Only connect! – twenty-one words

This world

October 8, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged algal bloom, books, Clare Chambers, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poem, poems, poetry, reading, Small Pleasures, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … kindness

He knelt down to undress her, his shaking hands fumbling over every button and zip and hook, until she was naked in front of him. Then he stopped and looked up at her with a troubled expression.

‘I haven’t done this for seven years. Will you forgive me if it goes badly?’

Jean laughed, amazed at her own boldness in displaying her body while he was still fully clothed. It was the strangest feeling, placing herself in someone else’s power with complete confidence. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

‘Well, I haven’t done it for longer than that. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re kind.’

And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. And afterwards they lay for a long time pressed together, her head on his shoulder, his hand stroking her hip while the night deepened around them. There was no urgency to move apart; morning and work were a long way off.

From ‘Small Pleasures‘
By Clare Chambers

Depictions of sex are notoriously hard to get right, and what sets those that work apart from those that don’t isn’t always obvious (although personally I feel that it helps if the writer avoids analogies with mountains and valleys, and doesn’t refer to a man’s ‘member’!). But I think the passage I’ve quoted above, from Clare Chambers’s lovely novel Small Pleasures — a novel set in 1957 — is one of the most moving sex scenes I’ve ever read.

It’s also somehow shocking. How many sex scenes have you read recently where the lovers were explicitly kind to each other? I can’t remember a single one. So when I say the scene is shocking, I mean, not that Chambers sets out to describe something graphic or taboo-breaking, but the opposite — that this is the word she uses, kind. And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. How beautiful is that?

Deep Creek, September 2025.

I’ve been quiet over here for a while, not because I haven’t wanted to write a post, but because I didn’t know how to find the words to do so. Earlier this year, a toxic algal bloom hit the coast of South Australia. It began in regional locations but then spread to the metropolitan coast, killing marine animals in its wake and turning the ocean into a graveyard. Although scientists originally predicted that it would disperse during the cooler weather of the winter months, it hasn’t done so, and as summer approaches it’s clear that the bloom will remain for some time to come. There are thought to be several causes for it, among the most obvious of which is global warming: we are experiencing a marine heatwave in South Australia.

When I think about the algal bloom, I feel powerless and devastated. I have lived the whole of my adult life around the sea. My house is within walking distance of the sea. My holidays and camping trips are centred around the sea. I walk and run by the sea. I go to the sea to remind myself that there is another world beyond the human world — to tune the rhythm of my breathing into the rhythm of the waves, in and out. In and out.

But now what I feel when I go to the sea is grief.

Deep Creek, September 2025

It’s impossible for me to write a post here, on this blog in which I have for so many years celebrated my life by the sea, without acknowledging the algal bloom, and yet I find it almost equally impossible to write about it. And so this is the reason for my quietness. These words, even as I write them, do not come easily to me.

The effects of climate change are not kind. This is not a kind world.

Deep Creek, September 2025

I will finish by saying that the photographs that accompany this post come from a recent trip I made with a friend to Deep Creek, to the place where I spent a week on a writing residency around the same time last year.

Wait — let me rephrase that: I will finish by saying that Deep Creek is a place of stunning natural beauty and I am grateful for my time there, but that it, too, like the ocean, is vulnerable to climate change, because this is not a kind world.

It is not a kind world.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, discussing the poem Hurry by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges in this essay artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
These poems remind me that one reason why I turn to poetry is because of the ways that some poems acknowledge, so often, our ever-present inability, and, in doing so, they perform exercises of coping. They reimagine lives. They repeat. They open doors. They enter: Devin Kelly again, this time exploring Matthew Nienow’s poem For What it’s Worth.
Thank You For the Tulips: more poetry here, perhaps because I need it — this time a poem by Lisa Bellamy on motherhood and love.
At 50, Choosing New Make-Up: one more poem for good measure, this one by Wendy Barker. In fact, there are several others by Barker if you scroll down the page, though this is the one that first drew me to her poetry.

The soft clatter of keyboards

June 4, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, Winter, work, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poetry, reading, The Modern, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … crying at work

Anthea told me she went to the bathrooms in the basement, by the cinema, when she needed to cry at work. Joanna recommended the stairwell behind the librarian’s office. I just sat silently at my desk, staring hard at my computer screen, rubbing my eyes as if they were smarting from all the data entry.

