrial twin was driven underground by Christianity—human hearts were meant to find their rest in God—but resurfaced and reached its peak in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Shelley described a couple in love as “one soul of interwoven flame,” and in Wuthering Heights Cathy exclaims to her nanny, “Surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you…Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” The core features of our contemporary ideal of romantic love were born in this period: the ideas that love between romantic partners, at its truest and best, is unconditional, selfless, and eternal, a haven of peace, a source of ultimate meaning, a guarantee of perfect happiness, and a redemption of all life’s sufferings. If romance subs for God in each of these ways, it also promises us the closest thing to immortality we skeptics can now hope for, by extending each lover beyond the bounds of their own mortal frame. “What were the use of my creation,” Cathy asks, “if I were entirely contained here?”

Seen against this backdrop, my vision of a beatific twin reunion at Camilla’s seems distinctively Romantic, while at the same being very unromantic, as far as my future ex-husband was concerned. This reflects a broader problem with the relationship between twinship and romance, which is an awkward fit by any measure. Twins clearly function as metaphors for singleton romantic relationships in the Platonic myth, and as Alice Dreger points out, many a love song can be read as a covert analogy to conjoined twins. (“I’ve got you under my skin,” Sinatra croons to his lover. But even Plato makes his myth’s uneasy fit with singleton romance quite clear. Our reunited ancestors “cannot say what it is they want from one another,” his mouthpiece, Aristophanes, states. “No one would think it is the intimacy of sex—that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other. It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else.”

Aristophanes suggests romantic lovers yearn to fit together not merely sexually, but in a more thorough-going and permanent way, like two lifelong halves of an apple. They want what’s impossible for them, we might say: to be actual twins. Identical twins, at least, literally come into the world as the result of asexual reproductive division, just like Aristophanes’s split ovoid creatures, or Eve, created from Adam’s rib in the Garden of Eden. Spend more than a little time thinking about that, and it starts to seem that we identicals don’t so much animate the Romantic ideal for singletons, as underscore the impossibility of their ever truly attaining it.

*

In Western culture, the myth of twinship—actual twinship—as the ideal human relationship takes its most famous form in the story of Castor and Pollux. The two were said to have resulted from their mother sleeping with Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, and Zeus, the ruler of Olympus, one after the other, resulting in one ordinary human baby and one touched by divinity, delivered at the same time. As the story goes, Castor and Pollux grew up to be the best of friends and spent all their time with each other, wearing their matching pointed felt caps, said to represent the vestiges of the two eggs from which they’d hatched. They were excellent horsemen and also loved hunting, sailing, boxing, and merrily picking fights with their rivals. Eventually, though, the fun ran out when Castor was mortally wounded in a brawl. As Castor lay dying, Zeus informed semidivine Pollux that he could give half his immortality to his brother, which would mean sharing half of Castor’s death. The details of the offer are fuzzy: in some tellings, the twins would live on alternate days forever; in others they’d winter together in Hades and summer on Olympus.

Are You Two in Love? Illustration by Julia de Bres

According to the ancient Greek poet Pindar, Pollux “didn’t give it a second thought.” In a choice between immortality and Castor, he went with Castor—of course. He likely felt about it the way Cathy felt about Heathcliff when she said, “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.” Deathless though he was, Pollux couldn’t live without his twin.

When I talk about my relationship with Julia, I find myself speaking in phrases sapped of force by centuries of overuse by singleton romantics. What does it feel like? people want to know. It feels like she’s always there for me, I say. I can never get enough of her company. We have more fun together than we have with anyone else. We understand each other better than everyone. We can tell each other everything. We trust each other completely. We’d do anything for each other. I make myself sick. But now and then the violent truth underlying these clichés surfaces, giant and graceless, like a whale. I was speaking about Julia a few years ago to a minor acquaintance at a bar when I heard myself say casually, one sip into a martini, “If I betrayed her, I couldn’t live.” I blinked and returned to my drink, self-startled. It wasn’t a thought I’d explicitly entertained before, let alone articulated to a semi-stranger. Like Pollux, I recognized it instantly as the basic fact of my life.

__________________________________

Excerpted from How to be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena de Bres. Copyright (c) 2023 Helena de Bres. Used by arrangement with the Publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing. Illustration (c) 2023 Julia de Bres  All rights reserved.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
―James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

I was in college and home for a visit when my mom first shared a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird. We were in the kitchen in our house in suburban Atlanta, and our conversation turned to my grand­father, who had died a few years earlier. All these decades later, I still remember how the afternoon light made the red counters glow as she told me a story that I had never heard before but would never after that day forget.

The events my mom described occurred during her childhood, when her father, Oury Berry, was serving his first term as sheriff of rural Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi. One summer day, someone their family knew found a pregnant and injured white woman walking along a country road in the heat and gave her a ride into Prentiss, the county seat. At the court­house, the woman reported that early that same morning, her husband had left their house—which was located on a nearby farm—to work in town. After he was gone, a Black man had come to the door and asked for a drink of water. When she returned with a glass, he attacked her, dragged her into the woods, and raped her.

My grandfather and his deputies, my mother told me, used this information to find the man whom the injured woman had accused. By evening, a crowd had gathered outside my grandfather’s office in the courthouse. Carrying his pistol, my grandfather walked outside to speak to the armed and sweating men. “I’ve known most of you all my life, and I sure am going to hate to have to shoot you,” he said, just like Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch, “but no one is taking a man out of my jail.”

Willing to uphold the law even against the people who voted him into office, my grandfather prevented a lynching, my mother told me. He was a hero.

The tragedy, as my mother described it, happened the next morning, after her father went home to get some sleep. In his absence, his deputies and a highway patrolman took the alleged rapist to the scene of the crime, the woods on the edge of a farm just outside Prentiss, so he could explain what happened. There, the Black man attempted to escape, grabbing the patrol­man’s improperly holstered gun. The officers had no alternative but to shoot.

My grandfather was upset at the patrolman’s negligence, according to my mom. But he also believed that the accused man had chosen to die this way rather than be lynched or executed in Mississippi’s mobile electric chair. The way she remembered it, her father the sheriff understood what happened as the man’s decision.

*

A few years later, in graduate school, I learned another version of this story.

Growing up, I had loved my grandfather deeply, but my mom’s story had made me proud of him as well. It had also inspired me to research lynch­ing. As I was finishing my dissertation, I went to visit my grandmother in Prentiss. It would be the last time I saw her in the hundred-year-old house at the corner of Second Street and Pearl where, in my memory, she had always lived. Unlike my grandfather, she did not like to talk about the past, so I spent a day at the office of the Prentiss Headlight reading bound volumes of old editions of the newspaper to try to find out more about what my mom had told me. I wanted to see what the local newspaper reported about my grandfather’s act of bravery in preventing a lynching.

Many Americans have a limited and narrow understanding of lynchings as hangings conducted by vigilantes. Schooled by my research in the writings of Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, who pioneered the study of this violence in the 1890s, as well as by my studies of investigative reports on these killings compiled by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), I knew that lynchings took a variety of forms: not just hanging but also burning, shooting, torture, and other kinds of violence. According to Wells, lynchings were crimes committed by communities rather than individuals. In the early twentieth century, sociologist James Elbert Cutler agreed: “Popular justification” was the essential characteristic of the practice, he wrote. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, passed by the House in early 1922 but defeated in the Senate by a filibuster, extended this understanding.

