crossing the border

I want to remember next year that July is for me the most challenging month: the hottest month, between the end of the kids’ school year and our vacation, when any semblance of a daily or weekly routine completely unravels and with it, my mind. Sometime in June, we began to sort through the boxes of files, childhood detritus, and miscellaneous etcetera that had been stacked more or less neatly in a corner of the master bedroom since our energy for dealing with them dissipated last year, and by the end of July the boxes were all over our living room, and the project had somehow expanded, becoming even more overwhelming than before.

In the midst of this disorder, I didn’t read much. I finally finished Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk and then started Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, a novel of long digressions made by a narrator who shifts from first to second to third person even within the same long sentence—wonderfully bewildering, but unfortunately too bewildering for me at the time; I didn’t finish it. In the last weekend of attempting to clean up our apartment, I reverted to an old and effective strategy (based on the Unfuck Your Habitat “no marathons” policy) of taking a break to read a chapter or two of a romance novel after every 45 minutes or so of cleaning. I read most of Managed by Kristen Callihan that way and then (after finishing it one night in bed) went back to the first book in the series to help me get through packing for vacation.

On the drive from the city, we listened to a lecture by Marci Shore on the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity, recorded as part of Timothy Snyder’s fall 2022 course on the history of Ukraine.

I’ve listened to this lecture three or four times. This time, with a potential coup attempt on my mind, I wanted some insight into what makes protests effective—which I did find, but which is a topic for another day. Today I want to share Shore’s reflections on time and possibility, which seem especially relevant these days. She begins the lecture with the observation that “in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was one of those things that felt inconceivable and impossible until the moment that it happened. And then, in retrospect, it seemed inevitable, which I think is a lesson for historians in general, that the thing that seems impossible and inconceivable will seem that way until the moment that it happens, and then it will retrospectively seem to be inevitable.” Having lived through these past few weeks in which what seemed to be a doomed campaign was transformed into something exhilarating and seemingly unstoppable, I know exactly what Shore is talking about.

I’ve seen people comment that certain things that Vice President Harris has said are “goofy” and “contradictory”—particularly, her assertion that “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you” and her belief in “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” How can we exist in the context created by the past and also be unburdened by it? How can both be true? The answer is obvious if you consider that being unburdened does not require a blindness to your context or a failure to acknowledge it. In fact, it would be difficult to unburden yourself of things you don’t know you are carrying. To be unburdened, I believe, is to respond to the context of all in which you live with imagination. As Shore concludes her lecture, in speaking about time, possibility, and the contingency of history:

The present is a border between what Sartre calls ‘the inward self’—facticity, what has already happened, who you have been up to this moment, what cannot be changed—and ‘the forward self’—what is coming in the future, what is not yet determined, what is the possibility for transcendence, to go beyond what has been and who have have been up to this moment. And that border is with us, every moment of our lives. The present is the moment of that crossing of the border from what has already been and who we have been to the possibility of going beyond, but we normally don’t feel it, we normally don’t turn our attention to it. And revolution is that moment when you suddenly shine a glaring light on that border, and you are shaken into understanding the present as the moment of the possibility of going beyond.

There’s lots more in the lecture that speaks to our current moment, including Shore’s explanation of dignity by way of Kant. Whereas certain political actors want us to believe that particular kinds of women have particular purposes, Kant says, according to Shore, “Whatever can be exchanged for something of equivalent value has a price. Whatever is beyond all price and bears of no equivalent has dignity. Human beings are distinguished in that we possess dignity. We do not have a price, we possess dignity”—and therefore “you always treat a human being as an ends and never as a means, always as a subject and not as an object.” In other words, we ourselves are our own purpose. This belief, I suppose, could lead to a crass individualism, but the recognition of the dignity of others is the foundation of an ethics and politics of care.