I was lucky to be here, checking measurements and shining the sentences that would appear on object labels. The open-plan offices felt like a new-age monastery; we showed our devotion through our long hours and low salaries, our gratitude and obsession with our work euphemistically called ‘attention to detail’ in the job advertisements. These offices were almost always silent save the soft clatter of our keyboards and the occasional ring of the elevator doors opening when somebody left for the galleries filled with bright, white light, where the crowds gathered to take photographs of endlessly reproduced images, paying homage to our gods, to modernism.

I wanted to stay, forever, because of the paintings.

From ‘The Modern‘
By Anna Kate Blair

The lines I’ve quoted in the passage above, which make up the opening sentences of Anna Kate Blair’s novel, The Modern, have stayed with me ever since I read it, some years ago now. The novel is about art, love, self-doubt and work — most of all, perhaps, about how in our society one of the things that determines our conception of ourselves, the way we see and value ourselves (and others), is work.

The ethos of work.

What I love, though, about this particular passage (which in fact turns out not to be particularly essential to the course of events throughout the rest of the novel, at least insofar as what happens to Sophia, the narrator), is its tragicomic depiction of women crying in the workplace. Blair dispenses here with the need to explain why Anthea and Joanna and Sophia are crying, and why they assume they have to keep their crying secret. Crying in the workplace, she implies, and secret crying in particular, is a commonplace for these women; they all simply assume, in some kind of tacit shared understanding of themselves and their lives, that they’ll end up crying at some point during the working week.

Aldinga Beach, May 2025.

I’ve worked in several workplaces over the years, and, just like Anthea and Joanna and Sophia, at some point in each job I’ve gone in search of a private place to cry. When I worked the afternoon shift in the call centre of a community health provider, I used to take the lift from the fourth floor down to the car park, walk around the corner of the building to a little alleyway on one side and lean against the wall to cry. When I was a cook, I’d step into the cool room and close the door behind me to cry in refrigerated privacy, crouched in among the cartons of milk and bowls of pastry cream and half-wheels of cheese. I’ve also done my fair share of crying in the office toilets like Anthea, and, yes, like Sophia, I’ve sat at my computer furtively blinking and dabbing at my eyes, all the while hoping that no-one would notice. And/or that no-one would notice me.

What is it about workplaces that reduces women, some women, to tears? Is crying part of our make-up, or is there something about the conditions of our workplaces — the buildings we work in, the people we talk to and report to, the conditions we’re bound by our salaries to — that makes us cry? Or is it rather the space the workplace occupies in our lives, the way it’s crammed in uneasily among everything else that belongs to our non-working selves, those selves we perhaps think of as our true selves?

I don’t know. But I think of Sophia, fellow workplace-weeper, from time to time and smile wryly.

May 2025

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, exploring the poem ‘Hurry’ by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges here artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
The Kiss, by Pamela Painter: Over the last year, I’ve been exploring, both as a reader and a writer, different forms of short fiction, including flash fiction and microfiction. Here’s a flash fiction story I recently read and loved.
We do not pay rent for the air we breathe: Poet and essayist Anne Boyer, exploring capitalism. If you read one essay this week, read this. It’s astonishing — an exhortation, a plea. A prayer.

Decoded

March 28, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, work, writingTagged AI, books, despair, editing, fiction, Intimacies, novel, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … language and interpreting

This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. This was happening to me now, in the conference room. I was absorbed by the task at hand, of decoding the legalese in which the content of the discussion was encased, so securely that nothing seemed to penetrate and nothing escaped. And yet — as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand — something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, ‘cross-border raid’, ‘mass grave’, ‘armed youth’.

I reached for the glass of water. One of the junior associates was speaking now — a solid wall of language that barrelled towards me as I drank all the water in the glass, poured another, and then drank that. I set the glass down, I had lost my place, I looked at the notepad again, as if I would find a clue there. The associate came to an abrupt stop, the former president [for whom I was interpreting] turned to look at me. Is everything okay, the associate asked sharply. I just need a moment, I said. Could we go back — the associate answered impatiently, Yes, yes, of course. How far? He exchanged glances with [the defence barrister] Kees, who was watching me, one arm folded over the other. He had been silent the entire time, now he suddenly spoke. Let’s take a break. Five minutes? And the others immediately rose to their feet as if they too had only been waiting for an excuse to pause.

From ‘Intimacies‘
By Katie Kitamura

When I was a young woman I studied French, German and Mandarin at university. I had a facility for language, for words, and in those days I thought that I might one day become an interpreter in one of these languages, like the narrator in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies. I studied all three languages for a year, having also studied French and German at high school, and then at the end of the year, which was the end of my first year at university, having achieved distinctions in all three subjects, I left university, left Australia, and didn’t return home to resume my studies for another three years.

