Six months ago, I read White Nights by Dostoevsky at exactly the wrong moment. Or maybe exactly the right one.
And I’m sharing here today because, yet again, it may be exactly the wrong moment, or the right one. But for entirely different reasons (mostly).
At the time, I suppose I thought it was a novel about longing. Now I think it was my first encounter with architecture. The architecture of loneliness.
When I wrote this, I didn’t yet know that writing could become another way of reading. I certainly didn’t know that my attention would slowly drift away from reviewing books and toward following the movements of my own consciousness as I encountered them. I wasn’t looking for a literary project. I was simply trying to stay close to what happened inside me.
So I see this reading experience standing at the beginning of a trail.
White Nights feels like an early sketch.
I hadn’t yet found words like encounter, registration, architecture, or thresholds. Clarice hadn’t walked into the room yet. Neither had Harpman.
But I was already circling them.
I can see a shift here where my writing stopped trying to conclude or simply report on themes, and moved toward noticing and articulating (or trying to) what happened between a book and me.
So I didn’t know it then, but I was already writing my way toward this Reading Room. And that’s pretty cool.
I’ve left this piece exactly as I wrote it because I don’t want to revise the person who encountered this book. She deserves to stay exactly where she was.
And I actually think it’s one of my stronger Instagram pieces because it’s so immediate.
Originally published on Instagram, January 26, 2026:
White Nights renders longing as a state of being. I encountered it at the wrong moment. Or maybe I just read it too honestly.
Scattered thoughts and fragmented impressions are perhaps the only way to review this:
What does it mean to love briefly? Does it still count if it never becomes shared? If it exists only in conversation, in fantasy, in the charged space between what’s said and what’s withheld? Before a choice is made? Is that even love?
Everything in this story feels dark and enclosed. The narrator’s desire is all interior, not physical, practically devotional. The streets feel emptied of witnesses. Time stretches, or maybe it was folding, I’m not even sure. Moments are too much or sometimes not even enough.
The narrator, far from being deprived of feeling, is totally flooded by it. Everything is emotional. Has weight. Glances. Pauses. Excitement. Everything is meaningful. Nothing is ‘it’s not that deep.’ Ya.
And hope. In all its brutal fucking glory. It becomes an unspent ache. You feel how easily fantasy can replace intimacy when you’ve been alone long enough. And this story is saturated with loneliness. It’s like the longing becomes intoxicating. The ache, the yearning becomes seductive especially if it has nowhere to land.
I love it. I resent it. I keep returning to it…
Because of intensity. Because of the body. Because it exposes how easily solitude convinces you that feeling deeply is the same as being loved. Even a brief closeness can reshape everything.
I finished it feeling seen. And clearly undone. And a bit in lust with all the quotes.
Last night, in the middle of a text message, I wrote something that surprised me.
I wasn’t trying to be profound. I was irritated.
Actually, irritated is too polite a word.
I was somewhere between exasperated and “Jesus fuck dude, read the room.”
Then, almost accidentally, I wrote:
I’m not a woman who waits for a man in a closed room.
And immediately after that:
I’ve got my own reading room.
For a couple months I’ve been building shelves. Writing essays. Collecting encounters. Putting Homer beside Clarice beside Harpman beside Nabokov beside Dazai.
I thought the reading room I was building was a way to record my encounters with books.
Lately, not so sure. I think I’m building something larger than a room full of books. Maybe it’s a house.
With a massive fucking library.
And so this question came to me:
What actually belongs in a reading room?
Shelves, obviously.
Books overflowing.
A comfortable chair with a quilt I sewed.
Windows (lots of them).
Daylight (lots of it).
Honesty.
And then this one totally got me:
Does a reading room even need doors?
I love this question because it feels both ridiculous and strange, and I genuinely don’t know the answer.
Doors separate things.
They divide spaces.
They create compartments.
They permit entry.
They deny entry.
They lock.
They hide.
And that’s when I realized something.
I don’t think I want that kind of architecture anymore.
Yesterday I wrote, half laughing and half furious:
It doesn’t have any fucking doors.
I meant the reading room.
Except… I didn’t.
I meant my life.
This isn’t about everyone who crosses the threshold getting unlimited access (though I feel there is a future entry on that idea) because I’ve actually become much better at boundaries. Hmm.. there’s too much ego in that. I’m learning my boundaries.
But I’m done with secrecy. Full stop. I’m done with side entrances. Hidden wings. Compartmentalized versions of me to fit the compartmentalized version of someone else.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about consciousness this year. I didn’t realize until recently that consciousness has or could have architecture.
Some people organize their lives into rooms:
Professional self.
Romantic self (some have multiple rooms here).
Literary self.
Family self (again, multiple rooms).
While there are moments in life where that matters, I’ve realized that very little inside me stays in its own room.
Living in an open-concept house means joy wanders into grief before I’ve finished making coffee…
Language ends up in love.
Books insist on becoming extended family.
Loneliness sits beside beauty.
Kids interrupt existential thought.
Anger encourages consciousness to keep writing.
Visitors spontaneously combust into metaphors.
Integrity opens a window and soaks up the sunshine.
Nothing seems interested in staying where I left it.
Maybe that’s why I never understood how to keep separate versions of myself.
The reader.
The writer.
The mother.
The runner.
The woman who falls in love.
The woman who chases sunsets.