By the 1930s, as increasing numbers of white southerners turned against the practice, anti-lynching activists fought over how to expand the definition to take in acts of lethal vigilante violence not sanctioned by broad community approval. By 1940, three characteristics were usually required for anti-lynching activists to label an act of violence a lynching: the victim had to die, three or in some cases two or more people had to participate in the murder, and the killers had to operate under the pretext of delivering justice or upholding tradition. This definition would become crucial to the alternate version of my mom’s story that I would learn at the newspaper office.

Reading the Prentiss Headlight, I learned details that my mom had not remembered: August 1, 1947, the date of the shooting; the Lipsey farm, the scene of the alleged crime; and Versie Johnson, the name of the man who was killed.

But it was the difference between the newspaper’s account and my mom’s story that shocked me. Thanks to my research, I also had learned how to interpret descriptions of racial violence in white southern news­papers and how to spot the stories that white southerners used to hide the truth. As I skimmed the articles in those old Headlights, I found one of these narratives right there on the brittle, brown page.

According to the front-page story in the August 7, 1947, edition, although there had been a crowd in front of the jail, no Mockingbird-type standoff had occurred. Instead, the reporter wrote, Versie Johnson “told the sheriff he wanted to return to the scene of the crime to talk to him about what had happened.” In the paper’s account, my grandfather was not only present, but he was in charge. With the aid of two highway patrolmen, Spencer Puckett and Andy Hopkins (rather than as my mom had described, one state officer plus several sheriff ’s deputies), he took Johnson out to those woods on the edge of the Lipsey farm. There, the three white men claimed, Johnson confessed to the crime and showed them exactly where the rape had occurred. And there, according to the paper, Johnson tried to escape: “As Patrolman Puckett stooped to make an investigation, the negro grabbed him around the waist and threw him to the ground and had a hold on his pistol when the officers fired upon the negro.” Three shots rang out, “two in the chest and one in the neck,” and Johnson fell dead.

If Versie Johnson had blocked Puckett’s access to his gun, the shooters must have been the other two officers: Berry and Hopkins. If my beloved grandfather Oury Berry did not kill Johnson, he had certainly tried.

Yet the Prentiss Headlight story was also confusing. Sitting at a small table beside the big plate glass window at the newspaper office, I struggled desperately to make sense of the words. The paper called the crowd gath­ered at the jail “large but orderly,” which begged the question of why it was necessary to quote my grandfather Sheriff Berry insisting that “at no time was the situation out of control.” The Headlight article also constructed an impossibly compressed timeline. Somehow, the journalist alleged, a long list of actions had taken place between nine in the morning and sometime the same afternoon: the rape, the injured pregnant woman’s walk into town in the heat to locate her husband, the couple’s trip together to the courthouse to speak to my grandfather, the manhunt to find Johnson, some unexplained process in which the woman confirmed her attacker’s identity, Johnson’s jailing, his decision to ask the sheriff to take him back to the Lipsey farm, the highway patrolmen coming to Prentiss to help, and the drive back out to the scene of the crime.

What worried me the most, however, was the newspaper’s claim that Johnson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman in prime lynching territory, had asked to be taken out of the jail, through that crowd, and out into the countryside.

The Headlight’s account of Versie Johnson’s death upended what I thought I knew about my grandfather and left me with a feeling of cold horror. But it was clear that neither my mother nor the Headlight had described what really happened to Versie Johnson.

On shaking legs I walked the block and a half from the newspaper office back to my grandmother’s house. I showed her the photocopy of the Headlight article, repeated my mom’s version of the story, and asked her what she knew.

My grandmother said she did not remember anything about Johnson’s killing.

Even then, I understood that her answer was a lie.

Over the next few years, I turned my dissertation into a prizewinning book about the history of southern segregation, lynching, and white supremacy and took a job as a professor at the University of Virginia. I taught southern history, even as I ran away from my own family’s past. But I never forgot that Prentiss Headlight article.

My reluctance to dig into my mom’s cherished story, and the things that I discovered when I finally did, taught me a great deal: about my grandparents, about the world that produced them, and about the deep and still often unacknowledged history of white supremacy in America—a legacy with which, as my own family shows, we are only just beginning to engage.

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Excerpted from In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning by Grace Elizabeth Hale. Copyright © 2023. Available from Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Stephanie Land’s new book, Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, is out today, so we asked her a few questions about her routine, writing advice, and how she deals with writers block.

Who do you most wish would read your book?

Anyone who has authority over a person who works for wages that aren’t enough to pay their living expenses. Legislators who cry out “work requirements” whenever people try to pass bills to increase income limits for Medicaid, or to increase the amount people receive for food, and when they talk about continuing child tax credit payments. Elementary school teachers and parents who have the privilege to be involved with the PTA. It’s unfortunate that most of those people have their minds made up over who is “deserving” of assistance. But, honestly, the type of people who separate people in poverty to “deserving” and “undeserving” won’t see that I was “deserving” and definitely won’t read a book I’ve written about my experiences.

How do you tackle writers block?

I was completely blocked for two and a half years with this book. I took online classes through Corporeal Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch. I tried hiring a book coach—who fired me after three sessions, but not before adding that she’s “not a therapist.” I don’t remember what prompted me to, but I called my friend Erin Khar and told her everything, desperate for ideas, and we started the “Not Writing Club.” It became a space for a group of women memoirists to, basically, vent about all the things that barged in on the space we fought to maintain for (at that time) a hopeful glimmer of creative process. There’s no way I would have been able to write my second book without their support.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

Best: “The not writing is just as important as the writing.” — Walter Kirn.

Worst: Anyone who discourages a person from trying to get paid what they deserve for what they’ve written.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

I am very, very good at getting organized and making schedules and coming up with a routine. While I might follow that routine for a few days, or *just* long enough to make a reel of it for TikTok, it fades almost immediately. I physically wrote Class in 31 days, which is probably the most extreme example of my writing process (and one I promised my best friend to never ever do to myself again): I mentally chew on things, attempt to digest them, chew them some more, and regurgitate them onto the page. It’s messy and fast and I spend months editing it (I did the same thing for Maid, but in at least twice as many days) but I had to learn how to write that way as a single mom who had limited time to sit down and produce, so I guess that’s the process I am stuck with.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

Mr. Birdsall, my fourth grade teacher, forced us to write all year. We kept journals and wrote countless short stories, essays, and book reports. We even wrote stories about everyone in the class when their birthday came around. I hated it, but then it was the only thing that made sense, and I knew I was a writer. After the series from Maid came out, someone saw that I’d listed him in the acknowledgments and connected us through Twitter. We talked on the phone and I asked him what gave him the idea to force a bunch of ten year olds to write so much, and he said he’d gone to a conference that summer where the focus was to teach kids how to process their world through writing. He said, “but for you, it really clicked. You didn’t just understand the assignment, you needed it.”

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

I really, really miss being a barista. I have no doubt I would own some kind of coffee shop where other writers could work and then read or sing what they’ve written out loud and there wouldn’t be any blenders in sight.

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Stephanie Land’s memoir Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, is available from Atria/One Signal Publishers.

I had begun to conceive this essay after rereading a magazine interview I’d done months prior. The interview was about my then new book of short stories A Dream of a Woman, and the interviewer had asked me about community. I’m a trans woman, and specifically the interviewer asked about community among trans people, or “the trans community.” I echoed to him something a character says in the book: “that term ‘the trans community’ can mean whatever I want it to mean in that moment.”

