To follow a training plan is to work magic on your own body. I can see the evidence of the magic in my posts on Strava during my last marathon training cycle. Describing a 15-mile run on August 18: “An awful slog. In the tenth mile I knew I didn’t have another park loop in me.” Describing another run two weeks later: “17-miler DONE! 😩” And then, the week after that: “18 miles! And I feel fine?” I remember that 18-mile run, marveling in the fifteenth or sixteenth mile that I felt great, in what I call the Steve Rogers Zone (“I can do this all day”)—not at all as I had been feeling running similar distances in previous weeks.

This spring, as I’ve been working through my training plan for the Brooklyn Half Marathon, I’ve been feeling despondent. My regular runs often feel too slow, and my tempo runs too hard. Maybe the magic won’t happen this time. Maybe I’m finally too old, it’s all over.

From time to time I perceive glimmers of magic. Maybe the sky is gloomy and I’m kind of bored, but I feel good anyway. Or it’s the very end of a very long run that took me out to the ocean and back, and I find I have the energy to sustain an ambitious half-marathon pace for three miles. But it’s never all magic all the time, and I’ve got to get out there again and again all the same.

I wish that I could enjoy the early weeks of a training plan as I enjoy the early weeks of spring. There’s a bit of desperation to my enjoyment of it, actually. My favorite flowers come and go so fast. Though I am 💯 Team Chaucer and staunchly against T.S. Eliot’s nonsense about the cruelty of April, I do find every year that spring is an occasion for me to write yet another poem (or two or more) about death. I suppose that Frost best captures the bittersweetness of the time.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I think a lot about theories of change these days, even as I see and feel change everywhere. How spring unfurls slowly and then all at once. How my willingness to slog through twelve or more miles on a gloomy Sunday in March is what makes a great race possible—never guaranteed, but possible—in May. I haven’t yet read Erica Chenoweth on civil resistance (I’ve lately been reading Julie Anne Long’s Pennyroyal Green series, Marci Shore on the Euromaidan, and Bernadette Mayer), but their findings on its effectiveness make intuitive sense to me. The work and the fruits of the work are the same. How could it be otherwise?

So, yeah, as I expected last year, a lot of fucked-up shit is happening.

Even though I even remember that “temporary hardship” was an explicit campaign promise of the shadow president—I low-key freaked out when that promise was made—I nevertheless can’t say I expected this particular fucked-up shit, nor that it would be quite this fucked up.

But, here we are.

As an educator and librarian, I am committed to open knowledge: the understanding that knowledge is a public good, to be produced and shared openly. In fact, much of my writing here—about looking at art, definitions of the novel, Don Quixote, and so on—arises from this commitment.

Among the many things the government of the United States does is produce knowledge, much of which is shared openly. The health information put out by the CDC, statistics collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Census Bureau, discoveries by NASA about supernovas, Mars, the Sun, the Moon—all of this, and more, belongs to us. Much of it is in the public domain, which knows no borders, so this “us” really is everyone. Meanwhile, the current administration is doing its best to hide, steal, or destroy it all.

Creating and sharing knowledge openly is one way to fight back. For example, on Bluesky recently, Mariame Kaba suggested that people could make informative zines to distribute at protests and elsewhere. This, I can do! Given that not enough people truly understand what is going on right now, I wanted to make a zine explaining that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not to the President and certainly not to any rando billionaires he chooses to empower. But my attempts to make that zine brought me back to the foundational principle, popular sovereignty. And so I began there.

We Have the Power, No. 1

The file below is a PDF that you can download, print (choose “Actual size” or the equivalent when printing), fold into a small 8-page zine, and distribute.

I’m pleased with my beginner’s effort.

More to come!

Long description of the zine for the visually impaired:

cover: We Have the Power! The “We” is an image from the Constitution of the United States.

pages 1–2: The first three words of the Constitution of the United States are “We the People.” The “We the People” is an image from the Constitution.

pages 3–4: This means that the entire Constitution is based on the power of “We the people.” Image: a diverse group of smiling people gathered together

page 5: The Constitution belongs to us. Not to judges and lawyers. And certainly not to the president, who is trying to ignore it anyway.

page 6: It’s time to stand up and fight for our government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Get organized. Speak out. Join with other people to protest. Call, write to, or meet with your Congressfolks—they represent you! Know your rights. Share your knowledge. We’re in this fight together.

back cover: Democracy doesn’t end in the voting booth. It begins with us. “We Have the Power” No 1. by Rae, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0

In 2024, I ran 1,388 miles and participated in twelve races, racing in seven of them and just running in five. As in 2023, my key races were the Brooklyn Half Marathon in May and NYC Marathon in November. In neither of those races did I achieve what I had hoped. In the Brooklyn Half, I hit some kind of wall at the beginning of the eighth mile and just kept it together until the end, finishing in a more-than-respectable 1:57:30, but without shaving a minute or two off the previous year’s time, as I had hoped to do. In the NYC Marathon, leg cramps made most of the last ten miles excruciating, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I actually considered DNFing but eventually rallied and even managed to run through the finish, covering the last 400 meters or so like it was just the last interval in a speed workout.

Not all of my races were disappointing. In June, I set a (post-kid) PR in the New York Mini 10K—after joking with teammates before the start that I had slept terribly the night before, felt like shit, and was maybe going to do this one at a tempo pace or maybe even at training pace, we’ll see. In July, for the third year in a row, I knocked another few seconds off my Best Pace (used for corral assignments in NYRR races) in the NYRR Team Championships 5M. In August, I finished the NYCRUNS Brooklyn Ice Cream Social half marathon more than half a minute faster than the Brooklyn Half three months earlier, despite having to run up Battle Pass Hill four times, and placed first in my age group. And, best of all, over the summer I ran in the PPTC Al Goldstein Speed Series 5K three times, each time coaching one of my kids to the finish, and this month, for my last race of the year, I started the NYRR Frosty 5K with both of them, coaching the 12yo to the finish a few minutes behind the 16yo.