The woman who rambles about an idea.
The woman who underlines every sentence on every page of a Lispector book.
Nothing within me feels like separate rooms. There are corners, obviously. A kitchen, a closet, probably a skeleton stashed somewhere I haven’t looked in awhile. But it’s still one house. Perhaps even a home.
Books and experiences have revealed to me that everything seems to connect to everything else, exist in one open space.
I can’t read Homer without thinking about my dad.
I can’t read Harpman without thinking about what it means to be registered.
I can’t photograph a sunset without somehow ending up in a conversation about travel, choices, longing and language with a stranger on a dock.
So nothing stays on its assigned shelf for very long.
Looking back now, I can actually see the sequence:
My Dark Vanessa asked: Who is holding the pen?
Clarice asked: Who told you the room needed walls?
Harpman asked: What does it mean to be encountered?
The Odyssey asked: When do stories finally give way to the person standing in front of you?
And somewhere between Penelope needing evidence, Eumaeus opening his door to a stranger, and Odysseus trying to become a husband again after twenty years of survival, I texted someone:
I’m not a woman who waits for a man in a closed room.
I love staring at this sentence.
It’s not dramatic and it’s absolutely true.
It doesn’t say, never love again.
It says, never wait in a closed room again in a house on a street named, “No one knows what’s coming.”
That feels like wisdom rather than anger.
A man was one story.
The architecture was the lesson.
Integrity became the house.
Maybe that’s why certain kinds of relationships hurt as much as they do. Why the structural differences end up hurting both people.
A hidden room.
A locked wing.
A side entrance.
I’ve discovered that kind of structure doesn’t allow me to flourish, especially if I’m waiting inside one of these. Especially if it is in Dorothy’s house, free falling out of the sky. Especially if it’s labelled ‘uncertainty’. And especially if the ventilation system has been turned off by ambiguity.
For me, the rent is paid by my nervous system, and by parts of myself I abandon to remain there. Because clarity and honesty and reality are like oxygen for me.
So all I really want is for someone to say, come see this room too.
And now I’ve come back to the word: threshold. And to that massive fucking library. All the old libraries.
Many of them didn’t have doors.
They had thresholds.
You simply walked in.
I like that.
A threshold acknowledges you’re entering a different kind of space.
I finished Emily Wilson’s translation ofThe Odyssey the same morning I went to see Christopher Nolan’s film. As someone who has admired Nolan’s work for years, I was genuinely excited. It felt like the perfect way to close out my Homer chapter. I drove away a little disappointed.
That’s a difficult thing for me to admit because, on the surface, the film has almost everything I usually love. It’s visually astonishing. The score is atmospheric and immense. The sound design is overwhelming, perhaps a little too overwhelming at times. Many of the iconic moments are there, staged with the technical ambition Nolan is known for. But the film leaned so heavily into that scale and spectacle that the small, potentially impactful moments – the ones that had come to define The Odyssey for me – were often crowded out.
What ultimately kept me at a distance, though, wasn’t the spectacle. It was the writing. It flattened the psychological complexity that Homer spends twenty four books constructing and Emily Wilson so thoughtfully bringing into English. So I wasn’t too surprised when I saw her comments on the script.
The poem earns its emotional moments through years of waiting, memory, uncertainty and relationships built over time. On screen, when many of those same moments/scenes arrived, I didn’t really feel the weight of them.
And more than anything, I missed Odysseus himself. Not the legendary king or the weary veteran, but the contradictions that make him so compelling in the poem, both poems. Homer gives us a man capable of extraordinary tenderness and startling brutality, honesty and deception, humility and hubris. He survives because he is clever, yet that same cleverness repeatedly gets him in trouble. The film smooths many of those rough edges. So what remained was a man carrying trauma, rather than a man wrestling with his own contradictions.
The moment Matt Damon blurted, “We need to assess the situation,” I actually laughed out loud, to the dismay of the people sitting beside me. It wasn’t the modern phrasing that bothered me so much as the feeling behind it. Suddenly I wasn’t listening to Homer or Nolan. I was listening to a project manager. It punctured the world the film had been trying to build.
And I’m not saying dialogue has to be archaic, it’s why Emily Wilson’s translation is so accessible, why I’m curious to read other translations too, but it has to feel as though it belongs to the emotional and imaginative landscape of the story. That line, a few others, at least for me, didn’t.
Also, I kept waiting for humanity. That’s something Nolan has delivered on in other films, which is why the absence stood out so sharply. Instead, many scenes felt functional. He moved the story forward, yes, but often it felt like watching chess pieces advance across a board. Well… maybe it was more like checkers (please don’t come at me).
By contrast, Homer almost never does that. I love how he slows down, lets people hesitate, remember and doubt. He lets husband and wife tell stories after making love. He lets recognition unfold so slowly it hurts.
Perhaps it’s simply that Homer (and so many other authors I’ve spent time with this past year) have trained my attention toward human complexity. Once that happens, a film that prioritizes momentum over interiority ends up feeling like it was telling a different story altogether.
Walking out of the theatre, I wasn’t thinking very much about the Nolan’s interpretation. I was thinking about Homer and what he had accomplished over twenty four books.
Maybe that’s the highest compliment I can give Homer… the way I pay attention. Literature like this doesn’t just change what I think, it has changed what I notice.
