Two years ago in Dublin, I read the English translation of Sayaka Murata’s 2016 novel Convenience Store Woman. The first paragraph described a Japanese supermarket’s cacophony – tinkling door chime, voices, scanner beeps. I’d been to Tokyo and loved those sounds; and there it was, that embrace.
I kept reading, and kept seeing myself in the narrator. All her life, Japanese convenience store worker Keiko Furukura has had to teach herself how to behave around others. She’s relieved when her head office trainer guides her: “It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.” She pretends to share co-workers’ petty irritations, and is serenely oblivious to gossip. When patronised, she only really cares about the logic: yes, yes, that was rude, but was it well argued? I’m autistic, and this is all very me.
Feynman and Schrödinger were concerned about the extremely small scale, but what about the extremely large scale? A single human cell has more than twenty thousand genes. Therefore, assuming one protein per gene, the number of different non-modified proteins exceeds twenty thousand. Add to that the many more different proteins resulting from alternative splicing, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and posttranslational modification. No conceptual model is conceivable for the interactions among all of these genes and proteins, or for even a tiny portion of them, when one considers the complex biochemistry involved in regulation. What is the meaning of the intricate and massive pathway models generated by computer algorithms? Is this even a meaningful question to ask? And the human body contains on average an estimated thirty-seven trillion cells!
Yet science has had great success dealing with the unthinkable and inconceivable. Hannah Arendt puts the matter succinctly: “Man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language.” We have mathematically sophisticated scientific theories and daily operate with advanced engineering systems that are physically incomprehensible and whose principles cannot be communicated in everyday language. In Kantian terms, we are not limited by human categories of understanding.
This isn’t an essay about rereading, it’s about rewatching, but I’m starting to think it’s all the same impulse. Being a person who reads now feels the same as being a person who watches and one who listens, especially since sometimes all of those things are happening at once, an overwhelm of words, sounds, images all experienced before, so long as there’s no space in between for boredom or silence. This is about my relationship to art becoming recursive, in ways that feel both active and helpless.
The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet in another month or six weeks.
You would never run a class this way, because it practically minimizes the value that each participant gets from being in the group. The problem is that there’s no time to cash in on anyone else’s insights. If someone says something in the meeting that reframes how you think about the book — they suggest that Holden is lying, or that Kinbote wrote Canto IV; they tell you to read Portrait first, so you can understand Stephen’s double bind; they claim that Offred’s tale is a series of transcripts, not journal entries — well, now it’s too late, because you’ve finished reading the book and you’re probably never going back to it.
Among many superb literary nuggets in the book, there’s a quote from the poet Patrick Kavanagh that highlights the particular relevance of Wild Child to these strange sequestered days: “To know fully one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.” We have been turned in upon ourselves by the lockdown, forced to do what Barkham does so brilliantly in the book: subjecting a hedge, or a pond, or a garden, to intense scrutiny.
"There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other's company. He was fully half my life. I cannot hope for another such friend."
In eight lyrical chapters Taylor moves back and forth in time, presenting a series of vignettes and remembered conversations that offer an unvarnished view of a brilliant, driven man who was controversial almost from the start of his career, largely for his portrayal of his fellow Jews and women.
DH Evans opened a restaurant on the fifth floor of its rebuilt Oxford Street department store in 1937 that could serve 1,000 (mostly ladies) at once. By then J Lyons was running 10 outlets in the street to refresh the human torrent that has thronged the one mile and 620 yards of the world’s oldest continuously successful shopping street for more than 200 years.
Until just now, that is. The coronavirus has closed shops that the Blitz could not. By 1832, a bus every three minutes plied on this route from Paddington to the Bank. By 1840, 16 tons of horse manure a week were shovelled from the roadway. By 1913, the buses went past Marble Arch every 12 and a half seconds.
An orange on the first day, an apple the next
Down for the count with a parking-lot picnic
Out on the town in a parking-lot panic
I saw—saw!—the lake before falling asleep