And now another year has passed, I’m another year older, and I want to keep going. I’m happy with my overall mileage but want to be more consistent next year with stretching, strength training, and speed work. I plan to run the NYC Marathon for a sixth time next year (I’ve already qualified), and though it would be great for once in my life to finish that damn race faster than I did the previous year, my main goal is simply to enjoy it—not so simple, actually; I often find that my ambitions can sabotage my pleasure in the activities I enjoy. I also plan to try some different races (instead of running the races to qualify for the NYC Marathon in the following year), including racing in half marathons I’ve never done before and actually racing (rather than just running) in a 5K, which I haven’t done since 2016.

Over the past couple years at least, running has transformed my relationship with time. Like other runners, I think a lot about time, and not just in terms of pace, or setting new PRs, or the inevitability of slowing down as one gets older. I also think backward from the date of a key race to figure out how many miles I ought to be running this week and then work out a training plan for the weeks until the race. I like having a training plan, posting it on my bulletin board and checking off each run as I go. The seasons change, and so do I. In three weeks, for example, I’ll start training for a mid-April half marathon, and over the twelve weeks of training the days will grow longer, and snowdrops, crocuses, and then daffodils will bloom. Spring will come, and I will be out in the park to enjoy it, able to run much faster than I can now, before training has worked its alchemy on my cells.

I don’t have to have any grand resolutions for the new year. I have just the next race to train for, and I don’t even have to think all that much about that race. All I really have to worry about is today’s run, and eating well, and drinking enough water, and getting enough rest. Just today. It’s going to be a rough year, and I want to be able to meet its challenges with a strong heart and big spirit, as I’ve tried to do in every race I’ve ever run.

When I planned to help get out the vote in August, I didn’t really have phone banking in mind. I remembered the one phone banking shift I did for Clinton’s campaign in 2016 as hellish—not a great match for my skill set. I mean, who really wants to spend a couple hours calling strangers? Nobody I know. But I listen to Fated Mates, which since 2020 under the name Fated States has organized phone banks that have made more than one million calls to support Democrats and pro-abortion ballot measures, and I was persuaded to sign up for just one shift, the least I could do.

In the end, I did eight phone banking shifts this election cycle: five with Fated States, two recruiting Election Protection volunteers for Common Cause, and one for the Harris-Walz campaign. Along the way, I saw how phone banking is actually a great match for my skill set. It’s similar in many ways to the chat reference shifts I do most weeks. (I’ve written about chat reference a couple times; it’s one way that libraries offer online reference services.) For example, on chat reference I don’t know when someone is going to ping me with a question, and similarly while phone banking I don’t know when the automated dialer—cycling through many, many numbers while I sit there listening to hold music—will connect me with a voter or potential volunteer. And, as on chat reference, I don’t know who I’m going to talk to or what concerns will come up. The main thing is to ask good questions, give the information needed based on the conversation, and be friendly.

By my third phone banking shift, I found myself drawing on my teaching experiences to create a cheerful persona, and I was preparing similarly to how I prepare for chat reference shifts: making sure I had water and food with me along with the basic information most likely needed for conversations, such as when to vote, how to get a mail-in ballot, and details about the candidate or ballot measure I was calling to support. The snacks, water, information, and semi-manufactured cheer sustained me despite my anxiety—which is still part of my experience of chat reference shifts, though less so now than before. My confidence in my ability to get and share information with people is growing, and it seemed to me that phone banking is more about information than persuasion. However, it may be that I perceived phone banking in this way because my skills at verbal persuasion are not as strong—skills to work on for the future, then.

But, you might wonder, why am I writing about all this work I did for a campaign that lost?

Well, not quite everything was lost. With Fated States, I called Arizona to support Proposition 139 and Missouri to support Amendment 3, both of which passed. But we did not secure the top of the ticket. My god we gave so much heart and sweat to this campaign, and it is devastating that it was somehow not enough to defeat the worst person in the world, who is very obviously decomposing before the eyes of anyone paying attention. Our visible enthusiasm and hard work were not enough overcome the racism, sexism, and misogynoir that are endemic and seemingly intractable in this country, a global wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, or today’s abysmal information environment.

But I am writing about all the work I have done because there is more work to be done, and I believe that we all must continue to develop our skills and do our part. As Timothy Snyder has said (in a lecture that I have listened to many times), history doesn’t actually come to an end. The corollary is that, as Jamelle Bouie has said, politics haven’t stopped happening. Not everything is lost already, not yet.

The questions I’ve been asking myself, and that you can be asking yourself, too, if you aren’t already, are: Where is my power? What do I know how to do? What can I be learning? And what effective organizations are already in place, to which I can contribute my power and skills?

And here are my answers, as they stand now.

Because I understand electoral politics as well as how our system works, or ought to work, and because the GOP threatens the human rights of women, immigrants, people of color, and queer people, my praxis is to cosplay as a normie lib to get Democrats elected and then, once they are in office, badger them to do the right thing. Indivisible has the know-how, experience, and discipline for this work, so I’ll be working with Indivisible Brooklyn—my local group, and also the group that (to me, shockingly, given that the Kings County Democratic Party is shall we say not what it could be) is here in the borough where both congressional Democratic leaders live.

Because I work in higher education and want to do what I can (as an adjunct! with very little power on my own!) to protect students and faculty and counter any anticipatory obedience by leadership, I’m going to start attending union meetings while also continuing my day-to-day work supporting liberatory pedagogies.

Because I regularly vow to alleviate suffering, I will seek ways to do so, particularly here in my community, which may soon find itself under threat.

Because, being human, I can’t do everything, I will continue to give money to organizations that are doing the work I believe in, such as the Trans Justice Funding Project.

Because this work isn’t actually like a marathon—people might say that it is, but as someone who has run five marathons, I tell you it is not, because this race or whatever else you might call it has no end—I will take care to pace myself. I cannot be effective if I try to do too much, or if I don’t eat well, or if I don’t get enough sleep.