The character in question does believe this wholeheartedly. But when I read back those words of mine, speaking for myself as a real-life human, I wondered if I was actually quite that cynical. The magazine had landed on my doorstep in the humidity of summer 2021, in a newly vaccinated Windsor, Ontario, gingerly waking from COVID quarantine. I knew I benefited from community. I was actively reconnecting with community! And Lord knows, I had dearly come to understand how I needed community during the bleak lockdown days.

Yet, I was still frustrated with the concept of community, as I had been most of my life. The drama, the groupthink, the way it turns against individuals it does not understand. Its problems felt intractable, replete with all too human Ouroboros and Gordian knots. I found myself still loath to examine “community” head-on, whether it be in the context of Mennonitism, a small city like Windsor, the neighbourhoods of New York City where I was newly spending the academic year, the Manitoba towns of my childhood, the Pacific Northwest suburbs of my adolescence, or the squabbling, interlaced array of queer communities in which I’d spent much of my adult life.

Community. Just the word itself is so damn amorphous. It can describe everything from a Rust Belt city’s literary scene to a network of Christian denominations to transsexuals bitching about electrolysis pain on the internet to unwieldy political blocs of racialized minorities to internet fandoms to organized hate groups to any homosexual-adjacent person who self-describes with the word gay. Somewhere along the line, such amorphousness had even caused the word community to attain semantic satiation for me—the phenomenon in which a word is repeated so often it loses its meaning; it ceases to sound like a word.

And when I really started thinking about this, I saw that term community invoked everywhere, in a manner at once authoritative and nebulous, a word that can, indeed, seemingly mean whatever its speaker wants.

Like, okay, look at influential forces like politicians, or multinational conglomerates, or even just the media. Netflix advertises the documentary Disclosure: “Leading trans creatives and thinkers share heartfelt perspectives and analysis about Hollywood’s impact on the trans community.” The New York governor says of Black History Month: “A time for all New Yorkers to reflect on the many contributions of the Black community and the ongoing struggle for equality.” I can get off an airplane in Toronto and a bank advertisement on the jet bridge will proclaim the colonial nation-state of Canada “a close-knit community of 36 million.” I can cancel my free Adobe trial and, after alarmingly clingy screens plead for me to reconsider, the confirmation screen arrives: “Casey, you’re still part of the Adobe community.”

On the tenth anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an ABC affiliate reports: “The undocumented community says its future will remain uncertain until there’s a clear pathway to citizenship.” The US president signs a bill related to gay marriage and praises the then Speaker of the House at the ceremony: “Equality and dignity for the LGBT community has always been her North Star.”A Politico article on a US Senate race: “Herschel Walker rallied with the Indian American community in September . . .” A Wall Street Journal deck on the backlash to a comedian’s jokes: “the company faced strong criticism from the transgender community . . .”

So here we have powerful entities referring to vast, disparate groups of far-flung people and doing so with a mien of authority, with the assumption that when they say “community,” their audience understands what they mean, that nobody’s going to ask for clarification. These powerful entities are also the type whose utterances are usually subject to multiple rounds of review as well as quick public criticism—in other words, if a term would be confusing or get them in trouble, they might not use it. But “community” is invoked without question all the time.

I believe in community. I believe in its necessity. I believe it is deeply and irrevocably meaningful to humanity and to our individual lives. And yet: What do these powerful entities mean?

Take the phrase “the [X] community.” When I read that phrase, I think: How does this person know this about the [X] community? What are the borders of the [X] community? How is the writer deciding who counts within them and who does not? Is the writer a member of the [X] community? Would others dispute their membership? Whatever claim is made about the community, how many sections within it must the claim apply to in order to justify the term? Perhaps most importantly, How can that writer possibly decide who gets to speak for the community? And who are those not speaking in their place?

Now, as a writer, I get it. More specific phrasing than “the [X] community” can get prolix, and the pressure of word economy closes in. Still, my bullshit radar pings.

Take the last of the examples above, “the transgender community.” How would, say, that writer at the Wall Street Journal define it, if pressed? How would I define it if pressed? Certainly, if you asked me off the street, I doubt I’d come up with much beyond: “Goodness, that’s complicated. I don’t know.”

To wit: it’s probably indicative that many queer people to whom I mentioned this essay’s concept reacted with some combo of apprehension, shock, sympathy, and sometimes a deadpan why-are-you-doing-that-to-yourself.

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Excerpted from On Community by Casey Plett. Copyright © Casey Plett, 2023. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

In late 1916, as World War I convulsed the Middle East, Moshe Kopp, a Russian-born Jew who lived in Jerusalem, ordered his family to sit shiva for his eldest daughter, Fanny. The teenager had just run off to Turkey with Midhat Bey, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, with whom she had been living for the past year in the governor’s mansion. She was pregnant with his child. For one week—shiva is the Hebrew word for seven—the Kopps sat in a circle on low stools, barefoot or wearing wooden shoes, and made tears—kriyah, in Hebrew—in their clothing, on a hem, perhaps, or a cuff, to symbolize their grief. Cloths covered the mirrors, nobody bathed, and Moshe did not shave. He recited Kaddish for Fanny three times a day, thereby conveying to her, you have killed us, your family, by running off with a goy, so now we are killing you, and therefore you are dead. Moshe was simply following the usual custom of the Ashkenazim in those days when one’s child married out of the tribe. Moreover, that Fanny and Midhat were not married only compounded the sin she had committed against Am Israel, the People of Israel.

After the shiva, Moshe warned his wife, Ita, and their remaining five children never to utter Fanny’s name again.

I first heard about Fanny in the 1980s from my Israeli cousins, all descendants of Moshe Kopp and my grandfather’s first cousin, Ita Sparberg. Although Fanny was only my distant relative, I couldn’t let go of her story, and its grip on me tightened further after my son Alex fell in love with a Turkish woman, Ayse, whom he married in 2008.

Fanny left behind no diaries or letters, and, like most women, she was absent in the official annals of the past. We didn’t even know Fanny’s birth year for certain. But, on the night after my son’s wedding in Great Neck, New York, my third cousin Hasida—Fanny’s niece—showed us a photo of Fanny that she’d brought with her from Israel. It revealed a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with heavy eyebrows and a milky complexion, with a serious expression on her plump face, who was standing in front of a clump of roses in the garden of the governor’s mansion, where she was living with Midhat. Hasida said she was already pregnant when the photo was taken, but it must have been early on because no bump is discernible under her delicately draped, pastel-colored dress. A string of pearls, surely a gift from her lover, adorned her neck.

After that evening, I set off to find out more about this Ashkenazi woman who lived in early twentieth-century Jerusalem, caught between the taboos of her ancient culture and her bold embrace of modernity. Fanny bore witness to the last days of Ottoman rule in the Middle East and then the violent birth of Kemal Atatürk’s modern Turkish Republic, but her voice was erased when her tribe exiled her.

In the years following the night I saw Fanny’s photo for the first time, I’d combed through books and archives in English, French, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish—at times I needed translators—seeking information that would fill in the background of Fanny’s story. Through Hasida, I acquired three photos of Fanny. On the back of one, dated May 1912, Fanny had scribbled a note of concern to her brother, in French, about an unnamed “malheur” that he had suffered. “Nous sommes très inquièts,” she wrote, in the language that was then the lingua franca of educated Jews across the Middle East. The nature of that “malheur” is unknown. Another photo shows Fanny’s parents, in Kishinev, then Russia, holding Fanny as a baby.