I finished The Iliad looking for evidence of what mattered and carrying grief. I expected The Odyssey to carry me somewhere entirely different. Home, and all its many meanings, was my first assumption. That seems obvious enough. It is probably the first thing most people know about Homer’s second epic. A man spends years crossing impossible seas, coping with impossible losses, trying to return to his wife, his son and his kingdom. Emily Wilson certainly prepares us for many of those ideas in her introduction: identity, homecoming, wandering, survival.
Instead, home feels more like the frame, and one to be tested. I found myself paying surprisingly little attention to the journey itself. Almost immediately, I became invested in seeing what happened whenever two people stood before one another. Those moments carried a kind of electricity for me. They always seemed to reveal something the battles and monsters couldn’t. So the adventures became almost incidental. I wasn’t hanging about the Cyclops or the Sirens so much as the spaces where the plot slowed down and people simply had to face each other (and themselves).
And long before Odysseus walks through the door, people already have an idea of who he is. They have memories, rumours, songs, stories. Sometimes that’s all they have. I didn’t know it yet, but that thread would become one of the biggest ideas I carried through the poem.
Stories arrive before Odysseus does
Book 1 softly plants this idea without making much fuss about it. Athena begins telling Telemachus who his father is before we, as readers, really know him ourselves. Then Books 3 and 4 continue that work as Nestor, Menelaus and Helen each add another version of Odysseus. Every account illuminates him a little more, but none of them quite captures the whole man.
Telemachus captivated me immediately. No surprise there; I attach easily to boys in stories, especially coming-of-age, to boys who bloom into their own self in absence of a mother or father. And for him, he is trying to build a father out of other people’s memories during his own becoming. It was absorbing to think: Can someone really know another person through stories alone? And what does a parent’s absence do to our own becoming?
The famous hero suddenly has to live inside his own reputation
Meeting Circe while concurrently reading Madeline Miller’s novel was a delight, but something else caught my attention.
Before she ever meets Odysseus, she already knows his name. Or rather, she knows the stories attached to it. His reputation arrives before he does, just as it does throughout much of the poem.
Odysseus understands that. He walks into the encounter already carrying other people’s versions of himself – the admiration, the fear, the expectations that have gathered around his name. Before he has spoken a single word, he has already been imagined. And he’s actually nervous about it.
Reputation is a strange thing. It can be a gift, a disguise, a shield, an expectation, and sometimes even a prison. It seems to shape every encounter before you have the chance to shape it yourself. And sometimes that feels really unfair.
On hospitality
At first, I found it a little funny, a bit extra. Everyone seems wonderfully excessive about welcoming strangers. Sit down. Eat first. Drink some wine. We’ll figure out who you are afterward.
The more I read, though, the less it felt like a matter of good manners.
Before anyone knows your name, your history, or whether you’re worthy of trust, you’re offered food, warmth, and a place to rest. Care comes before identity. Before explanation. Before proof.
The gentleness struck me. It was dignity.
By the time Eumaeus welcomed a ragged beggar into his home in Book 14, fed him, listened to him and spoke kindly to him without knowing he was actually speaking to his king, I had completely fallen in love with him. Of course I did. He’s steady, kind, faithful, expects nothing and simply does what is right. He is exactly the kind of character I always end up carrying with me.
I’ll never forget writing in the margins,
I love Eumaeus too.
He does not lover her in the way she wants
I can see how easy it would be to flatten Calypso into a captor in Book 5. There was something tender here and so, and not at all surprising, I was sympathetic towards her. She explains why he’s in her care… everyone left or is dead. The war, his war, had taken everything. And there was simply no one to hold this exhausted man.
And then her loneliness of being the person who loves someone already looking elsewhere. Across the sea. And she can’t change this.
She cannot become home for him so she lets him go, warmly, lovingly. It felt deeply human and familiar. So I felt sorry for her, or me, or both of us.
I couldn’t help but think how complicated love can be when care exists, but home does not.
The bridge back to The Iliad
Even as the poem moves away from Troy, Homer reminds us that companionship hasn’t disappeared and Book 8 reached back into The Iliad to offer brotherhood again.
Almost casually Homer gives us the line:
“A friend can be as close as any brother.”
I stopped. I had spent nearly an entire essay writing about camaraderie. Then, one sentence and suddenly Patroclus was standing beside Achilles again. The battlefield, the loyalty, the impossible grief of losing someone who feels so much a part of you. Homer somehow reached back into the first epic and handed this to me again.
What was it all for?
Book 11 may be the strangest book in the poem. The underworld. The prophet. His mother. Agamemnon. Ghosts.
Odyssues meets Achilles. Homer brings him back and places him among the dead. The greatest warrior of the Greek world is no longer speaking from the battlefield but from mortality itself.
I won’t pretend I understood this one but I do remember laughing to myself afterward and writing something wonderfully unacademic:
The glory of war ain’t that glorious.
This was the next major bridge back to The Iliad. Achilles himself confirms it. Glory doesn’t erase loss and it certainly doesn’t erase death. And beneath the armour was just a person wanting to live, to be loved, and then is lost. Somehow Homer managed to make the second epic deepen my understanding of the first.
What even is ‘home’ now?