All of the above probably sounds far more assured than I actually feel. A lot of fucked-up shit is likely to happen next year, but I don’t know exactly what or how. No one does. We are The Fool, forever walking toward the edge of an unknown future. The uncertainty is terrifying, even as it may also offer opportunities. Despite my fears, I want to do what I can to make space in my life for joy. For now, I’m planning to run the New York City Marathon again next year. And for sure, I’ll continue to read romance novels and read and write poetry. I’m already 51 years old. I don’t want to give any more of my life to mucking around in my disgust for hateful people. I’d rather spend my time doing the work that needs to be done and going on loving the world, though it might break my heart.

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.

I was standing on the platform at Atlantic Avenue waiting for a Q train one Friday evening a few months ago when a young man approached me with a clipboard to ask me to sign his petition to get some independents on the ballot upstate. I said no and (as I remember it) otherwise didn’t engage. Later, I overheard the same guy talking to another woman who was protesting that his petition seemed fraudulent—why would he be asking in the city for signatures to support candidates upstate? That’s when he said, “We’re trying to get Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the ballot,” and I started laughing, loudly. “That laugh seems fake,” he said to me, and I turned away to get onto the train that had just pulled into the station. I didn’t care whether the train was a B or a Q—I just wanted to get away from that guy and my own deranged laughter.

On that particular evening, I did get away from that particular guy, but in another sense there is no escape. To live in the United States of America is to live with innumerable cranks, crackpots, and conspiracists. Somehow or other, we are supposed to make a democracy work with a demos that includes them—along with those who are well informed, ill informed, disengaged, striving for justice, striving for themselves, or striving to destroy the whole thing. You know, humanity. It’s hard to put up with my own family sometimes, and I love them dearly. As for putting up with all the rest of you—well, it is no wonder that from time to time I would get a little cracked myself and find myself laughing at a stranger on a subway platform.

Lately I’ve been more than a little cracked while much of the political press indulges in a mad orgy of speculation, prognostication, and demands regarding the candidacy of the U.S. president for another term in office. I had thought that the madness would subside after one weekend, especially after the Supreme Court released its decision that the former guy can do whatever he wants, he can be king. But no. Forget that on the debate stage the former guy claimed, of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “This was his dream; I talked to him about it” while he also again implied that his re-election is the ransom for the release of wrongly imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Forget that his election would result in the implementation of a plan to crack down on marginalized people and the perceived enemies of the Right while establishing white Christian patriarchal rule. Forget that the GOP wants to extend Fourteenth Amendment rights to fertilized eggs. The president is old, and The New York Times in particular is on a crusade to make sure that no one forgets it.

Five years ago, when I first wrote about Don Quixote, I saw the novel as “a cautionary tale for our age, in which misinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate.” I compared Don Quixote to a conspiracist with a gun and wondered why, given the violence with which he acts out his fantasies, his particular form of quixotism is so valorized. Today I think we’re all to some degree like Don Quixote, including those of us who (think we) aren’t conspiracists. It can be hard to know what’s real because we perceive so much through media. Don Quixote sees windmills and a barber’s basin through the lens of chivalric romances; we see an election campaign through the lens of our doomscrolling. What’s worse, an election campaign isn’t a tangible thing, like an inn, and most of us can’t interact with a presidential candidate as Don Quixote can with an innkeeper. For most of us, the media creates nearly our entire experience of an election campaign. And, as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones explains,

As media, we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans thinks is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it is not so. If Americans don’t recognize the crisis our democracy is facing, that’s not their fault, it is ours.

While pundits fantasize about “blitz primaries” and contested conventions—and these are in fact, to be perfectly clear, complete fantasies—I’m striving to do what I can do in the real world to defeat the current authoritarian threat, given the facts as I understand them. I’ll be writing 200 postcards to voters in Pennsylvania, and I’m planning a postcard-writing party to get at least another 200 written. I’m also screwing up my courage to canvass at least ten of my neighbors to make sure that they know about and vote for the Equal Rights Amendment to the New York Constitution this November. I didn’t even know about this possible amendment to the state Constitution before I went to an Indivisible meeting this week, during which I sat and talked with others at a taqueria while we wrote and addressed postcards to voters in a local swing district. It is good to get away from the media frenzy and simply do this work side-by-side with other people, to share knowledge and laughter with them—wry laughter, or bitter laughter, or laughter that’s just laughter, but never fake laughter.

I worry that I should do more, though I’m sure that when I do actually do more, I’ll still worry that it isn’t enough. What haven’t I thought of, that I could be doing? What are you doing?

An attempt at putting some order to my truly out-of-control tbr piles earlier this month turned into a bookcase-reorganization project that took up a good part of my time on the first summer Friday of the year. My plans for summer reading are probably still too ambitious, and every book I read seems to suggest two or three other books I ought to read, so who knows what I’ll actually read and how well (if at all) it will correspond with my plans.

For example, I checked out The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody from the library a few weeks ago just so I could read the introduction and get a sense of her overall argument. I knew that in the book Doody proposes that the origins of the novel are found not in eighteenth-century England or Don Quixote but many centuries ago in ancient Greece and Rome, and I was prepared to dismiss her argument because how can we say that a thing we call the novel existed long before the word novel came into use? Instead, I found her argument, at least as it is presented in the introduction, heady and seductive. Doody takes on the arguments and assumptions of Watt, Bakhtin, Lukács, Kermode, Auerbach, and so on and on, as well as the construction of the Western canon and the idea that individual personhood is a modern, bourgeois construction. She writes:

At times one encounters a strange kind of anti-pastoral pastoralism that feels a nostalgia for an era when we were innocent of personality, and also innocent of erotic love—when we did not have to cope with the heavy intricacies of (modern) breathing human passion. . . . If love is a conspiracy, it is much older than the age of “bourgeois individualism” in which some historians tend to locate it; nostalgia for an age that knew no Eros is hard put to find a home. There has admittedly been a tendency for classicists to present their age as secure from that awkward feminizing influence. Plato’s Eros, is after all, homosexual, but Socrates does not indulge it, and Love between persons, being only a matter of beauty, should be but the first rung in the ladder that leads to higher things. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and C. S. Lewis have perhaps nothing else in common, but they both share the nineteenth century’s desire to keep the grand classical age free of love stories. I was taught by C. S. Lewis, through reading his The Allegory of Love (1936), that what we know as “romantic love,” heterosexual eroticism with an emphasis on personal emotions, began in the Middle Ages.