I also had oral testimonies from Hasida and several other cousins in Israel, and information from a memoir, Geriye Yazılar Kaldı (Only My Words Remain), by Midhat’s granddaughter, a celebrated Turkish journalist named Leyla Umar. Umar, who died in 2015, started her career as a newspaper reporter in the 1950s and became a leading Turkish public intellectual who interviewed world leaders such as Yasir Arafat and Nelson Mandela. She was also a powerful figure in Midhat’s family and left behind a grandson whom I came to know, Arda Eksigil. Thanks to Arda, I gained access to Turkish documents. For the previous five years, Arda had been on a parallel journey with mine, searching through archives in Turkey and Europe as he worked on a biography of his great-great grandfather Midhat. So far, a sort of silhouette of Fanny had emerged, but it had yet to spring to life.

Going to the actual places, I thought, would reveal more of her. In the spring of 2022, I decided to trace Fanny’s footsteps from Jerusalem to Izmir, where she died of bone tuberculosis a hundred years earlier, leaving behind the five-year-old daughter she had with Midhat.

*

Within days of my arrival in Jerusalem, a new variant of COVID-19 hit the Middle East, and I succumbed. For a day I stayed in my hotel room as the virus began to run its course. It was early spring, but the freezing weather typical of Jerusalem winters was hanging on. Rain pounded on the windows. Miserable, I asked myself why I had come here. I had compiled an itinerary of sorts, but I didn’t know exactly where to find my story. I would have to go looking for it.

The following morning, the rain stopped, and I wandered, feverish, around the neighborhood, masked and bundled up against the cold. In fact, Fanny was living with Midhat during a terrible winter just like the one now. But conditions then were so much worse. It was wartime, and people were dying of typhus and cholera, and there was no kerosene to fuel the little Primus stoves that provided the only source of heat.

I found myself at the old Ottoman depot, Tachana Harishona, “First Station.” This was a relic of a railway line constructed between Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1892 that connected Jerusalem, long a neglected outback of the Ottoman Empire, to points throughout the Ottoman provinces of Palestine and Syria. For years it stood abandoned, until 2013 when a developer turned it into an outdoor mall and entertainment complex. It was exactly from here that Fanny and Midhat left Jerusalem in 1916. At least half of the retail and restaurant spaces were sitting empty, no doubt due to the pandemic, and those that were still hanging on had few patrons. In the middle of the complex, a carousel stood idle. I wandered about, trying to tease out some reminder of what once happened there, and became briefly distracted by one kiosk’s colorful inventory of rugs, pottery, and other tchotchkes. Most, I discovered as I perused them, came from Turkey, which has a perennially difficult relationship with Israel that at times erupts into hostility. But the two nations through it all maintain close economic ties, because they need each other’s business.

I then moved on to study a group of enlarged photo reproductions from Ottoman and Mandate times that were displayed in front of the old station house, which now houses a restaurant. One of the photos showed a crowd of mostly Turkish dignitaries standing on the train platform seeing off Midhat’s superior and nemesis, Djemal Pasha, the mercurial and sadistic Commander of the Fourth Division of the Ottoman Army in Syria and Palestine. On the bottom of the photo, somebody had scrawled the date, 1916.

In Europe at that time, millions of men were fighting and dying in the trenches of the Somme in an Allied offensive that lasted nearly five months. Three years had passed since a series of wars in the Balkans ended Ottoman rule in what is now Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The loss of its European provinces had weakened the central government in Constantinople, and in 1913, a group of ultra-nationalist Turkish army officers staged a coup. Among its leaders was Djemal, who emerged as one of the de facto heads of the new government.

The following year, Turkey entered the European war on the side of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. This was a disastrous tactical decision that further hastened the end of the long-expiring Ottoman Empire and led the Empire to implement policies designed to terrorize the populations still under Ottoman control, in order to discourage them from seeking independence. To this end, the new government oversaw the forced uprooting and genocidal killings of Armenians in Anatolia, while in Syria and Palestine, Djemal was ordering public hangings of Arabs whom he suspected of involvement in nationalistic movements. In Jerusalem the hangings often took place in front of the Jaffa Gate, and the corpses were left strung up on the gallows for several days. Braha, Fanny’s younger sister (and Hasida’s mother), remembered seeing them, and later she described the terrible sight to her grandchildren. They, in turn, described it to me.

As for the Jews under Djemal’s jurisdiction, Zionism was a crime under Ottoman law, and one of the first things Djemal did when he arrived in Palestine in January 1915 was to warn the Jews that they would suffer the same fate as the Armenians if they proved themselves insufficiently loyal. He had Hebrew signs removed from public places (“Hebrew Not Wanted,” the Jewish Exponent reported from Jerusalem on July 4, 1915). In one case, a Jewish bookseller was arrested for housing Hebrew manuscripts in his inventory. Djemal ordered the arrest of hundreds of Jews suspected of Zionist leanings, among them a young David Ben Gurion—as well as Fanny’s brother, Itzhak.

After several minutes of ruminating over the tableau at Tahana Harishona, I recognized one of the men as Midhat Bey. He was bespectacled and sporting the requisite fez of an Ottoman official. In 1916, Fanny was living with Midhat in the governor’s mansion. In the photo, Midhat is standing erect, dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, his black moustache carefully waxed. His expression borders on severe but with a soupçon of a smile. According to Arda, Midhat was known for having many love affairs.

I recalled the European trope of the exotic, dangerous Jewess who wrecks the lives of the gentile men who fear, despise, and, most of all, desire her. The Jewess—la belle Juive—was a favorite subject of nineteenth-century French painters. Henri Regnault’s Salome—with her wild black hair, the smirk on her lips, and her burning dark eyes that stare directly at the viewer—seems to say, I dare you to come closer. Perhaps it was Midhat himself who took the picture of the daintily attired Fanny in the garden of the governor’s house. That Fanny was Jewish made Midhat’s liaison with her downright dangerous, given Djemal’s rising paranoia over Zionism. Ironically, though, Djemal Pasha, too, had a Jewish mistress.

Conde de Ballobar, a Spanish diplomat posted in Jerusalem during the war years whose journals were translated and published in 2011, wrote in a diary entry dated May 31, 1915: “The month is ending, but not the more or less naughty comments being made about the projected wedding of Djemal Pasha with a beautiful Jewish lady named Leah Tennenbaum. The news seemed so unlikely to me that I gave it the least importance, but it persists, and there is no one in the city who is not commenting on it.” Such was the irresistible pull of la belle Juive. I don’t know if Fanny knew Tennenbaum. Perhaps so, Jerusalem was a small place. As for the wedding, it never happened.

Later in 1916, Midhat was accused of stealing money from a wheat syndicate that had been set up to address an ongoing famine in Jerusalem. Djemal disliked Midhat, according to Arda, and ordered him to report to Damascus to undergo an investigation. This is why Midhat and Fanny left Jerusalem. Ballobar mentioned their impending departure in his diary, and added that Midhat, whom he’d thought at first to be an honest person, must have been corrupted by Fanny.

After standing a few minutes longer in front of the station house photo, I sat at an outdoor table to have a drink. On my phone, I pulled up an old Ottoman rail map. I traced Fanny and Midhat’s route to Damascus. The couple crossed no national borders on the way, because what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories then constituted a single province under Ottoman rule, and through it ran a network of railroads that extended from Constantinople to the Arabian Peninsula. From Turkish documents, Arda learned that in Damascus, Midhat was cleared of the graft charges and ordered to Constantinople to await his new assignment.