For twelve books, it’s storms, monsters, gods, temptation, grief, exhaustion. Every obstacle exists to delay the inevitable moment when Odysseus’ feet finally touch Ithacan soil in Book 13. He wakes up, looks around, doesn’t recognize it. The place he has spent years imagining exists exactly where it always has, yet reality refuses to match the image he has carried across the sea. This is where Homer dismantles the idea that home is simply a destination. Odysseus arrived geographically, but nothing inside him has caught up yet.
Looking back at my notes,
Safety is an element of what home means,
I think that was my first attempt to name what felt so significant about this scene. Home wasn’t Ithaca, it was the place where he no longer had to survive. Where he could finally stop scanning the horizon, stop performing, stop scheming, stop calculating every conversation, stop wondering who could be trusted. But he is not there yet.
I was fascinated by his conversation with Athena
Neither of them begin with the truth.
She arrives disguised and he responds with another carefully constructed story. Oh the cleverness here, I smiled at the similarity between them. Athena eventually reveals herself and even seems to admire the very quality that has kept Odysseus alive:
“His mind was always full of clever schemes.”
But I found myself wondering about the cost of that cleverness.
For years, disguise, suspicion and half truths have been survival. Now he’s finally home but can’t simply say, “I’m Odysseus.”
This exchange was another favourite moment:
Odysseus doesn’t simply thank Athena.
He calls her out. He asks, in essence,
If you’ve been helping us all this time… where were you?
I loved that. It wasn’t criticism, it was human. Because after everything his family has endured, after Penelope’s years of waiting and Telemachus growing up without a father, gratitude isn’t his first instinct. Questions are. Athena answers that Telemachus needed to earn his own glory…. maybe.
I’m still not entirely on board with that position.
A small nod to when Odysseus worries about his treasure in this book, which felt… odd. I guess if you’ve survived said monsters, storms and total loss of your crew, you would do a final check on your luggage. I know it’s the deeper layer, when we’re exhausted and disoriented, we often cling to tangible things. So treasure is proof here, that a journey happened, he is still himself and survived.
Fathers and sons
Books 14 through 16 may be my favourite stretch of the entire poem because the homecoming is no longer theoretical, people are beginning to find one another.
Eumaeus continues grieving the master he believes is dead while unknowingly feeding him. Odysseus finally hears what his absence has done to the people who loved him.
Telemachus returns. By then, I already knew him. Now, father and son meet. Odysseus watches his son before revealing himself. He saw a young man, not a boy, who had grown into kindness, caution, loyalty and responsibility. This reunion mattered so much because there was already recognition. The blood relationship explained who they were to one another, but the deeper emotional truth was how they were both affected by the same absence, hope and love. Homer allowed this moment to become what so many reunions are: joy tangled up with grief for all the lost time.
Later, after all the violence, Telemachus simply goes and sits beside his father. It was such a quiet sentence for such an enormous relationship.
Recognition
The anticipation is almost unbearable in Book 19. Clever, scheming Odysseus finally arrives to his own house, a stranger, in disguise. Penelope welcomes him with such kindness, eager to hear any news of her husband, while he sits there listening to the she has lived in his absence. What on earth must he be thinking? For so much of the poem its been his longing to get home. Suddenly I was watching him hear the cost of all those lost years through her own words.
This line stopped me:
“She wept for her own husband who was right next to her.”
Homer wonderfully makes proximity more painful than separation.
Then, she asks for evidence.
Of course she does.
I would ask for evidence too.
You have to.
Don’t you?
What else do years of stories teach us? At some point, words are not enough. Hope alone is not enough. She needs something she can trust.
Then Homer slows everything down.
Eurycleia recognizes him not through prophecy or fate, but through touch. Through memory. Through caring for him when he was a child. His scar.
This book made recognition feel very layered in how it arrives. Perhaps it’s through memory first, then evidence, and finally through the courage to believe who is actually standing right in front of you.
Book 22 is astonishing
It brings together justice, violence, loyalty, and, finally, father and son standing together. But what surprised me was this weird emotion I had for Athena.
Earlier in the poem, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of her constant intervention. A little suspicious because, at times, it almost felt excessive, nudging the events along. By the end, though, I saw something entirely different. She had never abandoned this family. Through all the disguises, delays, grief, and uncertainty, she remained remarkably steady. As everything finally came together, I realized I felt a genuine pang for her too. Somehow, she’d been carrying this family home all along.
Then Homer gives us Book 23
I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading it.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I wrote:
She needed so much convincing.
Then, immediately:
I need so much convincing.
I don’t think I’d realized that about myself until I wrote it.
At this moment the poem stopped being about The Odyssey and became about me. And, if I’m honest, that’s usually how I know a book has truly found me.
Telemachus grows impatient with his mother. The old nurse begs her to believe him. Odysseus is sitting by the hearth waiting. The suitors are dead. The danger has passed. It’s over.
Maybe.
But how do you resolve twenty years of waiting in a single evening?
How do you step out of living in uncertainty for so long?
She’s been defending their home, honouring her husband, and surviving only on hope.
So what does happen when much of life is lived in hope and story?
You learn to be careful with belief.
Penelope crosses the threshold, and even then she remains wonderfully steady. Telemachus scolds her. Everyone around her seems to think recognition should happen immediately.
She waits.
Then Homer gives us one of the most beautiful lines in either epic:
“We have our ways to recognize each other, through secret signs known only to us.”
Not appearance.
Not reputation.
Not another story.
A shared life.
A shared memory.