By then I’d decided not to pursue a career in languages at all. I had understood from my travels that my natural shyness and introversion would make the kinds of context in which an interpreter works difficult for me, and I had decided not to challenge myself in that way. Funnily enough, this realisation came to me while I was living in Germany, where I had gone to live for a year to become fluent in German. Funnily enough, I should add, by the time I came to the realisation that interpreting wasn’t for me, I was almost entirely fluent in German. Anyway, I came back to Australia and left all of this behind, my fluency in German, my plans to be an interpreter, all of that.

Footprints in the sand, March 2025.

It’s funny, though, because Katie Kitamura’s description in the passage I’ve quoted above of the experience of being so immersed in the pursuit of choosing the correct word that you lose all sense of meaning is something I am deeply familiar with in another context — editing. As an editor, I have edited books in the fields of geology, medicine, history, literature and religion. On hearing this, people frequently say to me, ‘Wow, you must have learned a lot about geology/medicine/history/literature/religion!’ But the truth is, I don’t absorb that kind of information when I’m editing. Like Kitamura’s interpreter, I decode the language I’m working with in the material I’m editing — meaning that I make sure that the sentences are grammatically correct, that there are no spelling errors, that the writer has presented their argument cogently — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I understand it.

You literally do not know what you are saying, says Kitamura’s narrator of interpreting. Likewise, I would say of editing, I literally do not know what I am reading.

There are times when I regret losing the languages I learned when I was younger. There are times when I wish I had tried a little harder, thought a little more laterally, about how a person like me might use her language skills in her career without needing to be a gifted conversationalist or gregarious extrovert. But perhaps in the end my love for words and decoding language are what led me to become an editor, even if only by default. And I am, despite everything, grateful to have found my way to an editing life. It has served me well.

Lately I’ve been reading …

So autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented: I’ve been reading up on autofiction recently, though I’m not a fan of some of the most famous autoficton novels by Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti. Here, Christina Lorentzen explores what autofiction is in all its guises.
The inspiration for this book arrived after a long creative drought, during which I came to accept that I would never write another novel: Melanie Cheng, on writing her Stella Prize-longlisted novel, The Burrow. As someone who has experienced many a long creative drought, I find Cheng’s comments, along with the comments of all the other novelists long listed for the Stella this year, fascinating.
Cyra is a young queer woman whose sobriety is not the driving force of the novel. Her recovery is a part of her story, but it doesn’t define her. (For a long time, I thought my sobriety had to be my entire identity. I didn’t know how to make room for the rest of me): I’ve read many books, both memoirs and works of fiction, about alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and I’ve always been troubled by the way they seem to present only one path to sobriety, which is abstinence and AA. But here, I’m glad to report, is Saratoga Schaefer on why their first novel depicts a different path to sobriety.
You would be surprised to hear that even the Mediterranean diet riles me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato juices, olive oil, vinegar, bits of onion – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Crete: Yotam Ottolenghi on why intermittent fasting messed with his brain instead of helping him to lose weight, why eating isn’t only about nutrition and why the solution to losing weight isn’t dieting.
How AI is stealing our writing: Yes, my writing, too, has been stolen by Meta’s AI tool, and while I’m shocked and devastated, I’m sad to say that I’m also not remotely surprised that this is where AI is taking us …

Only connect: Talking honestly

February 1, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, Cairo, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Noor Naga, The Modern7 Comments

Other people’s words about … connection

I was never sure how honest I was supposed to be with friends. I didn’t think honesty was romantically or sexually loaded, but I felt sometimes that my understanding of friendship was distorted. I was always trying to determine, with everyone, whether I was on the right side of an invisible line. If asked, I’d always argue that the problem was with normative approaches to intimacy, though I’d never been asked. It had worked for Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara, I thought, and then I remembered that it hadn’t. I felt, talking to Cara, that perhaps I was veering into something too unstudied, but I wasn’t sure that could stop me today. I wanted comfort; I wanted to feel close to somebody.
‘I suppose I’m lonely,’ I said.

from ‘The Modern‘
by Anna Kate Blair

When it comes to friendships and intimacy, I am someone, like Blair’s narrator, Sophia, in the passage above, who is always struggling to interpret whether I am on the right side of an invisible line. I am frequently aware of my tendency to dive deep into conversations at an emotional level. At the same time I’m aware that most people aren’t comfortable with that depth, or with the emotional intensity that comes with it. In conversation I often try to pull back because of this, to reign myself in, although mostly I fail. It’s a dance I do, back and forth across that invisible line, over and over.