Along the way to Turkey, Midhat and Fanny stopped in Aleppo, where she gave birth to a girl. I know from Hasida that Fanny then sent a postcard from Aleppo to her family in Jerusalem announcing that she had a new daughter, whom she named Suzan—“Rose”—for the roses (Hebrew shoshanim) that bloomed in Midhat’s garden in Jerusalem. The card has long vanished, and I don’t know in what language Fanny wrote it, but I imagine that it was in French like the note she wrote to her brother in 1912. It’s possible, though, that it was in Yiddish.

When Fanny’s mother, Ita, received the card, she caught the next train to Damascus, with her youngest child, five-year-old Yehuda, in tow. From there the two would catch a connection to Aleppo. All his life, Yehuda would remember the trip, and many years later he would tell his young granddaughter about it, who would later tell this story to me.

When Ita and Yehuda got to Damascus, Ita learned that no trains were running to Aleppo that day on account of troop movements. Ita returned to Jerusalem with her son, grieving for her daughter, who, though still alive, was, in the eyes of her community, dead. The Kopp family never saw Fanny again.

I finished my drink. I didn’t feel well and had had enough for one day, so I returned to my hotel room. The next day, I fled to my cousin Yael’s home nearby to ride out the virus, where she comforted me by cooking cabbage soup with kasha, a peasant dish whose recipe had been passed down to us from our Russian great-great grandparents. A week later, I finally tested negative for COVID-19 and returned to Jerusalem, to pick up the thread of my journey. The cold weather had finally departed.

The next stop on my itinerary was Ethiopia Street, where the Kopp family set up their home after they arrived in Palestine from Kishinev, in 1905. This was where Fanny was living with her family when she met Midhat, in the fall of 1915. Leyla Umar mentioned Fanny and Midhat’s affair in her memoir, which was published in 2005. Their trysts took place at the governor’s mansion, which was a five-minute walk from Ethiopia Street. Umar wrote:

Midhat Bey, living by himself at the Governor’s mansion in Jerusalem, was visited by a young Jewish girl one day. This girl called Fanny was one of the daughters of a family who migrated to Jerusalem from Russia. Fanny, volunteering at the Red Crescent during the war that was going on for the previous two years, invited the Governor to the Red Crescent Ball. My grandfather, upon learning the ticket earnings would be donated to war veterans, accepted the invitation to the ball. My grandfather, later telling my mother about their encounter, said: “I felt like my body was electrified when Fanny walked into the room. I couldn’t control my feelings even though I knew the dire consequences of a Jewish girl and an Ottoman governor getting together in this most fervent period of Zionism.” Fanny came to the mansion a few more times after the Ball to visit Mr. Governor, and after a short while, moved in, never to return back home.

I didn’t know which house the Kopps lived in, but I told myself that maybe I would pick up some clues once I was walking along Ethiopia Street. I turned into a sharp curve off Street of the Prophets that marked Ethiopia Street’s entrance. At first, high stone walls covered with bougainvillea blocked the views of the houses nestled behind them, but after I rounded the curve, the tops of some old mansions became visible. I stood in front of a huge structure with hewn stone and lacy green ironwork. On its gate was posted the street number, 8. I stood there for a few minutes trying to imagine Fanny slipping out, then looking in either direction to see if anybody was watching her. She would have hurried down the street—at that time just a dirt path—and around the same curve I’d just walked on, across Street of the Prophets, and on to the governor’s mansion just a few minutes away, on what is now Rav Kook Street.

All of Jerusalem was talking about the scandal of Fanny and Midhat, according to Braha. Ita had to keep reminding people that her daughter Fanny was not a prostitute. Fanny wasn’t like all those Jewish girls selling their bodies to the thousands of soldiers then passing through Jerusalem. When Turkey entered the war in 1914, Djemal had turned the city into a staging point for a campaign through the Sinai and across the Suez Canal, to take Egypt from the British. In fact, in October 1915, one month after the Red Crescent ball, Djemal ordered two Jewish whorehouses closed down in the nearby Nachlot Shiva quarter. On October 16, 1915, the Hebrew newspaper Aherout rejoiced: “For this, Djemal deserves praise! He took away the shame of the residents of Jerusalem!”

Fanny, 1916. Photo courtesy of the author.

A few doors down from number 8, at number 11, I found a plaque marking the former home of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the philologist who compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary. Lithuanian born, he’d been possessed by the then-outlandish conviction that the Jews of Palestine should use Hebrew, the holy tongue, as their everyday spoken language. A photo of Ben Yehuda was affixed to the plaque, showing the bearded, spectacled scholar bent over a desk piled high with books. The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem cursed the man now considered the father of Modern Hebrew for profaning the language of prayer, and in true Old Testament fashion they stoned his house, right from where I was now standing. It occurred to me that Ben Yehuda was, in their eyes, like Fanny, sinning against God and the Jewish people. Fanny and Eliezer Ben Yehuda surely walked past each other while both lived on Ethiopia Street.

I kept walking, past the Ethiopian Church for which the street is named, to where it met the border of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Mea Shearim, where I found a large sign posted on a stone wall. It read: “To Women and Girls Who Pass Through Our Neighborhoods. We Beg You With All Our Hearts, Please Do Not Pass Through Our Neighborhood in IMMODEST CLOTHES. MODEST CLOTHES INCLUDE: CLOSED BLOUSE, WITH LONG SLEEVES, LONG SKIRT. NO TROUSERS, NO TIGHT-FITTING CLOTHES.” Black-suited Haredi men with their broad-brimmed hats and peyot walked past, holding their prayer books and talking on cell phones, and there were women dressed in long skirts and head coverings in conformance with the laws of smiut (modesty).

The sign marked the terminus of Ethiopia Street. I turned around and retraced my steps to Street of the Prophets, and considered taking it all the way to where it ends, at Damascus Gate, another spot favored by Djemal for public hangings of Arabs suspected of disloyalty to their Ottoman rulers. I could stand in the plaza in front of the gate, today often the scene of demonstrations by Palestinians against the Occupation, and imagine that I was Fanny, staring at the bodies. Afterwards, I could enter the souk and buy things I didn’t need: Armenian pottery, silver earrings, a bag of whole cardamom pods, a ceramic mezuzah decorated with a pomegranate motif, but I had visited Israel, and the souk, many times, and if I allowed myself this indulgence today, I would waste time better spent continuing my search for Fanny. I was afraid I would lose the trail.

So instead, I crossed over Street of the Prophets, and after a five-minute-walk I was standing in front of the carved door that led inside the old governor’s mansion, on Rav Kook Street. This is where Fanny lived with Midhat for a little over a year, from the autumn of 1915 until the couple left Jerusalem the following November. The limestone brick structure, with its terra cotta decoration and touches of lacy ironwork, was built by the Italian government in the nineteenth century to house its consulate. During World War I, the mansion was appropriated by the Ottoman administration. Jerusalemites still call this structure the Italian consul. Today it belongs to the Catholic Church and houses the Association of Hebrew Speaking Catholics.

I was greeted by the resident priest, the Neapolitan-born Father Benedetto di Bitonto, a slight, bearded man of perhaps forty. He invited me in for a cup of tea. His flock includes a few Israeli converts to Catholicism, but most are Catholics from elsewhere who live in Israel: diplomats and foreign students, for example, and American or European Catholics who are married to Israelis. There are also some Filipinos, of whom there are many living and working in Israel, and neither they, nor any children born to them there, can ever become citizens because they are not Jewish. “We try to keep a low profile,” Father Benny told me. “And we definitely do not proselytize.” He added that one of his priestly colleagues was once slapped across the face by a Haredi Jew while riding the tram.