The bed that only the two of them could truly know.
When she finally believes him, she runs to him, throws her arms around his neck, kisses him, and says,
“You made my stubborn heart believe in you.”
I cried.
Because she never doubted him, she doubted reality. She hadn’t been withholding love. She had been protecting it. And protecting her heart too.
And then Homer gives us one final gift.
After everything – after the war, the wandering, the disguises, the waiting, the recognition – they make love. And then they tell each other stories. I loved that… because now they were doing that together.
One last surprise
I expected Homer to end with Odysseus in Book 24. Instead, he gave us another father.
After The Iliad closed with Priam, I couldn’t help but notice Homer returning once again to the relationship between a father and his son. This time it was Laertes. Another recognition. Another reunion. Not built on appearances, but on memories that only the two of them could have shared.
As the poem drew to a close, I found myself writing one last question in the margins:
Can Odysseus ever be at peace?
Or has war become too much a part of him? Can a man who has spent so long surviving ever truly settle back into ordinary life? To home?
As for the gods…
No change to my (lack of) interest in them. But I loved that Athena and Zeus end the journey with peace. Because if the The Iliad ends with shared grief, The Odyssey ends with the possibility of peace. Possibility, not certainty. And that’s enough.
Finally, on home and me
Looking back, I don’t think The Odyssey was only about home. Homer certainly gives us that language, but by the end I found myself returning again and again to stories, memory, reputation, recognition, and how difficult it can be to truly know another person.
Maybe that’s what home slowly became for me.
It’s where recognition becomes possible. Where stories eventually give way to the person standing in front of you.
And perhaps that doesn’t only happen between people. I think it happens within us too.
The longer I sat with this poem, this essay, the less home felt like a destination waiting somewhere over the horizon. It’s a place inside ourselves that we slowly rebuild after grief, after love, after loss, after being blown off course. A place where we no longer have to survive, perform or live entirely inside the stories we’ve told about ourselves.
This whole Homer journey has felt like moving toward that kind of home. Not one I had to find, but one I am slowly learning to inhabit.
To recognize what has been there all along and keep building on that.
I’m writing this from the beach, well partially. Maybe continue when I get home.
It has been a difficult couple of days personally, and I came here mostly to catch rays and read Clarice. Maybe to let the weather do some of the work my mind has been trying to do.
A few weeks ago I wrote that Clarice walked into my reading room and asked, “Who told you the room needed walls?”
And I think she’s still dismantling them.
The phrase that caught me today was, “the strength that guides me and brings me the world itself.”
I realized I’ve spent much of this year trying to understand other people and my position in their lives. Maybe even trying to understand the world. Definitely trying to figure out my loneliness and why no one wants me. But Clarice is nudging me toward something else entirely. I think she’s saying, forget understanding the world and start participating in it.
But look at the start of that paragraph…
She doesn’t begin with the world.
She begins with “About me in the world…”
Existence first.
World second.
Then language.
Then voice.
Everything seems to emerge from consciousness itself. Amazing.
Another thing that struck me…
Clarice writes about “the eroticism that belongs to whatever is living.”
A few months ago, more like a few weeks if I’m honest, I probably would have read that as desire.
The eroticism that belongs to whatever is living is scattered in the air, in the sea, in the plants, in us…
I don’t think she’s talking about sex, rather she’s talking about sex the way Homer talks about war. As one expression of being alive. I have been using ‘alive’ a lot lately… wanting to feel it, be it. She uses eroticism the way i keep using aliveness.
Or maybe it’s eroticism = vitality.
Only a little while ago I wrote this somewhere, can’t remember, but it’s always top of mind:
“I want people to know my brain and my body.”
It’s not random, can’t be a coincidence. I think it was preparing me for Clarice or vice versa. It’s clear she refuses to split consciousness from embodiment.
Thinking.
Desire.
Writing.
Touch.
Attention.
All of it. They’re one movement. I want that movement. Maybe it’s what I would consider ‘flow’.
Also curious about this expression,
“I write you with my voice.”
That landed somewhere very deep.
I write you.
I don’t know what Clarice means.
I only know she doesn’t say I write to you.
She says I write you.
That tiny shift feels enormous.
It makes language feel less like communication and more like existence itself. I suspect I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time.
Or even now, still…
Is it maybe an act of existence of the self?
She’s definitely bringing herself into being through voice. This whole book feels like she’s constantly trying to catch consciousness before it hardens into thought.
So, no wonder I’ve become obsessed with authorship.
No wonder I’m building shelves.
No wonder “being registered” has become the center of this reading room.
Clarice isn’t merely communicating. She’s bringing consciousness into existence through language. Fuck I love it. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do but don’t know how.
I noticed something else in my own margin notes today. Without thinking, I wrote:
time, consciousness, interior weather, attention. all after heartbreak.
I was sad writing it. I smiled when I looked back at it. Because I realized it’s my Scotland reading list.
The qualities. As in,
I must read books that deepen those four things.
I must walk in weather that deepens those four things.
I must write field notes that preserve those four things.
Because if there’s one thing Clarice keeps whispering to me, it’s:
You don’t have to become someone new. Just become more available to the life that’s already moving through you.
So regarding the personally tough days, I feel I’m in protection mode now. I need to protect my aliveness. While I don’t fully know what I mean and how much I hold there yet, it’s there, I need to protect it and I want to chase more of it.