I am not sure whether people, when they’re talking to me, notice this or not. Maybe this is just part of my intensity, my awareness of it. But I like Sophia’s use of the word honest in this context. It is a loaded term, to my way of thinking. Not everyone fronts up to conversations wanting intimacy or intensity. Not everyone wants to engage in emotional honesty.

There’s that dance again. I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out.

Olive groves, Aldinga, January 2024.

On another note altogether, I’ve been immersing myself in books set in Cairo recently, partly because I lived there briefly when I was twenty-two and partly because I’d like to write a story set there myself one day. Talk to anyone who’s spent any time in Cairo and soon enough they’ll tell you that it’s not like any other city, that when you leave Cairo, you carry with you a kind of sense-memory that never leaves you. Reading these books has reminded me of this. Here’s Noor Naga’s male narrator, an Egyptian boy from Shobrakheit, in her wonderful, extraordinary novel If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English:

From Damanhour, I took the train to Cairo and inside it the air was very brown, like closet air. I fell asleep and woke up with a man feeling my thigh through my torn pocket. People think anyone with a camera will have coins instead of skin inside his pocket. When I arrived in Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. Nowhere you looked wasn’t people. You could turn into an alley and find fifty Sudanese men, bluer than black, with cheeks like shoulder blades and ankles like knives, or else women as tall as I am, women so pale you could see rivered blood at their wrists and neck …

If you read one book on Cairo this year, make it Naga’s novel. It will leave you with as much of a sense-memory as Cairo itself, I swear.

Sunlit tree, Taperoo, February 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I hate the algorithm. Everyone hates the algorithm: Kyle Chayka on globalisation, the flat world, and how the internet and Instagram have introduced a globally monotonous aesthetic that, despite its supposedly democratic intentions and roots, smacks of elitism and colonialism that ultimately own us.
- The painful truth is we are a gawdy, grotesque, gluttonous, self-destructive country that watches ‘Botched’, dips Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Velveeta, rolls coal, and responds to the mass murder of children by buying the same gun they were killed with in record numbers. No amount of education, social spending, or rehab will make us behave. Not with steroids, not with anything else: Adrian Nathan West, in a fascinating piece on getting ‘swole’.
- Most people aren’t aware of their bodies unless they are experiencing pain or pleasure. Most people think lifting the weights is the hard part. It’s not: Another piece on lifting, this time by Jordan Castro. In it he explores why lifting is more than a physical pursuit. I am fascinated by the similarity between what he has to say about lifting and what devotees of yoga say about yoga — they seem to me to be virtually the same.
- And maybe that’s the problem with land acknowledgements: not enough people understand that they’re not the end of the discussion: Kelly Boutsalis, a Mohawk journalist from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve, explores land acknowledgments, and who they are really for.
- I’ve never been sure if I can claim a queer identity based on attraction alone: Erich Schlich on the Own Stories movement, on authenticity, on writing about queer characters when you have never fully identrified as queer yourself, and on the definition of queerness itself. I’m not sure how I feel about Schlich’s piece, actually. I’m not sure which bothers me more — his eagerness to define his identity in a certain way or his anxiety to claim that identity (because these are not the same things). But it made me think, all the same.

Only connect: seeing someone

September 7, 2023Posted in a thought, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, on writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, WinterTagged Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout QueenLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … connection

‘So how is it [in prison]?’ I said [to Bunny]. ‘You look good.’
She did not look good. Her skin looked dull and she had a handful of tiny pimples on the left side of her face. Her hair was greasy at the roots. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I mean, I get by.’ She laughed.
‘Do you have any friends?’ I asked.
‘A couple,’ she said, licking up a palmful of M&Ms.
‘It’s just so good to see your face,’ I said, which was a lie. It was weird and sad to see her face. She didn’t look the same. But then she met my eyes fully for the first time, and the eye contact was so intense I felt I was falling, that if I didn’t concentrate I would lose consciousness. There was just her whole soul, right there. Looking at me. It was Bunny.

from ‘The Knockout Queen‘
by Rufi Thorpe

You know those moments when someone says something to you, or when you look at someone, and you feel a deep, true connection with them? That’s the kind of moment, I think, that Rufi Thorpe captures so movingly in the passage I’ve quoted today.

