'Your people have finally fallen into history,' he said.
'The rest of us are already here.'
An artist just sent out an email titled, simply, “Apologies.” His website plug-in switched off back in December and he hasn’t been able to process sales of prints of Nativity icons. I like the thought of people buying Nativity icons in February, though.
On my to-do list, under a scribbled note to look up website costs, I have written out a Jenny Offill quote: “Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?”
It feels, sometimes, like artists are offering more and more apologies: Apologies that the silence it takes to create something meaningful is no longer available. Apologies that a machine can tell this story better than I can. (“They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words,” writes Offill.) Apologies that we can’t tell stories fast enough to keep up with the future; our past stories aren’t enough to safeguard us. (“All day, Ben lies on the couch, reading a giant history of war. But he got it at a used-book store so it only goes up to World War I.”)
•
I took out Offill’s tiny novel, Weather, from the library because when Sabrina Orah Mark and Ocean Vuong both tell you to read a book, you read the book. I admire the minds who admire Offill and so I want to say something clever about it, but the reality is it’s too close to home to really see: tiny paragraphs, all in the present tense, all equally spaced, documenting the mundane things of life and intricate relationships falling apart or tentatively sustained. Battering each life, doomsday reports on the end of the world and how to be prepared (can you be prepared?).
•
The novel is not an apology, but neither is it comforting. The pre-Socratic note the narrator finds in her lunchbox from her husband Ben reads, “Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.” And the last line of the novel is Ben speaking to her: “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.”
The narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian and takes on a side-gig of responding to emails about the coming climate apocalypse. There is a recurring question: where is it safe for our children to grow up? Argentina? Canada?
•
After reading Weather I go to a book club at the library to discuss a different book – I Married the Klondike, a memoir from the time of the Yukon’s gold rush. “The pioneers treated all of it – Toronto, Vancouver, the Klondike – like a new frontier,” someone says. The conversation sweeps away from the book. One woman who took the train across Canada alone in the 1940’s says we should all learn to shoot guns to keep America from taking over Canada and someone else suggests, maybe we should all just move to New Zealand.
“It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air,” Offill’s narrator, Lizzie, remembers. “Everyone, everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn’t want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.”
I know you’re not supposed to bend the corners of pages in library books, but I ear-marked that one. Which makes me think of Lizzie’s survival tactic of unflinching honesty: “If you think you are lost: beware bending the map. Don’t say maybe it was a pond, not a lake; maybe the stream flowed east, not west. Leave a trail as you go. Try to mark trees.”
•
On a long drive, I listen to Jenny Offill’s interview with TinHouse. She says Weather started as a novel about getting older and losing people “and that sense that you know you’re going to keep walking down the corridor of loss and the doors are going to keep opening.” She calls it “anticipatory dread”. The interviewer really wants to talk about scale, and also whether we know how to tell stories where humanity doesn’t win, or doesn’t even figure. Offill says that, in her research for the novel, she discovered the super-wealthy are choosing to move to New Zealand.
“I thought there are all these people materially prepping, and that’s a rabbit hole that I went down for a little bit, but mostly, I just wanted to learn to emotionally prep and spiritually prep. That felt like something that I could put in a book or tell a loved one.”
•
Having “fallen into history”, the narrator finds a tentative peace in old traditions. She repeatedly attempts enlightenment through Buddhist meditation. She’s caught up with the memory of dust filtering through windows at church: “The Unitarians never kneel. But I want to kneel. Later, I do at home by my bed. The oldest and best of prayers: Mercy.”
The morning after Trump announced tariffs on Canadian goods I was in a tiny, wooden church for Candlemas, a celebration I didn’t know existed. I learned I could have brought my candles to be blessed for the coming year.
Candlemas is the celebration of the day Mary, mother of Jesus, was purified forty days after giving birth and dedicated her child with two pigeons at the Temple. Old Symeon told her that one day a sword would pierce her heart. For centuries (millennia) Symeon’s words have been sung daily as evening prayer. The priest offers a fresh translation: “Lord, now you are liberating your servant in peace . . . for my own eyes have seen the freedom which you prepared in the sight of every people.”
In the pew I try to unstick the fear of loss, which is a fear of death, from my heart. I think maybe I should buy a candle (a Canadian candle) and make this a nightly practice. It makes me think of one odd paragraph in Weather. It’s a book where words are lost, or taken over, and yet near the end there’s this striking image: “On the way home, the wind blows some newspapers down the street. There’s a man sleeping in a doorway and one comes and curls itself around his feet. A visitor asked the old monks at Mount Athos what they did all day and was told: We have died and we are in love with everything.”
My to-do list grows: paint the future, find a picture frame large enough for last year’s wolf, return Weather to the library, give the sturgeon an eye, buy a candle. •
Have you read Weather by Jenny Offill? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I’m dropping a writing prompt gathered from Offill’s interview in the chat for paid subscribers, as a thank-you to them for keeping this Substack free to everyone else.
What else am I reading? Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce turned out to be a delightful escapist novel. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben is blowing my mind in the best way. Obit by Victoria Chang has me starting a fresh prose poem draft every morning this week (I’ll be sharing those soon!). What’s on your reading list?
Maaike, your reflective and evocative writing resonates deeply with me. The way you've woven personal experiences with broader existential themes is both profound and moving. Thank you for sharing such beautifully crafted and thought-provoking writing. I look forward to reading more of your work and exploring these meaningful conversations with you. Thank you.
Okay, okay, I’ll read the book 😬😆