I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump’s second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children’s-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as “Hamas”; on the street, I thought “hot yoga” was “hot dogs”; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising “Jan. Ticketing” said “Jia Tolentino” to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of “losing it” elude me. There are sometimes only images: foggy white drizzle, melted rainbows in a gasoline puddle, pink foam insulation bursting between slats of splintered wood.
Possibly, I should be writing this on the intake form at a neurologist’s office. Maybe the fog never cleared after my third round of COVID. Maybe it’s the self-severance of having two young children but pretending for half of the day that I don’t. Maybe this is exactly what my mother warned me about twenty years ago when she discovered my passion for marijuana. But I get the sense that quite a lot of people are feeling like this all the time now, too.
It occurred to him that his relationship with nature could be extended to the spirit world. “Over time, I started to view life and death not as separate things, but death as an extension of life, and life and death as points connected along a straight line. As such, I came to believe we could share our thoughts with those that have passed away,” he says. Death was on his mind: Sasaki’s cousin had just been diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live. He thought of his aunt, who had deteriorated rapidly after a bout of grief over her daughter’s cancer diagnosis. “I felt that our family should not have to suffer the same fate again.”
A year later, Sasaki stumbled across a white telephone box being removed from in front of a hotel in Kamaishi. “I imagined it would look beautiful in my garden,” he says. He couldn’t persuade the removal company to sell it to him. But serendipity struck. His friend said he had come into possession of a similar phone booth he could use. Sasaki rented a truck, drove to the neighbouring town and took it home.
A deeper current runs through the book, aligning Macfarlane’s work with a wider literary-environmental shift. As we discover the profound interconnectedness of flora, fauna and other forms of “life”, our language and conceptual frameworks expand dramatically.