Instead, argues Doody, “‘Romantic love,’ with the poetic conceits that express it, is much, much older than the Middle Ages, and there is a great continuity in our dealings with it.” This argument for antiquity and continuity rings true to me. After all, the readings for the course I took in college on sexuality and spirituality (that is, the elements of romantic love) in the middle ages and Renaissance began not with medieval poetry but with the Song of Songs and Ovid. And, of course, there’s Sappho (from the translation by Anne Carson of fragment 31):

. . . oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
          is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
          fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
          I seem to me. . . .

I have dozens of other books to read: a short-story collection to review; Dune, which I stopped reading about 100 pages short of the ending because I know I don’t like how the book concludes; three Ukrainian novels plus A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which I found on the sidewalk on my way to pick up the 12yo from after-school; a tall stack of romances; a shorter stack of poetry collections; and Don Quixote, which I’m determined to get to the end of on this reread. And there’s more. All the same, how can I not read the nearly 500 packed pages of The True Story of the Novel right now? I mean, I was planning to get back to it eventually, but . . .

At nineteen minutes before midnight on Tuesday, May 23 last year I sent my professor an email telling him that I had completed my final project for his course, which concluded my final course in library school. The next day, I read the first romance novel I had read since . . . whatever mass market paperback I bought at the mall bookstore to read for a Women’s Studies course on literature? Maybe? It’s also possible that I have invented the memory; I no longer have the syllabus for the course, and my seminar notes are incomprehensible. I definitely read a novel by Danielle Steel in middle school but could not tell you which one. It possibly had a red cover. I don’t really remember. At any rate, on Wednesday, May 24 last year I began The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, which I had put on hold at the library months earlier because since listening to an episode of 99% Invisible on clinch covers I had been wanting to read a romance novel. Why was that particular novel the one I chose to read? Again, I don’t remember. I read the book on the subway rides to and from a walk in Central Park, and when I got home I didn’t stop reading the book until I was finished. After that, I started to look at the library for more romance novels to read. In the year since then, I have read more than one hundred.

To be clear, one hundred romance novels in a lifetime (so far) is hardly any at all. I was never a teen who hid Johanna Lindsey paperbacks from judgmental peers and adults; instead, I read a mixture of YA mass market paperbacks, the classics, science fiction and fantasy, and occasional literary fiction. I liked books that involved witchcraft or sorcery or that were set in the past. I also liked books that featured a love story, whether that love story was central (e.g., Jane Eyre) or part of a larger story (e.g., Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain and Westmark trilogy). And then in my first semester of college I read The Romance of the Rose, which (after a verse in which the speaker assures us that what he is about to tell us is true) begins:

A dream vision “in which the whole art of love is contained”? I was a goner. In the semesters that followed, I focused as much as possible on medieval and Renaissance literature. I wanted to understand what centuries-old literature had to say about love, particularly about the relationship between romantic love and spiritual love.

Looking back, I see that what attracted me to this literature was the yearning expressed through the tropes of courtly love and Petrarchism, as in this poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of my favorites:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Women like wild deer fleeing from the speaker! The memory of a dream-like tryst in (apparently) the speaker’s bedroom! The speaker’s hurt and sense of betrayal by a woman whom he clearly still yearns for! I just love this shit.

But of course nearly all of this shit was written by men. Women figure in this literature primarily as objects of pursuit whose subjectivity is expressed only through their resistance of the speaker’s desire. Shakespeare’s heroines are an exception, as is the woman who asks “Dear heart, how like you this?” in the poem above.

All of which is to say that it would have made sense for me to read romance novels then, but I didn’t. I didn’t think they were for me, which at the time might have been true. But now, for various reasons, the time is right for me.

I have expressed both my impatience with definitions and my inclination to see the novel as “a loose, baggy monster,”2 but I have also indicated that the definition of romance novels “matters very much.” In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis defines the romance novel as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines.” This definition is incomplete; it doesn’t account for queer romance or for the fact that in many romantic relationships a happily-ever-after does not necessitate a wedding. The definition does, however, with non-inclusive language, name the three elements essential to a romance novel: the focus on the love story (what Regis calls “courtship”), the necessity of a happy ending (what Regis calls “betrothal”), and the centrality of marginalized people (“heroines” and others). These three elements account for why now is the right time for romance for me. I have always been drawn to love stories. I want to read stories that center the needs and desires of women and marginalized people. And right now, with so many real threats looming and outcomes unknown, I want to read stories that, though they may be filled with angst and yearning, I know will end happily.

When I was seeking a critique of the heteronormativity of Regis’s definition of the romance novel, I found Jonathan A. Allan’s discussion of her work in “Reading the Regis Roundtable: An Outsider’s Perspective,” published as part of a roundtable discussion convened by the Journal of Popular Romance Studies in 2013, on the tenth anniversary of the publication of A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Allan’s focus on the happily-ever-after in particular as problematic surprised me. He writes, “While I agree with Regis that much of the ‘values [of romance] are profoundly bourgeois’3—and they may indeed be read this way—I want to suggest that attached to these values is an insistence upon heteronormativity: specifically, to the heteronormative ideal that Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism,’” and, concluding, “What readers love about the happily ever after is that it promises a tomorrow,” questions whether this promised tomorrow insists too much on domesticity and a “cruel optimism” that, impossibly, “Our happily ever after will bring an end to our sad stories, restoring what was lost.” There’s so much I want to unpack and think and write about here, and I very much accept Allan’s critique, but all the same, he has pointed to and named what I yearn for so much, even more than love and romance—which is for there to be a tomorrow.