It’s hard to be frank in this way with another person, and it’s rarely sustainable, and so the intensity of the moment fades in the same way a bruise fades. That doesn’t mean you didn’t see each other.

It doesn’t mean you haven’t been seen.

Sunset, Deep Creek, August 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- And they broke into song: Yasmine El Rashidi on protest, fear, repression and hip-hop in Egypt today.
- She began to sing then, low and lovely, in Pennsylvania Dutch. As she proceeded, the notes took on a tactile quality, a weight: dark birds moving through the night air: Rachel Yoder explores the fascinating world of Amish spells.
- When I say that a book has made me cry, what I’m really saying is: This is part of the canon of some of the most profound moments of my life: As a fellow crier, I enjoyed Rachel Dlugatch’s list of reading to make you cry.
- What look like lampposts around the field are actually vents that allow methane gases to escape: Rachel Kushner on post-street-life streets.
- The pressure to have fun in the summer has always felt like a kind of tyranny to me: Jean Hannah Edelstein on motherhood in the era of social media.

How are we to know

July 4, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, Winter, writingTagged Men in My Situation, Per PettersonLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … grief

And one time [Audun] drove in to Advocate Delhis Plass and picked me up off the floor where I was lying flat out on my stomach. Turid and the girls were in Trondheim, and I had no intention of getting up for a good while, but rather preferred to lie there with my forehead ground into the hard cold dusty floorboards, and I thought, how does one measure grief, is there a yardstick for grieving, is there any difference, say, between grieving for one person as opposed to two or three persons, or even four, as in my case, did all this fit on a yardstick, or could the level of grief register as on an instrument, such as a Geiger counter, and the closer the instrument got to the full power, the full height, the full number, the faster and louder the instrument would emit its familiar beep. And how was I to know when there was grief enough, and if grief was liquid like melting silver, could one then pour the grief into a litre measure and conclude, under these circumstances eight decilitres ought to be sufficient, and let the silver congeal hard and shiny not far below the rim. How was I to know. And how was I to know it really was grief I was feeling, it didn’t seem to resemble anything I had seen on film, or what others told me they had felt when their people died, and I was bewildered, for I didn’t cry, and when did one cry really, when you were alone, or in the company of witnesses. And if one were alone, what was the point, when no-one would see it, how was I to know, I didn’t have that yardstick, that litre measure. I had to deal with it myself, was that not so, I let no-one else inside, no-one else’s yardstick was of any use, no-one’s litre measure, and in a way it felt strangely irrelevant, no, not irrelevant, but rather beyond my field of vision. I could barely glimpse a dark swishing tail disappearing, and when I grasped it and held it fast, I was left with nothing but the tail in my hand. The rest was gone, like a lizard sacrificing its tail for freedom. I did try, and hard too, with open eyes to face what had happened, but I didn’t know what to do with what I saw, I had already watched most versions of the issue acted out on TV, they were used up, and I couldn’t think of any others. So then I simply tried not thinking about it at all. That didn’t work either. And so instead I wanted to find an image that could cover all this, after all it was my job, to turn the whirling liquid into something concrete, turn the waves of distracting electric shocks to the stomach into solid surface. but I didn’t have any images that were large enough, firm enough, and after a while I found it pretty exhausting. So I lay there until Audun arrived. He walked straight in, the door wasn’t locked, I had forgotten as usual, and before even seeing me, he said into the hallway, hello Arvid, for Christ’s sake, why don’t you answer the phone when I call. And it was true, often I didn’t answer, it was a breach of every rule, but I was afraid there might be an undertaker at the other end, although I knew the funerals I was supposed to attend lay behind me for now. And there came Audun, in through the living-room door and he saw me on the floor and said, what the hell are you doing down there. I’m thinking, I said. All right, he said, so what are you thinking about. Litre measures, I said, yardsticks, that kind of thing. Okay, he said, that sounds practical in a way, but you can get up now. I’m not sure I can, I said down into the floor, my lips cold against the cold planks, covered in dust, the vacuum cleaner hadn’t been out for a good while. Yes, you can, he said, just do it, and I’ll go to the kitchen and put the kettle on for coffee.
Ten minutes later when he came back with two full cups of coffee and milk and sugar on a tray, I was sitting on my chair at the desk. It wasn’t exactly Mont Blanc, but it had been a long climb.

from ‘Men in My Situation‘
by Per Petterson

I am thankful to say that I have never experienced a grief or sorrow of the kind that the narrator in the passage above, Arvid, has experienced, having lost his parents and siblings to a tragic accident at sea. But Petterson’s words, voiced through Arvid, move me all the same. Elsewhere, Arvid says, ‘[T]o be honest I was in a state of bottomless despair, it was the worst time, by far, I felt quite naked, quite cold’. And I think this is what the longer passage I’ve quoted in this post describes, really — Arvid’s feeling of utter nakedness in the face of his loss.