I knew that I would easily get over my reading slump on vacation. I always bring a carefully curated stack of books with me—this year I began to collect the stack sometime in the spring—and my very favorite thing to do is to float in a tube on the water with my book. I sometimes drift far from shore while reading, and last year a loon came up behind me to scold me—I heard it before I saw it, just a few feet away and much louder and much, much larger than I would have expected.

Here’s what I read on vacation this year.1

Beach Read by Emily Henry is a beautiful tribute to the HEA in a sick, sad world where even the best of us are flawed.

I felt some dread reading The Searcher by Tana French. In many of French’s novels, solving the crime destroys the detective, so I worried about how things would turn out for the main character, Cal. I worried even more about Trey, the searcher of the title, a child who goes to Cal for help. At one point the narrator says (channeling Cal’s point of view) that “this isn’t going to have a happy ending.” Of course I already knew that, but because I just read Beach Read with its explicit discussion of the HEA, this clause leapt off the page for me. In the end, things turn out as things turn out because Cal sticks to his moral code: “I just try to do right by people, is all.”

Finally I got to see why Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase is lauded as one of the best romance novels ever written. This fantastic novel helped me see that I prefer historical romances that are more soap opera than rom-com. I am not a lifelong or even longtime reader of romances, but I did grow up in a home in which Another World was on the TV from 2:00 to 3:00 most afternoons. Jess (the heroine of Lord of Scoundrels) shooting Dain (the hero) reminded me of a plot from Another World that I apparently misremembered. According to my memory, Rachel Cory poisoned her husband Mac, but according to various fan websites, it was a different wife, Janice Frame, who poisoned him. I can be forgiven for remembering incorrectly; the only reason I knew that Mac once got poisoned on the show is because my mother told my sister and me not to tell our father about it. I was very young at the time, however, and had no idea that this was actually happening in the show, so lol on my mother for filling me in on it. Anyway, the internet tells me that Janice ended up getting killed when she attacked Rachel with a knife and they fell into a swimming pool. Another thing my mother probably wouldn’t have wanted my father to know about!

Having read most of her Ravenels series, I enjoyed Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas, set a generation earlier in the Victorian era, at the beginning of the decline of the peerage. I’d still take Tom Severin, the engineer hero of Chasing Cassandra, over Simon Hunt, the finance guy. (Both are involved in railroads.) As always, I wonder about the nature of the investments Simon makes himself and advises others to make, in a book set just after the conclusion of the First Opium War.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia starts off like “The Fall of the House of Usher” on a mist-enshrouded mountain instead of next to a tarn, and then two-thirds of the way in, the whole thing goes off the rails in the most amazing way. Like, Bertha Mason as a super-sentient mummy is far from the weirdest thing in this book.

In Before I Let Go, Kennedy Ryan reveals just how much emotional courage love can require. I knew from her guest appearance on Fated Mates that Ryan is a big Laura Kinsale fan, and this novel delivered the angst and yearning I hoped for. I mean, what could bring more angst than yearning for your ex after a painful divorce?

The last book I got to read while floating on the lake was Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; I finished it somewhere on I-495 on the way home. I gotta read this one again. I’m in love with Maite’s atelier—the second bedroom she can barely afford, which she has filled with the books and records that she loves. I wonder if either of the main characters in this story has a code—the thing without which, as Cal describes it in The Searcher, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.” Is a love of music and literature sufficient in itself as a code? I don’t think so, and thus I don’t quite know what I make of this book. Not after only one read. An enjoyable book I want to puzzle over! The very best kind of book!

Rise Up by Matthew Rohrer was what I read before drafting poems, when I made time for that. His jaunty, imaginative, loving narrator is the catalyst I need right now.

It’s so hard to return to New York City and all the things after vacation every year. One of my cousins, who often stays with his family at a cottage next door at the same time as my family, wonders sometimes if the time being there is worth the pain of leaving. I believe so. Spending a week or two by that lake with a view of the mountains restores my soul; what an attenuated thing my soul would be without that time.