In library school, we were frequently asked to consider such definitional questions as What is information? and What is a book? In two different courses I encountered the question of whether an antelope is a document, both times in the article “Information as Thing,” in which Michael K. Buckland, citing the views of Suzanne Briet, writes: “A wild antelope would not be a document, but a captured specimen of a newly discovered species that was being studied, described, and exhibited in a zoo would not only have become a document, but ‘the catalogued antelope is a primary document and other documents are secondary and derived.’”

I admire the mind that can take up such a question and respond with such clarity and thoroughness, though I also find it suspect; the catalogued antelope is obviously a colonial subject. Mine is not such a mind. When I taught poetry writing workshops, for example, students often asked But what is poetry, particularly in discussions of prose poetry or of metered versus free verse poetry, and over time I lost interest in this question. What eventually seemed more useful than trying to categorize a given work as poetry or not poetry was describing its traits so that I might consider how those traits function in the work and how I might employ those techniques myself. Traits of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, for example, include its matter-of-fact narrator, who is deeply sad but takes a stance of curiosity toward her sadness. The book incorporates elements of both memoir and philosophy, particularly aesthetics. It is brief, comprising only 95 short pages, and written in prose, organized in numbered sections after the example of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s propositions. Is it poetry? Who knows? As a reader, writer, and teacher of poetry, I don’t have to decide.1

Despite my skepticism about definitions, when reading the literature on Don Quixote, I did wish that I could find an origin for the thing we call the novel. Many people have said that Don Quixote is the first novel, and it has always seemed telling to me, if not inauspicious, that what might be the first novel is the story of a man driven mad by reading. Not everyone agrees that Don Quixote was the first, however. Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría, for example, calls it the first modern novel. Ian Watt says that Robinson Crusoe, published more than a century after Don Quixote, was the first novel. And Margaret Anne Doody begins her book The True Story of the Novel with the bold claim, “This book is the revelation of a very well-kept secret: that the Novel as a form of literature in the West has a continuous history of about two thousand years.”

I like the capaciousness of Doody’s outlook. She writes:

I believe that a novel includes the idea of length (preferably forty or more pages), and that, above all, it should be in prose. . . . If anybody has called a work a novel at any time, that is sufficient—so Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Voltaire’s Candide, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, can all be admitted. When we are trying to discover what a genre might be (and the idea of “genre” is itself at once loose and arbitrary ) it is too soon to impose strict definitions and qualifications. Nothing is precluded by my theory, which comes not to destroy but to fulfill.

I also like Henry James’s description of the novel as a “loose, baggy monster.” This vision of the genre as monstrous jibes with an account that Timothy Snyder gives of origin stories—that we should be suspicious of origin stories that imagine a past state of innocence and purity (e.g., the Garden of Eden) and instead think of origins as arising from encounters like those in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tells stories about “weird contacts involving violence and sex and families that generally don’t work out” but do result in transformations.

And so it would appear that my conclusion is that the novel is a prosy monster of indefinite origin, and definitions don’t matter much anyway, so who cares whether or not Don Quixote was the first novel. I certainly don’t, not anymore. But next time I want to take a bit of a detour to tell an origin story of sorts—the story of my beginnings as a reader of romance novels, the definition of which matters very much.

Spring break came very late this year for NYC students, at the very end of this month. On the kids’ first day off, I took them to the American Museum of Natural History, where we saw the blue whale, space show, and dinosaur bones. The 15yo apparently still knows everything he ever learned about dinosaurs but was surprised that their skeletons weren’t as large as he remembered, especially the bones of the T-Rex. I again marveled at the comparatively teeny tiny head of the Apatosaurus and wondered about the millions upon millions of years when creatures roamed the earth without any notion of philosophy or poetry.

En route to the museum I reread the beginning of Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins. I had started reading the novel earlier in the month but had put it to the side for a couple weeks while I reacquainted myself with Ukrainian history, via Timothy Snyder’s lectures at Yale (I listen to them as I would a podcast) and The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy. The narrator of Forgottenness is obsessed with the life of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, a historian who became involved in the Ukrainian nationalist movement that before World War I was based in Halychyna (also known as Galicia, where my maternal grandmother’s parents came to the States from). In a metaphor that runs through the novel, the narrator compares time to a blue whale:

I suddenly began to think about time as the thing that unites an endless rosary of senseless events; and also about the fact that only in the sequence of these events is there meaning; and that it’s not God, not love, not beauty, not the greatness of intellect that determines this world, but only time—the flow of time and the glimmering of human life within it.

Human life is its sustenance. Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it onto a homogeneous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance. Yet it wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it. I thought to myself: I’ve already got one foot there, out in complete forgottenness. The process of my inevitable disappearance was initiated at the moment of my birth. And the longer I live, the more I vanish. My feelings and my emotions vanish, my pain and my joy; the places I’ve seen vanish, and the people I’ve met. My memories vanish,as do my thoughts. My conception of the world vanishes. My body vanishes, more and more very day. The world within me and around me vanishes, leaving no trace, and I can do nothing to safeguard it.

This blue whale, like the dinosaurs it consumed so long ago, leaving behind only a few fragmentary remnants for us to puzzle over, has no notion of philosophy or poetry. As the narrator says, it “continues to live in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.”

My reading and understanding of philosophy and literary theory are slim and shaky at best, and I habitually relieve myself of any responsibility for dealing with any of it by finding a fault in the reasoning of whatever has momentarily engaged my attention. When John Ganz wrote a series of posts on René Girard at the end of last year, I worried that I was going to have to deal with Girard, given his writing on Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. Girard’s central theory, among those ideas for which he has found great favor in the American Right, is that of mimetic desire: “Man [sic] is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” I finally read all four posts this month, and Ganz kindly found the fault in Girard’s thinking that relieved me of having to read him; in explaining how Girard accounts for the novels of Honoré Balzac, which do not really fit Girard’s theory, Ganz writes:

For now I will just say that the way Girard attempts save his theory here is quite frankly a piece of definitional chicanery: the novels and novelists who replicate his theory are the really novelistic ones, while those who don’t are merely romantics, who reflect but do not reveal mimetic desire: “In the future we shall use the term romantic for the works which reflect the presence of a mediator without ever revealing it and the term novelistic for the works which reveal this presence. It is to the latter that this book is primarily devoted.” So, the really novelly novels are the ones that novel the way you say they ought to novel—Uh huh.

