I. Finding
I made it a point to visit a few bookstores in New York. My favorite given the limited time I had was Book Court, which I visited twice. The first visit was a glance in the window; reconnaissance during the lunch hour of the conference I was attending as I tried to map its location during daylight. I crossed Adams, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel and turned onto Court Street, hoping that I was going in the right direction.
II. Walking
Walking in Brooklyn is unique to my urban experience in America. In Los Angeles I did a lot of walking from where I parked. In San Francisco my walks up and down the hilly city were accompanied by other tourists looking at their maps and pointing towards points of orientation. When it wasn’t tourists, it was workers since most of my walks were in the financial district. Even in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury I had a feeling most of the people I walked by were externals, like me. In places like Kansas City walks are designed, an imposition of walkability in an otherwise sprawled cityscape. Even in Manhattan the walk felt different for one principle reason: to walk in Brooklyn is to be surrounded by its inhabitants. That’s how I felt walking south on Court Street passing fruit stands, flower shops, and local restaurants.
III. Singing
It was later that evening when I started back. Evening had the same magic to it that had sparked my interest at midday. Although I might have been inclined to listen to music, I chose instead to just listen to the sounds of the city around me. It’s moments like that when I have the words of Walt Whitman’s poem I hear America singing come back to me and the clarity of my first experience with the words sits in firm contrast with being here. When I’d read it I always dreamed I’d be a part of the singing but I’m convinced that even American citizenship won’t bring me to a full immersion with the noises that reverberate from what fits into my conceptual imagination of this country: the people, the experience, the politics, the language, the place.
IV. Presence
The bookstore was everything I thought: new books, excellent range, well organized, and staff that subtly showed an awareness of your presence but left you alone to browse the shelves in peace. I overheard them talking about an in store reading – the “another one?” phrase revealing a sentiment that bordered between nonchalance and inconvenience. I wondered who it would be as I looked at the bookshelf on the far wall. There was a basement in the bookstore and finding my way upstairs after having a look I saw the author whose reading was shortly to ensue. She was tall both physically and as a presence, and as they waited for her publicist I took a step behind some different shelves to have a look.
V. Pedigree
Well educated, I guessed, pretty but not striking, part of the New York writing scene, and very young. She seemed to know I was studying her and performed the trick that confirmed her status as a well endowed member of The Scene, successful even if modestly so: she looked over me. She looked through me.
VI. Envy
I wondered about the book. I don’t often find envy but at that moment I thought of our differences. I thought about Biola, my alma mater, in its Real Housewives of Orange County context; wealthy suburban kids for whom college was either a fun detour into family life or spiritual seekers who chose it because it held the quaintness of spirituality with which they’d grown up. I thought about my house in South Dakota, the 1994 Buick Regal I drive, and the converted warehouse where I work. I thought about the doors at Yale, the walls around Harvard, and the way I’d felt like I could see but not be seen when I walked around either campus. I thought about driving down Highway 1 in New Jersey and turning right onto Washington Ave towards Princeton. As I crossed the bridge over Lake Carnegie, I could see crew teams practicing in the water. I loved the experience of putting a concrete experience to a fascination I’ve always had in good schools, the art of learning, and wondering at the people whose footsteps I would traverse at these institutions of merit. I hated how it made me dislike my past and question my own pedigree.
VII. Memoir
I wondered about the book and then found out it was a memoir. My curiosity vanished; I have a large tub in which I categorize memoirists, with a principle conclusion that neither am I that interested to write all about my life at book’s length nor am I interested in reading another person’s unless they are notable in some way. The Ivy League, I think, may qualify you to be envied, but it does not qualify you to be read. I didn’t wait for the reading to start though I did make a note of the name thinking I’d have to amuse myself by finding out what her shtick was in writing a memoir at such a young age.
I found out that evening while eating my box of takeout pizza that Sarah Manguso was named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Sunday Book Review and won Best Nonfiction Book for the Year from The San Francisco Chronicle. Awards include The Joseph Brosdky Rome Prize in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A Memoir?
VIII. Terrible, Sparse, Beautiful
The book is called The Two Kinds of Decay and it’s about a debilitating disease Sarah gets in her junior year of college – a rarity that is related to but not the same as Guillan-Barre called Chronic Idiopathic Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy or CIDP. The disease is as horrible as it sounds, and the book in its delicately crafted prose does not obscure the ordeal she went through before recovering.
It’s a memoir, to be sure, but the way the prose is that of a poet: words are not wasted, meter is evident, and you get as much out of the negative space of what’s unsaid as you do with each sentence. Pieces of it are better read aloud.
“… Think of spacetime , through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.
There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.
But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.”
I don’t read quickly but 20, then 30 pages turn as I read more into what happened. The writing is exquisite, the illness it describes so beautifully seems an equally exquisite torture.
The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.
For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn’t help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.
The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very slowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body.
By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.
But I’m just going to say if felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.
And then I realize the thing about writing, writers, and memoirs. Each time you put pen to paper you give a piece of yourself away. Just as our lives can shrink or expand with curiosity, what the writer gives grows in proportion to how much of themselves they put out for us to see. It comes neither with New York, nor with any institution of merit. It comes with a type of courage and sacrifice that is rare.
I should have stayed that day in Book Court and waited along with everybody else for the publicist. I should like to have known the cadence of the book as read aloud by its author whom I no longer envy but hold with a newfound respect.
When I rushed out into the street, a few blocks and a turn back to the confident framework of seeing a person that I’d made up in my head to represent the hobgoblins of my own foolish consistency, I missed the beauty of a person opening up for a rare conversation, the type that one pockets for a lifelong memory.
At least I have the book.