I told Father Benny the story of Fanny and Midhat. I showed him her picture. His soft dark eyes gazed directly into mine as I spoke. Then he asked me, in his fluent, American-accented English: “Do you believe there was true love between them?”

I was startled by his question, which in fact was long bedeviling me. I wondered how to define love in such an unequal relationship, between a Jewish teenager and a Turkish governor. I told Father Benny that I didn’t know the answer.

He showed me around the house, but, to my disappointment, it had been recently renovated into a sunny, blandly modern interior. The only vestiges of its past were the arched doorways separating two small offices from the main reception area, which led to a sanctuary at the back of the building. No trace remained of the scandal that once played out within its walls. These were painted an immaculate white.

I asked if I could see the upstairs, but this was the clergy’s living quarters and off limits to visitors. I knew that Fanny’s bedroom was on the second floor, because Hasida and, later, her daughter Ayeleth told me that Braha, Ita, and the youngest child, Yehuda, sometimes visited Fanny there when Midhat was called away to Damascus or Beirut on government business. Braha, then eleven, would climb up the tree in front of the window of the room where her sister slept. She would knock on the glass, and Fanny then ran downstairs to the front door to let everybody in.

Fanny could not visit her family on Ethiopia Street, because her father Moshe had forbidden her to ever enter his home again.

That evening, back in my hotel, I did a bit of research on my laptop and discovered that number 8 Ethiopia Street was one of seven houses built by a family of Palestinian patricians, the Nashashibis, during late Ottoman times. I knew that the Kopp family lived in an apartment inside a Nashashibi house. I was getting closer, but I was going to Izmir in a few days, where Arda and I were going to meet face-to-face for the first time. I would have to leave it at that.

*

In 1917, Midhat was appointed chief inspector of the Tribes and Migrants Department, the same branch of the Ottoman government that had organized the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians from Anatolia, in which some one million died, most of them during death marches through the Syrian desert. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims displaced by the war were now flooding into the areas the Armenians had been forced from. Arda’s research revealed that Midhat’s new job consisted of traveling from town to town around Anatolia to oversee the living conditions of these new refugees. Midhat could not possibly have taken Fanny and their infant daughter along with him on such an undesirable assignment in the middle of nowhere. Conditions would be primitive, and the dangers many. So Midhat parked Fanny and Suzan with the large extended household of his father, Abdurrahman, a well-to-do bureaucrat in Izmir.

After that, I don’t know if Fanny and Midhat ever saw each other again. I learned from Leyla Cohen, Arda’s cousin and the niece of Leyla Umar, that Suzan had once had a suitcase filled with letters that her parents wrote to each other during the time when they were separated. But somebody robbed Suzan’s apartment and stole the suitcase, so the letters were lost. Suzan died in Ankara in 2008.

In time, Fanny became sick with bone tuberculosis and was hospitalized at a sanatorium in Izmir. Umar wrote in her memoir that her mother, Mihriban— Midhat’s daughter from his first wife, who died giving birth to Mihriban—lived in Abdurrahman’s house, with Fanny and Suzan. Mihriban took her five-year-old cousin Suzan often to the hospital to visit Fanny. “She used to tell me that she always remembered Fanny in bed, combing her hair. Fanny would burst into tears when she looked at her daughter,” Umar wrote.

Within a few months, Fanny died. She was twenty-five, according to Umar. Arda’s research has revealed that shortly before Fanny’s death, Midhat married another woman. This was a political marriage, forced upon Midhat by Atatürk, and it proves that Midhat and Fanny were never legally married. Hasida told me that the Jewish community of Izmir then sent the Kopp family a letter informing them of Fanny’s death, and that she had been interred in the Jewish cemetery. The letter has long since vanished, but my cousin Ayeleth remembers her mother, Hasida, claiming that many years ago it turned up in the home of another family member. Who, Hasida said, then threw it away. I haven’t been able to confirm this.

Fanny’s death corresponded to a terrible time in Izmir. In the aftermath of World War I, Greece embarked on an unsuccessful campaign to reclaim historically Greek areas of Asia Minor. As the Greek army withdrew, a spectacular conflagration broke out in Izmir—images of the burning city exist in film clips taken at the scene by British journalists. Afterwards, entire ethnic populations were expelled and resettled under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which formally ended the conflict between Turkey and the Allies. Some half a million Muslims from what is now Greece and Northern Macedonia were exchanged for at least 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor. In the midst of the chaos, the modern republic of Turkey was born, under the leadership of Atatürk.

As I was packing my suitcase to leave for Turkey, I wondered if any members of Midhat’s family attended the funeral rites in the Jewish cemetery. Afterwards, nobody in Izmir would have sat shiva for her, because Jewish law dictates that this obligation be performed only by the deceased’s family. Fanny had no family in Izmir save for her daughter. I grieved over Fanny’s lonely death, and the orphaned Suzan, but rage mixed in with my grief at the thought that Moshe had forced his family to sit shiva for Fanny five years earlier, while she was still alive. Moshe had stolen his daughter’s final years from her.

Up to then I hadn’t been exactly sure what had driven my journey, but now I knew. I’d wanted to get these five years back. I wanted to resurrect them, and therefore Fanny’s memory, by telling her story.

*

Sitting at a café on a warm afternoon in the ancient city of Izmir, where Arda and I had agreed to meet, I sipped a Turkish coffee and thought about Fanny, one hundred years before, living in Abdurrahman’s large house up in the hills. She would have been nursing her daughter while murmuring to her in Yiddish, all alone among strangers who controlled every moment of her life and spoke a language she didn’t understand. The house, I would later learn, no longer exists.

A few minutes into my daydream, Arda appeared. The young, auburn-haired man and I embraced. We then sat and talked, all the time expanding the instant connection that we had made the year before, on Zoom, into an unusual friendship between a young Turkish man from an old Kemalist family and a Jewish woman from New York, a friendship that had its roots in the love affair between Fanny and Midhat in Ottoman Jerusalem.

Three hours slipped by before we went to dinner with some of Arda’s Izmir cousins, all of them descendants of Midhat. Arda was eager to find out what they remembered hearing about Midhat and his relationship with Fanny, and for the next few hours the cousins reconstructed their ancestor Midhat’s story in animated Turkish as we enjoyed a meal of mezze and fish accompanied by frequently refilled glasses of raki. Arda apologized to me that they were speaking in Turkish, which I do not understand. But in fact I appreciated the chance to withdraw into my imagination about Fanny’s life here and just listen to the soft tones of Turkish in the background.

The next morning, Arda and I climbed into a cab to take us to the Jewish cemetery, in “the hill of the springs.” The cab wound its way up the hill, through derelict neighborhoods. Feral cats roamed about. At one turn, three plump Turkish women, all wearing heavy makeup, their hair teased and carefully arranged, sat at wooden tables in front of a café, staring glumly at glasses of tea.

The cab pulled up in front of the cemetery. We pushed open the door affixed to the gate and entered. Immediately, Moşe Habif, president of Izmir’s Hevra Kadosha (Jewish burial society), greeted us. A short, wiry man perhaps in his early seventies, he gestured for us to follow him, along a path parallel to a caretaker’s hut bordered with flower beds, and past a small pool fed by the freshwater spring that gives Ğürçeşme its name.