Originally shared in April while the book was still sitting heavily with me. Reading it again now, I don’t think I’d change much. What follows is the moment as I experienced it. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes preserving the encounter matters more than improving it.
The relentless protection of them. The vastness of the love I have for them. The way it becomes your life’s mission to make sure they are okay, always.
I’ve never been someone who felt like I lost myself in motherhood. If anything, I’m still growing into it as they get older. It’s a gift. I love it.
But we are also walking with grief. All. The. Time. It’s there from the beginning.
Watching them grow. Everything they attach to and then leave behind. The slow shift as they become more themselves… and less yours. Even something as small as a routine, done over and over, until one day it just ends. You don’t know which time was the last. Or, it’s simply the final school bus ride.
And let’s just agree that the “what if” loops on long, quiet drives bring us to our knees.
I know their moods, their fears, what makes them feel safe, their insecurities… it all sits deep, but also buzzes right at the surface. I don’t ever want to not feel like this.
So reading Agnes felt real. Not distant or heightened. Recognizable.
When the loss of Hamnet comes it’s not a shock. It’s what it does to everything around it. Judith trying to exist inside the absence of her brother. A family still moving but totally altered in ways that don’t match.
How the distance opens up between a mother and a father, between ways of carrying the weight.
Then to the play. A shift. From something lived, intimate, maternal, to something made for the stage. Having to face it this way.
By the time I reached the ending, I could barely breathe through it. It tightened so much. Sitting there while she raced to the stage, her trying to understand what she’s seeing, the betrayal she feels, the utter confusion of it. Not yet understanding how grief moves through the people around us.
And it just lands.
And I was just… gone.
And it didn’t stop there. It stayed. For days.
Because I wasn’t reacting to the book anymore. It simply touched something I already carry.
And honestly, the fact that Maggie O’Farrell reached me like this is all I really need to say about what she’s capable of.
A work of real depth. A devastating read.
Field note: This book reminds me that grief isn’t always about death. It’s also about the ordinary disappearances we live through without recognizing them. So yes, sometimes I feel this reading experience is about motherhood. But I also wonder now if it is about the extraordinary intimacy of knowing another person’s inner weather so deeply that their becoming changes our own?
“I don’t like that feeling about being out in the open alone.”
Neither do I, not really.
The difference is that he instinctively recoiled from that feeling. I couldn’t stop feeling it.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about I Who Have Never Known Men since I read it. Like many, it affected me deeply and I’m still trying to understand my own reaction to it.
Why did this story get under my skin?
Why this one?
And eventually,
What am I searching for when I read?
Why do I feel compelled to write what I do after certain books?
While I don’t have all the answers yet, somewhere in here reveals why I started this reading room in the first place.
I love spending time thinking about language, meaning, grief, authorship and identity. Those inquiries send me in all kinds of different directions. But the more I read, the more I notice they are all underpinned by the same deeper curiosity: How does literature become a place where I discover who I am?
This book didn’t answer that question solely, or specifically. But it helped me notice the same question I’ve been moving towards this year. Not the same answer. The same question.
What does it mean to be registered?
I don’t mean remembered or admired. I don’t even think I mean loved. And certainly not just “seen”. Maybe I’m not even sure it’s about being known.
I genuinely mean I want to be encountered. To know that my life crossed an impossible distance and left an imprint in another mind and body. And that other consciousness encountered mine.
To know that when this is said,
I am here.
someone answers back,
I know. I feel you.
… and I was sometimes acutely aware that I was alone, and always would be, and that the only pleasure within my grasp was the all-too-rare one of curiosity.
I think that’s why books matter so much to me. Over the past year, both my reading and my personal life have shifted. I still care about stories, but I find myself paying just as much attention to the experience of meeting them. Even a single sentence, written decades ago, can charge me, release me, or arrest me entirely. And there is something deeply reassuring about that, because, for a moment, the distance collapses:
Someone else has stood where I’m standing.
Someone else has felt this.
Someone else has followed this question before me.
I annotate and underline a lot now. I never used to. It’s not to collect beautiful sentences. I’m trying to mark the moment something stirred, the moment a feeling surfaced, because those passages become evidence that the encounter happened.
Writing too has become my way of answering back. Any notion of a review in the transactional, classical sense is long gone. Building shelves of reading experiences in this little room helps me preserve the places where I felt my own mind and body meet another’s.
And I have this need to collect proof that something happened here.
Perhaps, proof that I happened here.
I am an old woman, but I still love looking at my face. I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it is the only human face I ever see. I smile at it and receive a friendly smile back.
Reading Harpman’s novel, I found myself trying to imagine a life without exchange. Not simply a life without relationships, but a life without the ordinary friction of being shaped by other people. No real conversation. No shared memories. No opportunity to place yourself beside another person and discover who you are by contrast, by recognition, by response.
We have a phrase for what people seem to want now.
“I see you.”
It’s everywhere and somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling sufficient to me. Or hollow.
It’s kind language. I respect it. But it doesn’t reach the thing I’m trying to describe.
The thing I noticed in this book:
The narrator isn’t simply unseen.
She’s unwitnessed.
That distinction was huge for me.
Because aren’t we constantly being altered by what we encounter? Family. Friends. Work. Books. The people who stayed. The people who left. Even rejection leaves something behind. Even rejection changes us. Even rejection is a kind of encounter.
