A brief note:
I drafted the majority of this dispatch two weeks ago, and am glad I am able to share it with you all. That said, I also think it urgent, at the top end, to express solidarity with the people of Gaza and to acknowledge that we’re witnessing a genocide unfold, one committed by a nuclear state against a stateless people—a population of 2 million who have, to now, been living under apartheid rule.
At the time of this writing, the Israeli government has murdered over 6,500 Palestinians, predominantly in airstrikes; an estimated 1,100 more—mostly children—remain lost among the rubble. Following comments from President Biden that he had “no confidence” in reported death tolls, the Palestinian Ministry of Health published the names of the dead, to the extent that the dead are countable. So many bodies remain unidentified; so many are missing.
We bear witness—this framing always feels insufficient—as hospitals are obliterated in real, entirely watchable time, journalists (and the families of correspondents) are killed, and an unfathomably-well-oiled propaganda machine clicks into horrifying motion. We know who is committing these actions—actions even the U.N. argues are in violation of international humanitarian law—and we also know who’s funding and arming a great deal of it.
Netanyahu, Zionism, and those who aid and abet this iteration of an annihilative colonialist offensive do not, and can never, speak for or in the name of all Jewish people. This should go without saying. You can read about JVP’s call for an immediate ceasefire here. The American media and our political establishment, unsurprisingly, are as war-hungry as they ever were. It’s disheartening and, yes, infuriating to see people fall prey to, delight in, and disseminate the same lies that formed the ideological bedrock for America’s War on Terror in the wake of 9/11.1
But there’s something else in the air—a sense that we are at a tipping point, that a political sea change might be on the horizon.
I’m no expert, and I get that people don’t come to my little Proust newsletter for geopolitics, but I can’t and won’t stay silent in the shadow of such atrocities. I don’t pretend to be perfect, or even perfectible, in my understanding of the world. I can, however, expand that understanding, educate myself, and speak toward what I know to be right.
Some work I’ve read in the last weeks that seemed to me to offer illumination: Arielle Angel’s “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other”; Gabriel Winant’s “On Mourning and Statehood”; Protean Magazine’s series “Letters from Gaza” (of which three parts are currently live); Mosab Abu Toha’s “The View from My Window in Gaza”; and Saree Makdisi’s “No Human Being Can Exist.”
(Selfishly I also want you to read my friend—a woman I look to often as an example of moral and intellectual clarity—Charlotte Shane’s latest newsletter, which addresses how to keep feelings of hopelessness from immobilizing us.2)
Here are some immediate resources and calls to action. I’ve also added my signature to an open letter drafted by the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), an “ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people.” I’m proud to have done so. You can learn more and, if you wish to, sign here. As individuals we often feel disempowered—as a collective, however, we are not powerless. Love & solidarity forever xx
For a long time, I used to go to bed late. Over a decade ago I fled Boston and my graduate program to come to New York. Not for any particular reason, surely not—as you might think—to Become a Writer, but where, out of habit and economic urgency, I found myself again in service work. My first gig here was at a sort of swanky Mexican restaurant. The food was fabulous; my coworkers were talented, funny, and hot; the job was comparatively easy—high volume, yes, but really, I’d spend the six or seven or occasionally eight hours shaking margaritas and popping bottled beers. We’d get a staff dinner each shift, a meal I desperately needed. Some days it was all I’d eat. After we closed up shop, we’d go to the gay bar next door and get a little tanked, dance, or sing karaoke. I’d be in bed by 1, fresh as a daisy the next morning.
Later, I cut my teeth in dives that put on airs, naming themselves ~craft cocktail destinations~ during the peak of the industry’s mixology craze. Suddenly, I was barely withstanding thirteen or fourteen hour shifts, locking the bar at 5 or 6 in the morning, staggering into bed as the sun broke the sky above me open, a merciless eye. I knew bartenders then who loved this discordance: the thrill of crawling toward sleep just as the “normies” rose to proceed with their more usual lives. For me it was never anything other than a horror. I felt like a kind of monster as I puffed on a pre-dawn cigarette walking home past diligent joggers and early morning dog-walkers. I felt displaced from time.