Moşe told us apologetically that he didn’t have much time. We were disappointed: our journey through Izmir’s Jewish necropolis had only just begun. To stall our departure, Arda started firing questions at Moşe in Turkish while I wandered about in the hope that Fanny’s name would pop out at me from one of the slabs in the ground that I was now examining. Some were so corroded as to render the writing on them illegible, and others had bits of Hebrew, or French. “ici repose l’ane du defunt samuel cohen, fils de Mazaltov. Decede le 23 avril 1918,” read one, “priez pour lui!” another. Along the periphery of the burial area, hundreds of old slabs, many of them broken, lay in neglected piles. I walked back to where Arda and Moşe were standing. “We must go now,” Moşe said apologetically. I picked up a stone and placed it on a random grave, and after Moşe quickly recited Kaddish, he rushed us towards the cemetery gates.

Even before we exited onto the street, I knew that I would return to Ğürçeşme and continue my search for Fanny’s grave. Before Arda and I visited Ğürçeşme, we had approached the Jewish community of Izmir to see if they could locate Fanny’s burial record. But there was none, because all the Jewish archives prior to 1923 burned in the fire. Still, I knew for certain that a stone for Fanny existed, because Hasida once told me about her odyssey to find it.

She and Suzan—the two women were first cousins—met for the first time in 1984. Together, they went to the cemetery in 1990 so that Suzan could show her where her mother was buried. But Suzan had forgotten to make an appointment beforehand, and when she and Hasida arrived at the gate, they found it locked. So Hasida never saw Fanny’s grave. Both she and Suzan are dead, so there is no one left to ask where it is. Next time, I told myself, I would take all the time that I needed. I would keep looking until I found it. From my son Alex, and his wife, Ayse, I now have two granddaughters, Arzu and Alara. I must do this for them. I want them to know about the cosmopolitan tapestry of our family history, and to pass down to them the story of Fanny, who was nearly forgotten as punishment for defying the conventions of her time.

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“Fanny in Ottoman Jerusalem” by Alice Sparberg Alexiou appears in the latest issue of New England Review.

“What one sees with one’s own eyes is mixed up with the question of what someone else sees.”
—Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing

Published in 1993, “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace’s essay about the now pretty much bygone age of cable TV, reads today as a kind of critique avant la lettre of the culture that’s since been spawned by the digital streaming services—services that allow us to take charge of what gets channelled into our homes such that we need hear only what we want to hear and see only what we want to see. At the time, the particular target of Wallace’s essay was his own breed, American writers of fiction, whose art he thought at risk of TV’s malign influence. As the ultimate window on to American normality, he warned, or what “Americans want to regard as normal,” TV looks like a godsend “for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself.” Yet the risk for these professional oglers is that they could lose sight of reality thanks to the ease and comfort of its televisual substitution—a risk, he added, that was by no means theirs alone. If it’s true that the average American watches TV for six hours a day then the screen must be a dark mirror of the democratic ideal itself. Wallace didn’t, by this, intend to lambast arthouse TV such as Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Although the lower-brow TV he had in mind did in some ways resemble that sophisticated modernist bend towards formal self-consciousness. The TV you gleefully derided along with your like-minded friends had not only metabolized your own critiques of it, it was already speaking to you in the register of your own mockery. TV was practically begging you to hate-watch it in fact; and it was doing so long before social media’s algorithms had figured out that it’s the pleasure of hating that gets you hailed, homogenized and hooked. Bergman, after all, isn’t the only one to have considered the small screen an ideal match for marriage. Amongst the family-centered sitcoms Wallace mentions are such specimens as the Cosby Show or Married…with Children. Marriage and TV, in other words, may have enjoyed such a binding and lasting relationship because it’s those two hitched together that can provide us with the most compelling picture of normality. As such, they can also help to hitch together a TV-watching populace that knows exactly what to say and how to say it in the “cynical, irreverent, ironic” tone that Wallace deems the method, mood and meaning of the screen age. Or the TV screen age at any rate.

That said, binding the populace with a vision of normality was much easier to do back in our analogue days when we were all forced to watch what was on at the time it was scheduled, whereas living as we do now, in the solipsistic and siloed future Wallace’s essay predicted, we can all decide for ourselves what’s on. Where couples used to fight, in their most eloquent of marital disputes, over the remote control, peace has since prevailed over home entertainment as every household member can reach for earphones and laptops and turn on whatever it is that turns them on. Not, though, at my address. Here we do still continue to vie for the remote control, our quarrels notwithstanding, because we still feel the need of shared televisual experience as pretty much the only zone of interaction we have each day that doesn’t feel like a management meeting. This TV time, we tell our children whenever they get out of bed to interrupt us, is special, sacred, adult time. Once we’ve watched over them, we get to watch the next episode of our box set. We do this so religiously, in fact, that if either of us was to jump ahead and watch that next episode alone, it would reasonably be declared, within the terms of our current contract, an act of infidelity. So is this what middle age looks like, or looks like for us? We look forward to looking forward together and there are few things we look forward to quite as much. Spoken aloud, that doesn’t sound great. Have we then consigned our own romance to the past, or delegated all further romancing to the actors we watch on television? Not necessarily, I tell myself. Wasting time after all, pace Cavell, is what lovers do in the belief that no time spent together could really be wasted. And there’s no time wasted like TV time. Physical intimacy aside, could any time spent together be more intimate? Yes, that’s what I tell myself. But we do, it’s true, my husband probably more than me, have reservations about our TV addiction. And I sometimes wonder what we might really be looking for when we’re looking forward to the box. Observing that one starts looking for things only once one thinks they’re lost, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader has suggested this might tell us something about looking per se. Are we always looking for what we’ve lost? And if so, when we’re distracted by our laptop or phone or TV could that suggest that we’ve even lost a sense of what we’ve lost, or what it is we imagine we’re looking for? What are we seeking when we’re staring at our screens? Is it something different when we watch our screens alone as opposed to together?

Tracing the ways we look at each other back to childhood and the looks first exchanged at home, Leader notes that Freud’s early work on scopophilia (the pleasure in looking) is linked to a sexual curiosity aroused by the veiling of parts of the body. Viewed thus, looking becomes part of an effort to reveal what’s been hidden in order to complete the object—so it’s infused as well with an incipient form of distorted memory or nostalgia since its veiling is what also allows the looker to imagine the object had once been satisfyingly whole. In an earlier chapter I associated this veiling of the body, or of sex, with the wedding veil, and with the claim that marriage and clothing appeared at the moment when something—call it paradise—feels lost. I suggested that via this “civilizing” move, the effort to socialize the sexual simultaneously sexualizes the social. Once veiled, that is, interest gets displaced on to the veil itself, whose mystery is now rendered both physical and metaphysical. For which reason, says Leader, we needn’t take the sex organs in this story too literally. After the veil has been added to sex, sex seems to stand for something else—something “that eludes visualization.” But what is it that, when we’re looking, we can’t seem to see? One answer, says Leader, is that we can’t see our own act of seeing. Which is true, I’m finding, even intellectually. Few things are more slippery than endeavoring to look at looking. You really feel yourself going around the houses as every look sends you off looking somewhere else. Although it’s true in the mirror too, of course, that we can’t focus both our eyes on both our eyes, “we can only imagine the way someone else is looking at us”—as if someone else possessed the power to complete us.

If it’s “someone else looking at us” who we fantasize has such power, then this someone else must also, presumably, possess the power to dismantle us by the same means. Face to face may well be a portal to the ethical relation, as in Levinas’s philosophy, but it can equally awaken the anxiety that a more hostile or even aggressive confrontation could be taking shape. Albeit how we feel about being looked at is also likely to have its own specific history; a history that probably relates to the looks we exchanged with the caregiver who first watched over us. While being watched might be viewed by some as an essentially benevolent, beholding act, therefore, it might, by the same token, also recall in us a sense of our underlying powerlessness and utter dependency. There are those for whom it is only ever persecutory to feel oneself the object of another’s gaze.