Distinguishing between the romance and the novel to favor one over the other is nothing new. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis traces the history of the use of the terms romance and novel; the account of their difference that Regis cites by novelist and historian Clara Reeve, writing in 1785, is far more typical than Girard’s: the novel is “a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written” whereas the romance “in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to.” Additionally, writes Regis, “Deborah Ross claims that this novel/romance distinction has been manipulated to argue that women always write the wrong sort of books—‘novelists’ such as Henry Fielding could scorn ‘romancers’ such as Eliza Haywood. Then, years later, which the aesthetic wheel had turned, ‘romancer’ Sir Walter Scott scorned ‘novelist’ Jane Austen.” Finding ways to belittle and scorn the work of women—nothing new under the sun!

Anyway, the volume of what has been written on Don Quixote is far too large for me to read in my time on Earth. John Milton is probably the last person in history to have read what he thought was everything.

I read far more in April than I can account for here. I haven’t kept track of any of it, and meanwhile the green that a few weeks ago was just a mist in the trees has grown full and bright. Let’s see what I can do with this space in May.

Please understand that when I write about romanticism or the role of the critic, my questions are urgent, not merely intellectual. I was once told that I might never be happy—I was too romantic, expecting life to be the way it is in books. This idea has troubled me since, especially because even in books, the expectation that life should be the way it is in books famously tends to work out rather badly for the protagonist, such as for Don Quixote and Emma Bovary.

I have wrestled more with Don Quixote than with Madame Bovary. I have read Madame Bovary twice but not in many, many years; the last time I tried to read it, I got to the part where Charles Bovary is considering how he might operate on Hippolyte’s club foot, read the clause it was necessary to cut the tendon of Achilles, closed the book, and never opened it again. I suppose I’ve gotten through reading about the botched surgery twice in my life already, but I haven’t yet felt up to reading about it a third time.

Don Quixote, on the other hand, I return to again and again. The novel tells the story of an aged hidalgo who read books of chivalry “until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad.” In his madness, he arms himself and sets off to right wrongs and win fame as a knight errant. I don’t like Don Quixote himself, but I very much enjoy the ironic, multilayered, polyvocal novel that tells his tale—and so many other tales as well.

My favorite part of the novel is the second sally, or expedition, which comprises most of Part I, first published in 1605. (Part II was published ten years later and is set a world in which everyone whom Don Quixote meets has read Part I of Don Quixote.) This part of the story includes episodes like the famous one with the windmills, where Don Quixote sees something and projects some idea about chivalry onto it (for example that the windmills are actually giants), Sancho Panza protests (“What giants?” he asks), a catastrophic battle follows, in which Don Quixote and sometimes other people (or creatures) get hurt, and then Don Quixote and Sancho discuss what happened. On the road, in the Sierra Morena, and at Juan Palomeque’s inn, Don Quixote and Sancho also encounter many people who tell their own stories, and these stories conform to other literary types (besides Don Quixote’s favored chivalric romances), such as the pastoral, picaresque, and so on. These stories are braided together, nested within each other, and frequently interrupted.

Don Quixote is, of course, a fool, but it is impossible to declare with any certainty how Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, viewed this foolishness. In Cervantes’s time, to publish books in or import books to Spain required a license, and anonymity was not permitted to authors. Meanwhile, an index of prohibited books had been established, and the Inquisition enforced conformity through violence. This context, critic Carroll B. Johnson argues in Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction, accounts for the challenges of interpreting Cervantes’s texts, in which he deploys irony in order to get his stories past the censors. This irony makes it difficult for readers today to understand Don Quixote’s madness as Cervantes might have intended—is it a sign of his delusion or of his refusal to conform to the senselessness of his world?

My view is that Don Quixote is deluded, and dangerously so. The nature of his foolishness is very different from that of The Fool, whose image (as rendered by Pamela Colman Smith) I have used as my avatar for years. The Fool in the tarot is open to experience, willing to make mistakes or fall down, and he walks toward an unknown future, as represented by the edge of the cliff. Don Quixote, on the other hand, isn’t really open to experience. Instead, he projects his own ideas—his delusion—onto experience, as in his encounter with the windmills. He is a bad reader, lacking the thoughtfulness of the critic, expecting the world to conform to his vision instead of looking to see what is actually there.

This post, the first of a few on Don Quixote, is excerpted and adapted from a presentation titled “Reading Novels Will Mess You Up: Don Quixote and the Modern Novel,” which I gave in December 2022 in the class From Manuscripts to eBooks: Studies in Print Culture taught by Dr. S. E. “Shack” Hackney at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York.

I am a slow and fitful reader of poetry and nonfiction and voracious reader of novels. I am also curious about—sometimes even suspicious of—my enthusiastic novel reading. What does reading all these long, fictional stories do for me, or for anyone?

Additionally, I am curious and suspicious about my curiosity and suspicion. Why all the fuss? Has a Puritan prejudice against fiction seeped into my unconscious?

This habit of turning such questions over and over in my mind is intrinsic to my work as a critic. And, of course, among the questions that I ask myself are: What is criticism? What is criticism for?

These two sentences from an article in Britannica on literary criticism by Frederick C. Crews serve well as a general answer to these questions: “Justification for [the critic’s] role rests on the premise that literary works are not in fact self-explanatory. A critic is socially useful to the extent that society wants, and receives, a fuller understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him [sic].” To be clear, I do not subscribe to the Easter Egg Hunt theory of literature, by which students are instructed to “read between the lines” in order to understand a poem (usually) or other work of literature. In other words, the reason literary works are not self-explanatory is not because meaning in literature is hidden. Rather, it is because meaning in literature is excessive. Texts do not stand on their own. They speak among themselves, as Adso of Melk realizes in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and are also embedded in particular social, cultural, and historical conditions—reflecting those conditions, responding to them, and even sometimes affecting them.

