The past couple of weeks I’ve tried to fill my life with small, material things while I fill my mind with big, abstract literary theory. Reading theory has a way of making me feel unmoored and unlike myself. I can’t speed through theory like I can with most books. I spent three hours this morning reading fifty-two pages of Edward Said’s Beginnings. I spent a little over thirteen hours reading Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests; that averages to a rate of around thirty pages an hour. The first ten pages alone took me forty-five minutes. It’s exhausting and sometimes demoralizing. My brain has to work in new ways to comprehend it all, which is no bad thing, when the theory is good. When it clicks, it can feel like a revelation. But usually, I just end up feeling unqualified to argue with parts I disagree with, because it’s all couched in so much (pseudo?) intellectual verbiage I second-guess whether I actually understood it at all. Moreover, theorists who have made me see the world completely anew are few in number – notably, Roland Barthes, Terry Eagleton, and Judith Butler. They’ve enriched my understanding not only of literature, but of culture, of people, of how people use words to construct culture. I’m still processing everything from Palimpsests and I’ve barely started Beginnings (I’m still in the first hundred pages), so I’m not sure I have a grasp on it yet.
At its worst, though, reading theory (even theory that has changed my life) makes me second-guess not only my own understanding, but my own capabilities, and then – this sounds dramatic I know – the point of any of it at all. Of my work, of degrees, of literature, of any of it. So, to try to counterbalance the sense of nihilistic dread that my readings are currently producing in me, I’m grounding myself with material things that make me remember why I like being on earth and why I feel like things matter (which wasn’t meant to be a pun, but then I saw, matter/matter – oh god, I’ve been reading so much theory).
I’ve held countless cups of tea in my hands, marveling at the warmth, at the way a cup of tea really can make me feel like all is well in the world. The milky-sweet, earthy smell of breakfast tea in the morning. Peppermint tea to perk up an afternoon. The mildness of chamomile just before bed.
I’m learning to knit, and I wonder at how people learned these skills. Who first took thread and needles and made a scarf? Who learned to cast on and who thought to weave the threads in different ways to make different stitches? For that matter, who first thought to spin yarn from wool?
I have these same thoughts about bread. Who thought, “Ah yes, yeast! I shall take some of this, mix it with wheat I learned to grow then decided to ground down, and watch it become a big, bubbling mass, then put it in a hot oven and see what happens!”? I’m glad someone thought to do this, but really. I’m sure catching wild yeast the first time was a fluke, but I don’t think my first thought would have been to mix the stuff with other stuff and then eat it.
I bought a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store on Friday. They’re hothouse flowers, of course, but they smell like spring around the corner, and they add color and joy to my table. I notice each day how the sun sets later and later, how we gained ten minutes in just four days. How the air feels fresher somehow, but maybe that’s just my imagination. How soon the tree outside my window will begin to bud.
I took my pen — the same one I’ve used to take countless notes — and drew a little scene of a tent pitched by a river in front of a mountain, and another of a little cabin surrounded by trees. How good it felt to put pen to paper and to draw lines instead of letters, for the first time in a million years.
I curled up in bed with a hot water bottle and a book for fun on Sunday afternoon. I breathed in the scent of clean sheets; I listened to rain patter against the windows, to two rumbles of thunder – and felt absurdly happy to hear thunder in January, while curled up in bed. I lost myself in a book, really let myself be pulled under by the words, in a way that doesn’t happen nearly so often now as it did when I was a child.
And then I go back to work, grateful that this is my work. I pick up the book of theory, and I wrestle with the words, and I try to let myself see the world in new ways.
(Photos: Top: My flowers, my tea, and the book I read for fun and highly recommend, The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert. Lower: My ink sketch of a cozy little log cabin surrounded by trees.)