This is what I love about fiction, the way someone else’s words can move you to tears and wonder. That’s all from me today — I will leave you with Petterson’s words, however you measure them, and however they move you.

The Washpool, Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- What I felt as I scrolled through the story the foundation member told was only the familiar ache of knowing something really bad is happening in the world and feeling powerless to stop it: Rachel Weaver, on the demise of the swift parrot, on thinking fast and also thinking slowly, and on five sweet notes of elusive birdsong.
- I could hear normal life taking place nearby, as friends whispered their worries to George in the kitchen. Did she have dizzy spells before? Have you ever seen anything like this? But engaging with their concerns would have required me to shift fully back into my body, where the vertigo remained debilitating: Katy Vine, in a fascinating piece about her experience of a five-week bout of vertigo, and about vertigo’s connection to migraine, seizures and ecstatic visions.
- I didn’t want an espresso. I didn’t want an Americano. I wanted filter coffee. Like something you brew in the morning before work. I didn’t even want a French press. I longed for a perfect, clean cup of coffee. Something clear and sharp. French press is kind of chewy to me these days. I can’t go back. I’ve tasted the sweet release of Chemex and anything else just feels like trying to suck down mud: The inimitable Brandon Taylor on trying to find a good coffee in London. I am not a coffee-drinker, but you can’t be an Australian and not be aware of how much we pride ourselves here in Australia on our coffee. I suspect that Brandon Taylor would hate it! This piece made me laugh in all the best ways.
- I like truth, especially in language. And using psychiatric terms to describe common human experiences is simply not truthful: Eleanor de Jong on why we should not pathologise normal feelings like sadness and stress, and on why the difference between serious mental illness and going through a bad patch is important.
- I stopped being a professional writer, but I haven’t stopped writing. I surrender to the trap of words because silence is overwhelming, and crushes my temples. So I have to break it with a sentence, shatter it, carry some words to safety, outside myself. Every time I do this, I think it’s the last time, and while I’m doing it, I also feel like doing it is a failure. But perhaps it’s worth it to reach this limit, to fail this way, to write only when not writing would be dying, to write only when I can’t do otherwise: Andrea Bajani on Kafka and the curse of not being able to write.

In the ether

June 5, 2023June 5, 2023Posted in a thought, Autumn, blogging, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind4 Comments

Other people’s words about … emails

Dorothy used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links. Email had been the way that she and the people she know or was getting to know had crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives. Their way of life, alas, had ended. Long emails had ceased being the preferred mode of storytelling among her peers, or perhaps they no longer had so much to say to one another, and emails, though sealed with perfunctory hugs and kisses, had become businesslike. Sending a thoughtful email that she had drafted over several days and edited would, she knew, be a form of aggression; it would be foisting unpaid labour, a homework assignment, on a friend. She herself liked homework, but it was unreasonable to hope for such an email: There was too much television to keep up on, and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media. Still, Dorothy had not stopped checking, expecting, or wishing that a good message might be out there, waiting in the ether just for her.

from ‘The Life of the Mind‘
by Christine Smallwood

Oh, how wryly I smiled when I read the passage above. My smile was wry on two counts — first, I come from a generation before Dorothy’s, and so I miss letters as well as emails. And second, there is so much to unpack here, from the description of a long, thoughtful email as a form of aggression (ouch!) through to that funny but terribly sad comment: There was too much television to keep up on.

Shining sand, Aldinga Beach, May 2023.

Meanwhile, I’ve had some good news recently. As a result, my life has been exceptionally busy for reasons that I can’t (yet) go into, though I promise that I will when I can. But I couldn’t resist popping in to leave you all to enjoy the passage above for now.

