In 1949, eight years after James Joyce died, his letters began to travel the world. Thanks to microfilm technology, popularized a few years earlier, the contents of his archive at the University of Buffalo became more accessible to curious readers and meddlesome critics than ever before. T. S. Eliot encountered them thousands of miles away, at the British Museum, in London, where he came face to face with a past self: his own letters to the Irish writer, lit up on a projection screen before him. Such exposure made Eliot uneasy. Later, in a letter sent across the ocean to Emily Hale, a teacher at a boarding school in Massachusetts, Eliot recalled the anxiety he’d experienced that day in the museum: “I thought, how fortunate that I did not know Joyce intimately enough to have made personal revelations or to have expressed adverse opinions, or repeated gossip or scandal, about living people!”
Eliot’s letters to Hale, who for nearly seventeen years was his confidante, his beloved, and his muse, were another matter. They don’t just repeat “gossip and scandal,” they produce it. Scholars have known about this correspondence since Hale donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, in 1956, but for decades, the trove of documents remained a tantalizing secret—kept sealed, at Eliot’s insistence, until fifty years after both he and Hale had died.
Passengers are led on a kind of maze that goes through the ruins of the shut-down international airport. It’s poignant to walk past the abandoned emporiums of duty-free whiskey, chocolates, and perfume. The lights are on, but the party’s over. Covid, always Covid, doing its best to remind you of its awesome gloom.
Life Without Air makes a multitude of connections between human beings and the world of the non-human. However, unlike with some more traditional nature poetry, Lafarge does not use the environment as just a backdrop, or fodder for metaphor. Rather, this is a work of true interrelation, albeit one that never falls into easy or holistic union.
But if you stick with the narrator's intellectual peregrinations, it pays off, as he lets his despairing facade fall, and opens up more about the origins of his malaise.