In recent weeks I’ve encountered arguments defining the role of the critic as doing more than considering the aesthetic qualities of artistic works. The first was in an episode of Unclear and Present Danger by Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz on (of all things) the Michael Bay movie The Rock. I have never seen nor will ever see many of the movies that Bouie and Ganz discuss on the podcast, which does not diminish my enjoyment of their show; more often than not, the movie is an occasion for them to discuss some related topic or theme of the 1990s—the malaise of life after (what some believed to be) the end of history, the emergence of the Internet, the then prevailing optimism regarding technology and its seemingly wondrous possibilities, the preconditions for the so-called War on Terror, and so on. Their discussion of The Rock, for example, begins with observations on the stupidity of the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, according to the 2016 Chilcot report, may have been based in part on the depiction of chemical weapons in the movie, and builds toward Bouie’s not-quite-tongue-in-cheek question whether, given how they influence our perceptions of ourselves and the world, movies should exist at all.

“It is a little scary to consider the power of art to shape things for ill,” says Ganz, citing as an example the role of aesthetics in fascism, but neither he nor Bouie—nor, of course, I—wishes to live as in Plato’s republic, from which poetry, which “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up,” has been banished. Ruminating on art and criticism, Ganz sees the passions that art awakens and feeds as tempered by thought. In distinguishing between propoganda and art, he says, “I believe that propoganda brings you away from the work of art with a really specific view of action, and a work of art leaves you in a state of uncertainty, or more of an openness and thoughtful position about what the world is about and should be done in politics.” And in rejecting Plato’s stance, he says, “I’m unwilling to impose a regime of censorship beyond the critic, I suppose. . . . And I wish people paid more attention to criticism because it permits you to consume things that are ‘problematic’ without reacting to it. . . . There’s a way to relate to these things in a thoughtful way (which I guess is what we’re trying to do?) that’s not reactive.”

This thoughtfulness is not that of the logician. Open, uncertain, it is itself a kind of a feeling—a feeling I enjoy. I like asking questions I can’t quite answer, questions whose answers generate more questions, questions I have questions about. I like hearing someone like John Ganz think out loud about the questions he’s wrestling with; in fact, thinking out loud is a pedagogical tool I use all the time as a librarian, especially in reference chat. I want students to know it’s OK not to know and to show them what fumbling toward a solution or answer looks like. I once wrote about my fear “that being asked questions will lead to a revelation of my ignorance—or worse, that I will lead a student to a dead end”; the antidote to this fear was my realization that I could bear this anxiety, especially on behalf of a student who does not have my years of practice and training in research. I had to show myself, too, that it’s OK to fumble my way through uncertainty—even slowly, while someone is waiting.

Can I hold my own views lightly—in uncertainty—while also counting myself a critic? I don’t know how else to proceed. And anyway, I don’t think that complete understanding is possible. There’s always something getting away.

Last Saturday morning I went birdwatching with the Ditmas Park Birdwatcher’s Club, organized by Andrew, proprietor of our local bookstore, and led by Jalen, an extraordinary young man with an encyclopedic knowledge of birds and a gift for telling about their habits and lives. Though I have gone on many walks at one of the Audubon Society’s wildlife sanctuaries on Cape Cod, I’d never before gone on a walk with the main purpose of seeking out birds. I hoped on this walk not just to see birds but to learn how to see birds—what to look for, and where and when and how. Before we even began to look, Jalen spoke about wind direction, temperature, and time of year, and I came to understand just how contingent and dynamic birdwatching is, and not just because birds don’t stay in one place as trees do. I also came to understand that looking for birds involves listening to them as well—hearing a bird tells you where to look for it.

I want to know how to see birds in the same way I want to know how to see trees, clouds, the moon, and stars. Last year, in an inquiry into the history of the trees of Prospect Park, I announced my commitment to learn to really see what’s there, which I described as a different sort of romanticism than the romanticism of my youth, a romanticism that involved lots of wishing, dreaming, and making things up.

Lately I’ve been wondering how I can call this commitment to seeing what’s real any sort of romanticism at all. Isn’t romanticism supposed to be about the primacy of the imagination, opening the doors of perception, and etcetera?

This question pointed me to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake so that I could find out exactly what he might have meant by “the doors of perception.” Reading this text is a bracing experience: in declarative sentence after declarative sentence after declarative sentence, the narrator states claims—or reports on the “Proverbs of Hell”—in a voice that is simultaneously both wholehearted and ironic. The doors of perception appear at the conclusion of an expository section in the middle of the work:

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

These lines of exposition follow a “Memorable Fancy” in which the narrator questions the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, asking them “how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them”; Isaiah answers: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing.”

Given the irony and many contradictions in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I’m not sure I fully understand what Blake might have meant in these lines, but in themselves they express what I seek: to encounter the ineffable through my attention to small, particular things. This search is a kind of romanticism because it is compelled by a sense that there is always something extra, something just beyond what I can perceive, and that the only way to comprehend it is to keep looking. Whereas to make things up with no reference to the real would be to live a dream life closed up in Plato’s cave—and to miss loving what is right in front of me. Because to attend to things as they are is to love them. Because imagining a better world requires this kind of love.

While reading Blake I wished that I, too, could write a manifesto, and I guess I just did.

Meanwhile, in the past couple days I realized that, given my understanding of how plants unfurl and bloom in spring—snowdrops followed by crocuses and soon after daffodils and then the pale green haze of the earliest new leaves, and so on—I am certainly capable, over time, of adding some knowledge of migrating birds to the story. I’ve also decided that, because I don’t have binoculars and also because I spend most of my time in the park running in loops around the park, I should focus my beginning study of birds on learning their songs. I can learn how to look by listening.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe did not come with the Olympia to New York City this fall; instead of the painting, we saw a study for the painting. This painting infuriated me from the moment I first saw a reproduction of it. Why doesn’t the woman in the foreground get to wear clothing? And I cannot help but share in Maxine Greene’s irritation (as I remember her commenting in class once) with how the man on the right is pointing as he talks. Definitely mansplaining! Though we didn’t yet have that word in 1998.