As always, there are links to some reading below, too. I’ve listed a few more than usual, just to keep you going till I next write …

Rock pools, Aldinga Beach, May 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- For a while, I kind of lost the joy of writing because suddenly, there was a sea of faces pressed to the glass, cooing at me, trying to see if they could get me to do a thing. Of course, there were no actual faces. People weren’t actively trying to make me do anything. But I felt that way. I had internalized a gallery of reproachful faces that smirked and sneered at every word I wrote: The always wonderful Brandon Taylor, on publishing his third novel, The Late Americans.
- Here was the truth: I was not a terrorist but a tourist: Omer Aziz, on identity, being a Brown man, being neither Westerner nor non-Westerner … and being a hyphenated man.
- He believed my pain, though; and what a relief that was, to be seen, in some crucial way: I wrote recently about reading Oliver Mol’s wonderful book about his experience of a chronic migraine, Train Lord. In my post I touched on my own experiences with a chronic headache. Here, Hanna Halperin writes about her experience of migraine, chronic pain, distrust of her own body and the way the medical establishment has failed her. This is a short piece but with much that I found resonant. I know my body intimately, she writes. I’ve never had a good sense of what I look like, how much I weigh, how much or how little space I take up. Every look in the mirror shows me somebody different. But how can you receive treatment if you can’t describe your embodied experience? I highly recommend it as a follow-up to Mol’s book if you’re interested in this topic.
- But our culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true: Josephe M. Keegin, arguing against instrumentality and for a life spent in pursuit of splendid uselessness (in other words, art for art’s sake).
- You’d think we despise/the way they slide together: Poet Ellen Bass on four-letter words and swearing. If you are not easily offended, this is a beautiful, angry, tender poem about connecting.
- It’s always dry now. If there is no water, the animals are sad: A Phinaya herdsman tells Angela Ponce, Sarah Johnson and Illa Liendo about the effects of climate change in the Andes on their lives.

Only [dis]connect

August 4, 2022September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, WinterTagged Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl5 Comments

Other people’s words about … beauty

I wondered if a more complex language like [my mother’s native language] Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.

Jenny asked the question so simply — ‘Okay, what do you want to talk about?’ — and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans — which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty? — when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. ‘So — what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, it was fine.’

from Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier

I thought of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? when I read the passage above. In Beautiful World, Rooney’s characters variously mourn the loss of the sense they used to have that they were moving through a beautiful world, or they lament the ugliness of the everyday world, or they remark upon what Rooney calls a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.

Sunset, early July 2022.

I think this is what Kyuoung Frazier’s narrator is getting at. She wants to tell Jenny about the beautiful world she sees all around her — but Jenny, like everyone else in the narrator’s life, either doesn’t want to hear what she has to say or doesn’t know how to hear it.

Some years ago when I was going through a difficult patch, a friend of mine offered to exchange a daily photograph with me via text message. ‘We’ll just send each other a picture of something we see,’ she said. ‘Something we like. Something that makes us smile. We’ll share our pictures, and it’ll be a way to reach out. To say hello.’

Dune flowers, early July 2022.

We ended up exchanging daily photographs for over a year, and it was a way to say hello, but it was also so much more. What I loved most about our exchange, beyond the sense of connection it gave me with another human being, was the knowledge that we were each finding something beautiful in our day and then sharing it with someone else. Passing the beauty on.

Maybe we should all share more beauty. Maybe it doesn’t matter if beauty is fleeting and makes us feel fragile. Maybe that’s exactly why we should keep on sharing it.

Before sunset, early July 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I feel like I’m 22 again. Just absolutely and utterly lost: Carmen Maria Machado on writing, loss, depression, anxiety … and being older than twenty-two.
- James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which was initially ridiculed as ‘New Age’ nonsense, now makes up the basis of much of climate science: Helena Horton on the life of Lovelock, who died recently at the age of 103.
- In The Last Walk, Jessica Pierce writes, ‘When we commit to owning an animal, we must commit all the way to the bitter end, as in a marriage’: Keshia Naran Badalge on seeing her beloved dog Shandi through to her death. I have to confess that ultimately I found Badalge’s piece troubling, and I would love to know what you think about it. Badalge says she thought of Shandi as her sister, but this was a ‘sister’ whom Badalge abandoned for ten years while she went off to live her own life in another country. Is that love? How much does one old dog have to forgive? What do you think?
- Part of our confusion today is tied to a belief that happiness and personal growth should organise all of our decisions about relationships, which is a relatively recent disposition in Western societies: Joshua Coleman on why the pursuit of happiness above all else is not always the best resolution when you feel you are struggling in a relationship, why our fervour for ‘happiness hacks’ (my term, not his) may be misplaced, and why Durkheim had a point.