The narrator has almost none of that. She observes. She endures. She continues. As though existence itself were enough.
Closing the book felt like being dropped into open air.
Because I was partly frightened by its beauty, by Harpman’s ability, to expose how much of myself has been formed through the simple fact of being encountered by other people.
Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others.
Let’s take something simple. Relatable I think. What I want is for someone to understand why I chase sunsets.
Not the photograph afterward, because that can be seen.
Not my name attached to it, because that can be remembered.
Not as a fact about me, because that can be known.
I mean the feelings before, during, after any of that.
The electricity that starts building in my body. The sudden urgency to get outside because something beautiful is about to happen. The wave of excitement, vulnerability and apprehension over sharing it with someone else. The strange relief that settles me back into steady once it’s over. Why any of this happens and why it matters. It’s a life. One life. My life.
That’s the part I wish could somehow be encountered. And then registered.
It’s the same reason I want someone to understand why a single passage in a novel can stay with me for months. Why language can rearrange the course of an afternoon, a night, or days.
Why I still return to my essay on The Iliad, sometimes daily, definitely weekly, as though I’m checking in on a version of myself I met there.
Why Clarice Lispector can do something to me that I still don’t have the language to describe.
Why books end up open on tables, floors, my desk and nightstand, as though they’re still participating in the life around me.
I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for all others, but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me.
And if I’m being honest, this all goes way deeper than books.
I think what I really want is for someone to recognize the parts of me that feel most alive.
The part that falls in love with ideas.
The part that wants to delight in another’s mind, for someone to delight in mine.
The part that aches for intimacy.
The part that responds to touch, affection, desire, language, atmosphere.
The part that feels everything at full volume.
Nothing here is really remarkable. It’s all just me and the particular shape my aliveness has taken. And I don’t want those intimate parts to disappear without having touched another life. I want them to have landed somewhere.
I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.
Maybe that’s what being registered means to me. It’s more than acknowledging that I exist. It’s more than having someone know me completely.
Just knowing that some part of my inner life crossed the distance into someone else’s.
That something true about what it feels like to be me landed there.
I think that’s what Harpman’s novel left me with.
Not the question of whether a life can exist without witness.
Clearly it can.
Her narrator proves that.
The question is:
What becomes of the parts of us that long to encounter another consciousness?
Maybe it’s actually about how those parts come alive through response and recognition, or through the simple fact that someone else met them. Yes, we are looping here. I do that. A lot.
It’s certainly becoming clearer why this reading room exists as a place to preserve encounters with books. A small act of registration. The evidence that, for a brief moment, two consciousnesses met across impossible distances.
And yes, it’s a hope that somewhere beyond these shelves, another consciousness answers back.
Clarice has infected my syntax. I love her for it.
I’ve been thinking about this all week.
My My Dark Vanessa essay was written after understanding. These Clarice entries are different. I’m trying to write them before understanding.
Because I think my reading room needs two kinds of writing. Personal essays that organize experience after the fact.
And encounters, just fragments, that preserve experience before my interpretation rearranges it.
When I met Clarice in Near to the Wild Heart, I knew almost immediately she would be dangerous for me.
I understood her.
Too quickly.
Too bodily.
Too instinctively.
I thought,
“How on earth did she know that?”
“Why does this already feel true?”
“She’s giving language to things I haven’t spoken yet.”
She is strange and too difficult to summarize (she even says this herself). Any preconceptions I had about the conditions under which I think and feel about books, she released me from.
Including meaning.
Now I’m reading Agua Viva. And I keep feeling she’s asking,
“Who told you the room needed walls?”
So I don’t just want meaning now. I want the closest possible relationship to language itself. (Oh for the love of wants.)
I’m not abandoning meaning altogether. I’m hearing Clarice say it’s okay to loosen my grip on it.
She’s very much telling me there are no walls here.
Shelves and libraries are lovely.
But we all have books strewn across floors, nightstands, tables, kitchen counters, car seats. And they belong there.
They belong open.
With passages underlined because they changed my breathing. Open mid-sentence. Waiting, breathing too. Waiting for someone to kneel beside them. Waiting for me to return.
It’s a discovery and a learning for me. That order and structure isn’t the price of entry. No conditions can apply. And nothing has to be finished or perfectly engineered before it can matter.
Revisiting…
Can the shelf hold an encounter?
I think it has to.
Before I organize it.
Before I smooth it into an essay.
Before I decide what happened.
Because it’s evidence that something happened here before I knew what it meant. A moment I felt alive when reading a passage of text. And for me that feels worth preserving.
Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free. And I want the flow.
Clarice writes about freedom as a final refuge.
I don’t know that I’m heroically free. But I think I’m learning to leave things open. Less shelves, more room on the floor.
Perhaps that’s because it’s how I use language myself. I think of words as commitments. Once spoken, they begin asking something of both people.
Sometimes they’re our attempt to make something true between two people.
Sometimes they succeed.
Sometimes they don’t.
When I read Lolita, an edge-of-my-seat reading experience, I leaned in because I wanted to.
I willingly surrendered to the manipulation.
To a man whose language charmed me, whose ambiguity created intimacy, whose attention was little more than a masquerade of love.
It was electrifying to watch myself lower my guard, one beautiful sentence at a time.