Unsurprisingly, my lifelong, mostly occasional struggle with insomnia became, in those long years, a vicious dailiness. As a rule, I don’t sleep well when the sun is up, and the body just isn’t designed to settle into rest after being amped on a manually laborious job for 12+ hours. More than this, endless shots and cocaine had become occupational hazards. The trouble was, you’d have already been at work eight hours before you even arrived at the hard part, the night rush. It’s a punishing rhythm, one you can’t know until you know.
This is why you meet so many sober bartenders in the city—not everyone will fess up, but almost all of us had dealers on speed dial at some point. The substances coursing perpetually through my body only exacerbated my restlessness, my congenitally poor sleep, my chronic night terrors. Often I had to drink enough to knock myself out entirely, or else I’d lie in bed hours-long—caught in a kind of gray stillness—rehearsing every moment of the shift, of the week, reconstructing in my too-active mind every second of my entire fucking life.
The French author Marie Darrieussecq describes insomnia as a kind of metaphysical severance: the alienated experience of being a person “wandering around without a shadow.” For Proust, the problem, too, was existential, it was “living in a sort of death, punctuated by brief awakenings.”3 Darrieussecq’s recent memoir, Sleepless, is an account of “serious” insomnia as a relentless “dance with death,” itself dancing across forms—autobiography, literary criticism, somatic practice, and psychoanalysis among them—in an attempt to reckon with that abyss, “the appalling consciousness of sleeplessness.”
At first I felt reluctant to read Sleepless (Pas dormir in the original French, translated into English by Penny Hueston), though Darrieussecq’s Being Here Is Everything, an experimental monograph on the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, remains one of my favorite books of the last several years. I worried, I guess, that I might summon an old demon back into my life, because it feels like a stalker or a virus, insomnia does, something hanging about the periphery and horribly transmissible, endlessly self-perpetuating. Anxiety over how much longer you’ll lie there waiting to pass out becomes a vicious feedback loop—as the minutes split apart from the linear procession of time, they seem to mock you, to toll a loud bell, to propel you into an ever more meticulous state of alertness.
But Darrieussecq is a deft archivist of insomniac histories—both her own twenty-year struggle (it surfaced, she remarks, in the wake of motherhood: “Our door opened to the baby and my sleep stole away like a cat”) and the death-dances of other writer-sufferers: Kafka, Cioran, and Proust chief among them. The frankness and humor of her account seemed, instead, in many ways a balm—not, as I feared, a dark invocation. Darrieussecq looks the beast in the eye and, rather than recoil, attempts to articulate the outlines of its odd face, to meet her insomnia with curiosity, in a search for understanding.
I’ve been lately reading Sedgwick on La recherche, too, in her posthumous collection The Weather in Proust. Particularly intriguing are her attentions to Proust’s mysticism, which she identifies as a “reality-grounded structure” guided by “every self-alienating aspect of the passage of time.” That is, sleep, love, or “a change in the weather”—each experience an atmospheric disturbance that signals, for Proust’s narrator, the temporary “death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection, but in a different self.” (A passage Sedgwick cites from volume two, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, which we are finishing up this week4).
Proust’s mysticism, she writes, follows from a Neoplatonic tradition interested in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, a kind of reincarnation that joins, for Sedgwick, Proust’s metaphysics to Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. For Plato, souls were sort of like mass—neither created nor destroyed by death; it’s just that they pass between different bodies, not all of which are human. (Whether Plato’s sense of this phenomenon was literal or allegorical remains a matter of debate.) In À l’ombre, Proust goes further to contend that “there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is co-tenant.” I’m curious, as his Novel continues to unfurl itself, whether we will see this notion become more explicitly underpinned by a kind of ethical obligation to the other.
Certainly, Proust’s sense of desire—the erotic dynamic already conjured in the first two volumes between Swann and Odette, the narrator and Albertine—orients along an axis of control and domination, rather than mutuality. Love, like sleep, though, nevertheless displaces us, transmogrifies the individual subject, or the soul, if you’ll have it be such. At the end of Sleepless, Darrieussecq takes a turn toward the ethical, reminding us that “three realms (the unconscious, life in the wild, the stars) exist in the same way: independent of our will.” We might also suggest this about the figure of the other—the other who we might discipline, but who will also always exceed us, as desire exceeds us, and love renders us larger than we had been.