Only connect: Reunion

May 8, 2022Posted in a thought, Australian bush, Autumn, books, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged despair, Only connect!, solaceLeave a comment

Other people’s words about connection

Maude cranes around to look and Cormac looks too, close enough to see them, all quite young and glacially made up with one man of height and handsomeness towering over the rest and another, a man to the tall one’s left, cocking his head and nodding in Cormac’s direction meaningfully.
It is Senan. Cormac waves …
He hasn’t seen Senan in person for months and yet his vision still telescopes in, urgent and unreconstructed, so that Cormac sees and knows again he loves him with a scratchy passion that returns as reliably as a rash. It is not a nostalgic feeling and casts no shadow, existing always in a self-sustaining now.
How acute it is: immediate deja vu.
From ‘We Were Young‘
by Niamh Campbell

I love this passage from Niahm Campbell about a man reuniting with someone he loves after the two of them have spent some time apart. Cormack, the character in Campbell’s novel, seems unable to commit to one person, whether man or woman; he moves from one relationship or liaison to another. But as a backdrop to all his attempts to remain unfettered there is his love for Senan, a man who is smart enough, perhaps, to keep himself unavailable and therefore always desirable and lovable.

Sunlight and trees, April 2022.

Who hasn’t at some time in their life loved someone who was unavailable? Or, moving beyond relationships and intimacy, who hasn’t wanted something that was eternally just out of reach?

Grasstree, May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve learned not to fear those little one-and-a-half moments of boredom: Ashley Moor on why deleting her Instagram account changed her life for the better.

It was not who he was —- I now see our striking differences, how often we fought, the way we tore open old wounds, our ruthlessness with each other — but rather a belief I had absorbed during our time together, that I was worthy of no one else’s love: Sanae Lemoine on heartbreak and chocolate cake.

Hope for Planet Earth: The citizen’s guide to climate change: A curated reading list on climate change.

I had no words for what I was going through. I felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck no one else had experienced, and I was afraid of infecting other people with my newfound darkness. I continued to hide it even as I longed for someone to see it, save me from it: Amanda Bestor-Siegal on the wordlessness of grief.

A very ugly future: Oliver Milman on why investment in primary pandemic prevention, not in vaccinations, is the way forwards as the likelihood of further pandemics due to climate change increases.

Absolution

April 6, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, books, depression, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the sky, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged anxiety, despair, mental health3 Comments

Other people’s words about … being loved

We were sitting on a cushioned bench [in the pub]. Eddie had one thick thigh crossed over the other, and he was wagging his right foot gently. He was wearing beautiful Italian brogues and talking to the man next to him, laughing at something a little too loudly, and then suddenly he turned to me, rested his hand on my leg and asked softly was I okay.
‘You okay there, pet? Can I get you something?’
It was there in the tone. I knew that I was loved as I had never been before. I don’t mean that Eddie loved me with remarkable passion or insight. I don’t mean that I felt most fully myself with him. I mean that, in the strangest way, I felt forgiven. For as long as I could remember there’d been a vague disquiet in me, as if I lived in the shadow of some humiliation whose particulars I could not recall. Until Eddie, until he absolved me, I hadn’t known there was any other way to feel.
From ‘When Light is Like Water‘
by Molly McCloskey

In the last few years I’ve noticed that when I’m reading a book or watching a movie the two kinds of scenes that most move me are those where two people connect for the first time (mostly, though not always, through falling in love) and those where someone forgives someone else.

Both kinds of scenes make me cry. I’m still not sure whether my tears come from a place of catharsis or from a place of yearning.

Port Adelaide, early April 2022.

I particularly love how Molly McCloskey’s narrator, Rachel, elucidates her experience of falling in love with her first husband in the passage above: how she moves away from romance to something gentler, and kinder, and deeper.

Like Rachel, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live with a sense that I was inherently wrong, flawed, in need of forgiveness. I sense that my experience is a relatively common one, but I also sense that in me the feeling is perhaps particularly strong.

Aldinga wetlands, April 2022.

How to manage anxiety: Be kind. Be curious. I read these words somewhere once. I remind myself of them from time to time. In their simplicity and compassion, they are helpful. What McCloskey’s narrator Rachel understands in the passage above is that kindness is inherent in true love. I think that’s why her words move me so much.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I felt a wasteland of sorrow. Too much of my own life had been spent wondering if what was wrong with me was a deficiency of character: Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness.

It’s the rhythm, I say defensively: Sarah Moss on why she likes to knit and run.