This “separate form of life” would become known as the archaea, reflecting the impression that these organisms were primitive, primordial, especially old. They were single-celled creatures, simple in structure, with no cell nucleus. Through a microscope, they looked like bacteria, and they had been mistaken for bacteria by all earlier microbiologists. They lived in extreme environments, at least some of them — hot springs, salty lakes, sewage — and some had unusual metabolic habits, such as metabolizing without oxygen and, as the Times account said, producing methane.
But these archaea, these whatevers, were drastically unlike bacteria if you looked at their DNA, which is what (indirectly) Woese had done. They lacked certain bits that characterized all bacteria, and they contained other bits that shouldn’t have been present. They constituted a “third kingdom” of living creatures because they fit within neither of the existing two, the bacterial kingdom (bacteria) and the kingdom of everything else (eukarya), including animals and plants, amoebas and fungi, you and me.
When my mom cooked sambal from scratch, she moved with controlled haste. Her eyebrows would furrow as she used her index finger to mix belacan, a pungent shrimp paste, with water. “Open all the windows!” she would suddenly yell, her warning to my brother, father and me that fiery chiles would be hitting her oiled wok in a few minutes.
Even with windows opened wide, the fumes from sizzling capsaicin invoked coughing fits and heavy breathing.
Making food from scratch often seems to be a luxury. How paradoxical, given the roots of so much cooking lie in thrift. One-time methods of food preservation – fermenting, pickling, salting, curing – have become rustic trends requiring time, money and space, all for results that, though lovely, are hardly essential to feeding a family. Homemaking bread has gone from being a quotidian chore – quite literally, “daily bread” – to a rare thrill, a novelty even, mostly the preserve of a leisure class to whom the skill can be sold back at £150 a class.
Which is why my library is what I call a “sentimental library.” A sentimental library is characterized by memory and association. It’s the halfway point between alphabetical and aesthetic. And, in my case, each book’s placement corresponds not just to when I read it and how I felt, but to whatever activity takes place beneath it now. They are thus animated in a way they might not be otherwise. Like it or not, I am in constant, real-time conversation with their contents.
“To love truth means to endure the void,” wrote Simone Weil in her notebooks, suggesting perhaps that we should resist the temptation to fill the empty spaces of ourselves with our own stories, and instead welcome grace into the absence. In remaining largely unknown, Faye allows Cusk to explore universality, which is a sort of truth, perhaps a sort of grace. “She has a task and she applies herself to it soberly: the trapping, if only in a mirrored surface, of some fragment of reality that might yield a truth about the whole,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2009. “I had found out more […] by listening,” Faye tells us in the conclusion to the second book, “than I had ever thought possible.” More about the whole, to be sure, but also more about herself.
For myself, every page was a miracle and for Robert a portal into a world he was clandestinely drawn and would eventually immortalize through the image. Artists pillage. A piece of writing, a musical phrase, a statue first regarded with pleasure until the moment, when seized, as Proust accounts, by a powerful joy, he casts off all pretenses of adoration and executes a work of his own. His poetry drew me to write, his imagery drew Robert to the camera.