Darrieussecq’s pivot in the closing pages of Sleepless toward an address of our universal condition of vulnerability—one which is not limited to the human, and is expressly, movingly attentive to the flora and fauna of this earth, all living beings in our global ecosystem—seems to me especially astonishing in this current political moment. I am thinking of recent warmongering comments about the “human animals” of Gaza, and Darrieussecq’s reminder—in dialogue with the work of Donna Haraway—that the difference is “not so much between us and animals as between ‘the killable’ and the ‘non-killable.’” Darrieussecq goes on to remark that “in order to make humans killable, all you have to do is animalize them. Human massacres are permitted by animal massacres.”
On her instagram stories today, Charlotte brought a brief piece of writing by Vivien Sansour—founder and director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library—to my attention. Sansour says there that “I have never been prouder to be of people who love birds and bread and whose humble existence has shaken the core of those who are scared of life and who continue to destroy all of it—human and non-human. Call me human animal—it honors me to be from humble people who value all life.” This dispatch has drifted pretty drastically apart from the question of insomnia, but then, these are of course the things that haunt me lately, that leave me lying wide awake in the strange middle of the night.5
à bientôt!
Next up: Volume 3, The Guermantes Way (pagination from the Moncrieff edition)
November: pp 1 - 203 (through “‘This do, and thou shalt live.’ Farewell friend”)
December: pp 203 - 424 (through the end of Part One)
January: pp. 425 - 631 (through “to the category of the most intolerable imbecility”)
February: pp 631 - through the end
You’d think any multicellular organism would see a video of George W. Bush pontificating in the year 2023—calling himself a “hardliner” on Gaza, describing genocide as Netanyahu doing “what he’s got to do,” and lauding the Biden administration—and remember something about the last two decades, but here we are. It seems crucial to note, too, the long legacy of the Bush admin in this particular moment—some facts of which were revealed as far back as 2008.
Speaking generally, as well, you should absolutely subscribe to her substack, “Meant For You.” Charlotte sends out an absolute gem every week.
As Darrieussecq notes too, though, insomnia was Proust’s laboratory: the fundamental condition of his writing.
It’s usually translated as “Within a Budding Grove,” but I prefer the more literal translation of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” particularly as the “little band” in which the narrator discovers Albertine so dominates the majority of our interlude in Balbec. I’ve been struck by the cosmic shift that occurs between Swann and À l’ombre—from the placental, domestic scenes of childhood to the horned-up beach intrigue and social climbing of the narrator’s teen years (is he a teen? his age is sort of inscrutable, non?). I found volume 2 thrilling, though this might have been because I was listening to a peculiarly funny audiobook narrator.
I said I would do a fall books preview in this letter, and while I didn’t get to it in any expansive sense, I want to briefly list some fantastic Fall ‘23 books I’ve read in the last few months—published recently or soon to come:
(1) Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan: a queasy novel of sex and obsession; Graywolf, 9/5
(2) Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (tr. Elina Alter): a lesbian travelogue from Moscow to Siberia, beautifully reviewed by Fernanda Eberstadt in the Times; Catapult, 9/5
(3) Yiyun Li’s Wednesday’s Child: a frank and glimmering collection of stories on mothers, children, grief; FSG, 9/5
(4) Olga Ravn’s My Work (tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell): one of my favorite recent books on new motherhood; New Directions, 9/26
(5) Lydia Davis, Our Strangers: Davis is always a classic, and, you might recall, is a guiding light for this project because of her extensive work on Proust—and her translation of Swann; anyways!, you simply have to listen to Davis in conversation with David Naimon here; Bookshop, 10/5
(6) Helen Garner, This House of Grief and The Children’s Bach: the first two reissues in Pantheon’s project of bringing Garner to an American audience—those who have been following along know I’m an enormous Garner stan (and I’ll finally be writing on her in 2024!); Pantheon, 10/10
(7) Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: a thrilling history of the conglomeration of the publishing industry and its impact on American literature; Columbia UP, 10/24
(8) Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood: a new collection of the always-brilliant Wang’s uncollected early writings, zines, blog posts, and criticism—really an astonishing portrait of a writerly trajectory; Semiotext(e), 11/21
I really enjoyed this one, thanks! I started with the second book, so have a particular affection for it. I think he's a teenager, yes. The 'one intelligence that moves the world' comes up a couple of times in Virgil. (My own substack is about poetry, not Proust, but I did write one piece about reading Proust here https://vamoul.substack.com/p/on-first-reading.)