There’s a kind of sheltering in reading. I find myself seeking refuge in the research for my current novel project about abandoned and dwindling towns in Italy. In Lisa St. Aubin de Teran’s A Valley in Italy, I’m transfixed by her family’s renovation of a derelict medieval castle in Umbria, the way they are colonizing the ancient ruin one room and archway at a time, even while Italy, in real time, is ravaged by this pandemic, even while we watch history write itself into our anxieties and grocery deliveries and news feeds. The other night our Seattle neighbors all came out on their porches to bang pots and pans in solidarity and I thought of all those Italians singing the national anthem to each other from their balconies. Here’s to pitched voices and small triumphs while we shelter in place.

On reading Peter Orner’s  “Never Childhood to a Child: On Reading Marianne Boruch during Covid-19”

I think of Halloweens past, the darkest, most thrilling and chilling nights of my childhood, walking with R. so bravely past the Lowell estate on Fox Hill Road, the trees allowing semi pine-obscured views of Blue Hill, which was to us the universe’s tallest mountain (think: Skunk Hour‘s, “a red fox stain covers Blue Hill”). We walked holding hands, toting our trick-or-treat bags, R.’s father a good 8 paces behind us though I don’t think we really knew that, or allowed ourselves to know until we were “older” and annoyed by his albeit discreet, whiskey perfumed presence. We were watched yet in our minds we enjoyed absolute independence as we turned right onto Farm Lane and left onto Pleasant Valley stopping to chat with each house’s kind occupants.

Today, the roof of our small NYC building provides a safe haven. Some light, some air, not a soul watching us (all of our neighbors’ blinds are down) as we walk back and forth toward north and south parapets, our current horizons, knowing that each step brings us closer to, if not a Milky Way, the day when that vast black cloud above yields to the sun.

In early February, my mother died. I held her hand and sang to her while she was in a coma in the hospital, was able to say goodbye. Did she hear me? I couldn’t go to her funeral because my disabled husband, who in his protective loyalty accompanied me to see her, could not make the grueling trip again. Then he was hospitalized for congestive heart failure. I and our 13-year-old daughter, who seems made of strength beyond her years, protected each other during his month in rehab. He’s a bit stronger now, and we’re all home, trying to keep from catching the virus. My father, ailing, who has lost the love of his life and partner of nearly 60 years, calls often. He’s lonely, but also, I’m pretty sure, goes on trying to protect me. Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” describes the female of a species of octopus who secretes a paper-thin egg case. The poem’s three sentences of syntactic tangle enact the complex, imprisoning ferocity of maternal protection, each clause and branch of sentence so hooked into what complicates, reverses and rebuilds it that quotation seems difficult. But try this:

the intensively
   watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,—
   leaving its wasp-nest flaws
   of white on white, and close-
 
   laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
   a Parthenon horse,
   round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
   is the only fortress
   strong enough to trust to.

The “as if” in the knowing. That ferocious and hedging declaration. It’s also there, softer but no less intense, in the face of the mother in Alice Neel’s double portrait “Nancy and Olivia.” The mother’s uncertain hold on the baby. Her dread. But she will not let go.

As a college student, I was introduced to the idea that one can either be a “Dostoevsky reader” or a “Tolstoy reader”—never both. Always a fan of team sports, I immediately picked a side, throwing my lot in with Dostoevsky’s frantic intelligence and sense of transcendence.

 I didn’t understand Tolstoy, at the time—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I wasn’t touched by him. I was a Philosophy and Russian Language major, and reading Dostoevsky made me feel I was doing the work of both disciplines at once, while also maybe running sprints and jumping hurdles. Once, my junior year, a friend ran into my living room and pulled me to my feet and said, “It’s time to do, Adrienne! It’s time to do!” Meaning, it was time to live. This was extremely Dostoevsky energy.

Recently, however, I began reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the first time in many years, following along with Yiyun Li and A Public Space’s #TolstoyTogether initiative. I figured it was only 12 pages a day, and I could drop out quietly if I didn’t enjoy it. But a funny thing happened: at last, I started to feel Tolstoy’s rhythms.

A page or two in, my blood pressure dropped, and I began to calm: not in the false way I can Force-Quit my anxiety while watching a scary movie, but in a deeper, limbic manner, cool blood rushing through my veins. Tolstoy, I’ve realized, is a master of the slow moment. Sometimes, as I begin a chapter, I am uncertain who is on stage, what their relationship is to one another: at nineteen, this frustrated me, and made me feel stupid. Now I know to simply wait. Tolstoy allows scenes to play out patiently, does not require each of them to unravel a plot so much as it excavates a bit of humanity.

His voice is also singular. Tolstoy writes with omniscience, but not distance: his narrator speaks from outside his characters, but with such precision that he seems to speak from within, substituting humanity for irony, observation for judgement (at least most of the time). Tolstoy was not always right for me: I was not ready for him. But now his moment has arrived.

We are all together in a place of waiting and noticing—often, noticing a bit too much, as numbers and theories unspool in the news, and hysteria floods every social media platform. Reading War and Peace allows me to close the door on all that noise, just for a while. And it opens a new door, onto a longer view of history. Onto the quiet space that exists between human beings who are willing to listen to one another, and onto the immanence of the natural world, which continues its discourse, despite our chatter.

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (Inner Sanctum Edition). Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York, Simon and Schuster, Inc, 1942.                                                 https://apublicspace.org/news/detail/tolstoy-together

Today, locked in our house, I hear Nathan McClain’s “Houdini” in a different way from when I first heard him read it, different still from when I first read it on the page, different, like everything else, from yesterday. “Who would’ve known you’d grow so afraid of stillness, / enclosed spaces, that you’d no longer remember a time you weren’t / subtracting seconds from your life, as if each breath were held?” the poem begins and each line after winds its way around the listener, tighter and tighter, Once I loved, with shivery pleasure, how the boy at the end of the poem slips free of the poem with his plea, “Mom, can I please be a ghost, please?” But today I want him to stay. I want to keep him, my own family, this poem, close and not let go.