I look at the painting differently now. For one thing, the nude woman appears to be so relaxed, even bemused; she is looking elsewhere, has other things on her mind, and is clearly not listening to the mansplaining of the mansplainer. For another thing, like so many of Édouard Manet’s paintings, this painting seems to be in part a wry joke, set up by inserting contemporary subjects into a scene that formally suggests the mythological or historical concerns of the works of the great masters. But the painting is far more than a mere joke. This commentary on Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Émile Zola, for example, particularly the sentence I have emphasized below, has been much on my mind lately:

The Luncheon on the Grass is the greatest work of Édouard Manet, one in which he realizes the dream of all painters: to place figures of natural grandeur in a landscape. We know the power with which he vanquished this difficulty. There are some leaves, some tree trunks, and, in the background, a river in which a chemise-wearing woman bathes; in the foreground, two young men are seated across from a second woman who has just exited the water and who dries her naked skin in the open air. This nude woman has scandalized the public, who see only her in the canvas. My God! What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men! That has never been seen. And this belief is a gross error, for in the Louvre there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude. But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized. The crowd has kept itself moreover from judging The Luncheon on the Grass like a veritable work of art should be judged; they see in it only some people who are having a picnic, finishing bathing, and they believed that the artist had placed an obscene intent in the disposition of the subject, while the artist had simply sought to obtain vibrant oppositions and a straightforward audience. Painters, especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not have this preoccupation with the subject which torments the crowd above all; the subject, for them, is merely a pretext to paint, while for the crowd, the subject alone exists. Thus, assuredly, the nude woman of The Luncheon on the Grass is only there to furnish the artist the occasion to paint a bit of flesh. That which must be seen in the painting is not a luncheon on the grass; it is the entire landscape, with its vigors and its finesses, with its foregrounds so large, so solid, and its backgrounds of a light delicateness; it is this firm modeled flesh under great spots of light, these tissues supple and strong, and particularly this delicious silhouette of a woman wearing a chemise who makes, in the background, an adorable dapple of white in the milieu of green leaves. It is, in short, this vast ensemble, full of atmosphere, this corner of nature rendered with a simplicity so just, all of this admirable page in which an artist has placed all the particular and rare elements which are in him.

Now, I would not go so far as to suggest that the subject matter of Déjeuner sur l’herbe is arbitrary; nor do I interpret Zola as making any such claim. But what I like about his description of Manet as an “analytic painter” is how it foregrounds the materiality of the artist’s concern—the painter’s love of paint.

Artists love their materials in ways that people who do not make art might not understand. I often think of this passage by Annie Dillard:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”

Do I like sentences? My god, yes I do. As I like gridded Moleskine journals, a type of college-ruled notepad that I can get only at Staples, black Flair medium felt-tip pens, and Prismacolor pencils in all the colors. My pleasure in these things might seem to be beside the point to everyone but me, because the versions of my poems that most other people read are not the versions written with a Flair pen on a notepad. And if I have to, say in order to capture a turn of phrase before it dissolves in my mind, I’ll write with a ballpoint pen on the back of an envelope. The essential material of my work is words. Whereas the essential material of a painting is paint.

“For the crowd, the subject alone exists,” writes Zola, and these words make sense for me of the common contempt for abstract painting. If there is no evident subject to look at in a painting, then some people—those in Zola’s tormented crowd—don’t know what to look at. What is there to see, if all there is to see is paint?

Of course, in any painting, all that you are looking at is paint. And even in a painting with a clearly evident subject, I often study the paint, as in Wheat Field with Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh.

The digital image cannot capture the texture of the impasto that I love in this painting, especially in the turbulent sky. Those white-and-blue swirls appear to be cumulus clouds—the happy clouds of a bright summer day—but, rendered in thick paint as they are, they don’t seem to be drifting calmly across the sky as I usually see them. There’s something unsettled in this landscape: too much sunlight, too much beauty, it’s all too too much.

In my most recent trip to the Met, I noticed that the roses in this still life are much like the clouds in Wheat Field with Cypresses: thick and swirly.

According to the Met, though, those roses were once pink but have faded. I want to go back now and look again to study the traces of pink in the paint that I did not see before.

Another painting I’ve been studying is this one of Claude Monet’s water lilies at Giverny.

Both from a distance and in the digital image, this painting looks sketchy, like a dashed-off pastel drawing. Studied closely, however, the painting is clearly made of paint, laid thickly and it seems quickly on the canvas to suggest water, lily pads, lilies, and willow leaves. In this work, Monet’s looking and looking and looking at his water lilies and rendering them again and again in paint over the years resulted in something like abstraction.

This work is the work of an old man; he painted it in his mid-to-late seventies, after a lifetime of study and practice. Presumably Monet knew what he was doing when he made it. But, notably, contempt for abstract art is often expressed through the claim that a four-year-old child could make that.

First of all, no they couldn’t. But also, this claim expresses contempt not just for abstract art, but also for children.

This drawing, made by a 22-month-old child, is all energy, pleasure, and curiosity: energy and pleasure in the gesture, and pleasure in and curiosity about the materials. (What gives more pleasure in this world than a fresh box of good crayons?) When I first laid eyes on this drawing, it revealed to me the meaning of Suzuki Roshi’s words: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.”

In the conclusion of the same talk, Suzuki Roshi says, “This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.” In Monet’s water lilies and in Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm I see the vitality and curiosity of beginner’s mind. True, these artists have a mastery of their materials that is beyond my comprehension—how, for example, did Pollock orchestrate the accidents of how paint drips and splatters to produce such a gorgeous composition? But it seems to me that these works arise from the investigations of an artist with questions, not from the assertions of one who believes he has found answers. The artist maintains the playful experimentation of a child—just with far greater knowledge and skill.

Some of the connections I drew in this essay arose as I wrote it; others arose in conversations with my husband, himself an abstract painter. He recently started a Substack newsletter where he will occasionally share his thoughts on art, beginning with his confrontation with another abstract artist, Cy Twombly—check it out.