Leader makes a subtle distinction between the act of looking (e.g. at art) and the act of watching (e.g. TV). Specifically, he notes that when we’re watching rather than looking, we often correlate our watching with compulsive snacking. We might watch a movie in the cinema while stuffing our mouths with popcorn, for instance. And this, he intimates, could be a sign of what, when we’re watching rather than looking, we’re unconsciously looking for, e.g. a psychical return to the fantasy of the bountiful breast; to that time when we were being fed and looked at simultaneously in what seemed to promise a continuous source of care, pleasure and gratification. To want to watch rather than look thus takes us back to that moment when we had her exactly where we wanted her; or when we perceived in the other’s gaze the look that looked after us.

Such a memory, however, were we really to have it, would likely, for Freud, be considered a “screen memory,” as in the kind of memory we invoke to calm ourselves about who we are and what our histories contain in order to block the experiences we cannot bear to recall, and which we cannot visualize either. With screen memories, Freud explained, “the essential elements of an experience are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience.” So if it’s infantile pleasures and gratifications we’re seeking when we’re watching our TV screens—during our “adult” time—then what we may simultaneously be seeking to evade with our watching could be that which gets more readily aroused by our looking. For it’s with looking that we can better sense how the object of our gaze has her own appetites, demands and desires; as if she’s not merely looking after us, but also looking at us. As such, it’s looking that we may wish to avoid, since “nothing prepares us for when the object looks back.” If we turn out to be the sort of incurable oglers who prefer to observe others unobserved, therefore, that may be because we’ve been driven by our desire to regain mastery over what first disturbed or dispossessed us in our earliest experiences of looking.

As a bid for mastery, however, ogling is a pretty limiting one. This is what Wallace intuited when he warned that watching people on TV as a way of resolving anxieties about being watched is liable to damage both artists and the art they’re capable of producing. For you view a screen, on this reading, precisely in order to be screened from view—and lest negative consequences ensue should your gaze be caught in flagrante. It’s not for nothing, for instance, that the most widely recycled internet meme, which gets enlisted to comment on just about anything that hooks the passing attention of a fickle world, is the one where a guy walking along a high street with his girlfriend has just turned his head, his face all wide-eyed and wowed, at the sight of another woman’s ass. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is left tugging on his sleeve, reminding him whose ass he’s supposed to be thinking about. Clearly she’s offended. And not only, one assumes, because he forgets her the moment another woman catches his eye, but equally because he doesn’t even bother to pretend otherwise—he doesn’t keep up the public performance of two people looking forward in the same direction. Spotting that other woman’s backside, it’s as if he’s decided he can’t not see that. Seeing him spot the other woman, it’s as if she’s discovered she can’t unsee that. But while what he saw will likely vanish from his mind just as quickly as it flashed into view, what she saw might never leave her. Such is the impact, very often, of glimpsing even a flicker of amorous betrayal. Although the irony, of course, is that a meme inviting us to identify, internet Puritans that we are, with the outraged girlfriend, reveals, by our use of it, who it is we perhaps really are—her faithless and easily distracted lover.

The critical question, however, is what that meme couple will do now that the different directions of their gaze have been witnessed. Are they off to make good on that other woman’s ass by seeing it as, for instance, the opportunity for an open- minded and exploratory conversation about what they each want from or feel frustrated about in their own relationship? Or by going home and, say, watching porn together. Though if even TV is becoming an increasingly solitary affair, then porn, I’d guess, is still mostly what people, in or out of couples, watch alone. Might that be what adult entertainment even implies? That the adult is someone looking to escape from the shared world of relationships and responsibilities—the world in which they feel, no less than children feel, that their every move is watched—so as to enter the zone of their special, sacred me-time.

Writing in the New York Times in the post #metoo heat of public and private arguments about sex, gender, power and abuse, the film critic Wesley Morris reflected on the watching habits of the on-demand populace. He was struck, he said, by “the two cultural planets these people seemed to be coming from…romantic comedy and porn.” Yet despite plenty of research into the warping effects of misogynistic pornography on the development of young boys and girls, there’s been little interest in exploring the impact of the romcom as “an entire genre about people coming together, as opposed to one that prefers your coming alone.” As a jumping-off point into adulthood, therefore, didn’t that suggest a more socially binding erotics of entertainment? Albeit the romcom’s real value could easily be missed by those tempted to treat the genre derisively as merely chick flicks, thus failing to acknowledge how romantic comedies have historically encouraged diverse audiences to watch them together, “everybody absorbing images of what it looked like to engage with each other.”

Not that watching things together always means engaging with each other. In lockdown, as Zadie Smith put it in a passage quoted before, married men, confronted with the infinite reality of wives they can no longer even exchange mentally “for a strange girl walking down the street,” are accosted by the awful nearness of having to see each other’s faces exclusively. “The only relief,” she continues, “is two faces facing forward, towards the screen.” Imagine lockdown, in other words, but without Netflix. Problem is, in my household, my husband has very strong views about Netflix. For all we may be a couple of TV addicts, I’m the real addict, which has led to some occasional strife between us. As a filmmaker, my husband has very strong views in general about what we watch, and where we watch it, and when, and how. His views are so strong on these matters that he even once wrote an opinion piece about them for the Guardian. “If you’re anything like me,” it began, “what shared emotional life you might still have is mostly achieved by mainlining shows on a streaming service with your loved one perched on the sofa nearby. When I say loved one, I mean co-watcher.” Since that loved one/co-watcher is me, I can vouch for the fact that he’s not knocking the streaming platforms—because it’s true that we depend on them, much as all internetted beings depend on such shows to, in his words, “dramatize the bits of our relationships we’re too exhausted to undergo the drama of ourselves.” But when he then comes out against bingeing such series the way cinemagoers binge popcorn, I can vouch for that too. For my husband—and this has been a point of contention between us—wants us not only to watch things together, he also wants us to look at things together. And he wants this, he sometimes tells me, for the sake of our marriage. Although to save our marriage by such a method, he acknowledges, we must also risk it. Contrasting episodic TV, whose pleasure is “precisely because it confirms our sense of ourselves,” to the languishing art of cinema, aka “the part of enjoyment that’s closer to pain,” as a general indicator, he explains, the latter “is more likely to lead to you and your partner sleeping in separate rooms.” Which, naturally, I can also vouch for.

Although I’m generally conscious of the splitting of our collective vision during the screening itself, normally we only row once it’s over. This is seldom an issue when we’re making our way through a box set. Then I don’t bother much to look at my spouse because I don’t doubt what he ’s thinking. It’s when we watch art films that I’m less sure. I notice myself stealing glances in his direction. Why do those glances feel stolen? Why does the dignified practice of watching art cinema draw my attention to what’s furtive, transgressive, even guilty in the art of looking? Is it because, as Leader intimates, there ’s “a dimension of theft always present in art?” The object accorded the status of “artwork” appears as if it’s been highjacked from common sense reality and resituated—”the key is that it finds itself in a new place”—such that we not only see the object differently, but recognize too how its removal from where we normally picture it could precipitate the tumbling of all the norms by which we live.

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Excerpted from On Marriage by Devorah Baum, to be published October 24, 2023 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.