I closed the novel even more fascinated by the power of language than before.
Then I picked up My Dark Vanessa.
It felt like the same conversation from the other side.
In Lolita, I experienced the seduction.
In My Dark Vanessa, I experienced its aftermath.
I watched what that same language had already convinced someone to believe.
The other side
It took me a while to understand why Lolita and My Dark Vanessa belonged together on my shelf.
People often compare them, but not for the reason I’m placing them here.
Lolita traps us inside the consciousness of the manipulator.
My Dark Vanessa traps us inside the consciousness of the person who has spent years trying to make sense of all that manipulation.
One reveals how language seduces.
The other reveals what that language leaves behind, and its half-life.
Vanessa is remembering what happened to her… but through his explanations.
His vocabulary.
His interpretations.
His logic.
His story.
That distinction is a phenomenal way to demonstrate the point where another person’s language is no longer something you’ve heard.
It’s the one you start thinking with.
Sentence by sentence.
Conversation by conversation.
It all becomes too blended together and you struggle to separate their voice from your own. In Vanessa, that was when I stopped thinking about manipulation, grooming and abuse and started thinking about authorship. Not narratives – authorship. And the matter of trust.
What happens when another person’s explanations begin sounding more trustworthy than your own?
Protecting stories
The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.
When I finished My Dark Vanessa, the pattern was clear.
Vanessa protects him.
Again.
And again.
Even after she begins to understand what happened.
Even after the harm becomes impossible to ignore.
Even after he is gone.
She keeps protecting his version of the story.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the ‘why’ here. And I arrived at the story… because for Vanessa that is where everything still made sense:
Where attention still meant love.
Where secrecy still meant significance.
Where confusion still resembled intimacy.
Where everything, however painfully, remained coherent.
To let that story collapse would mean letting an entire version of herself collapse with it. And I was genuinely moved by this realization.
Because once a story has carried your life for long enough, letting go of it doesn’t feel like changing your mind.
It feels like losing your home. And Vanessa lost hers.
I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
Two realities
Have you ever been asked to carry two realities at once? Excuse that, I meant, have you ever carried two realities at once, because you had to?
Your lived experience. Their lived experience.
Two versions of events, maybe one that is public, one that is private. Because that allows everything to continue making sense. For everyone. Or simply someone.
All for protecting the coherence of the world around them:
Their relationships.
Their version of events.
Their comfort.
Meanwhile, you start questioning your own memory to understand what happened… before you question theirs. You rehearse conversations you never get to have. You explain them to yourself with extraordinary generosity.
Eventually you stop searching for what happened and start searching for an explanation that can hold it.
You revisit conversations. Messages. Promises. The exact wording.
You read them again, convinced the right arrangement of language will finally make reality coherent. But it doesn’t.
And eventually the confusion becomes expensive.
So does the self-doubt.
So does the self-worth.
So does the hurt.
Maybe the better question isn’t whether you’ve ever protected another person’s comfort by keeping their secrets.
Perhaps it’s this:
Why did I accept responsibility for protecting a story that was never mine to carry?
It don’t think that question belongs only to Vanessa.
I think it belongs to almost everyone who has ever loved, hoped, excused, stayed silent or tried to preserve meaning a little longer than reality could sustain it.
Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.
On meaning
I want beautiful conversations to belong somewhere.
I want tenderness to remain true.
I want January to fit beside June.
I want contradiction to resolve itself.
Above all, I want my life to make sense.
That isn’t naïveté. It’s how I move through the world.
I make meaning almost automatically.
Perhaps that’s why language has always mattered so much to me.
Words don’t just describe reality. They organize it, give it structure.
One sentence can become the explanation I return to for months.
One conversation can become the version of events I keep trying to fit everything else around.
So I’ve realized I don’t look for meaning, it’s just always there… to stabilize my reality.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been wondering whether we (or I) protect meaning as fiercely as we (or I) protect people. Perhaps even more fiercely.
Because once a story explains our lives, letting go of it doesn’t only mean changing our minds. It means losing the architecture that once held everything together.
Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe the lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.
I’ve begun to suspect that much of my grief this year wasn’t about losing a connection. Because that is something that did remain true.
It was about losing an interpretation. Or letting go of it. And there is a particular loneliness in that.
Because you are grieving more than another person. You’re grieving a vocabulary, a language, that once made everything fit together.
The most difficult thing is that sometimes the story gives way before the heart does. That kind of grief feels so disorienting.
It is certainly letting go, yes, but also learning and accepting a new language for what happened.
That has taken me much longer to understand than I ever imagined.
Stories collapse first. Hearts catch up later.
On understanding
For a long time, I believed understanding was one of the deepest forms of love.
If I could explain someone’s contradictions, perhaps I could finally make peace with them.
Perhaps I could even make peace with myself.
I still believe understanding matters.
Curiosity matters.
Compassion matters.
I hope I never lose those instincts.
But I no longer think understanding requires me to surrender my own experience.
I’ve spent some time filling a shelf here:
Nabokov.
Homer.
Dazai.
Kundera.
Clarice.
Ali.
Using my reading experience as a way to document myself, my thoughts, my existence. Now it feels like I’m practicing authorship. And I’m very excited about that. No longer searching for some better ending. Instead, learning to tell what I find meaningful in a story in my own voice.
To date, I can see that every book has been handing me a different piece of the same question.
How do we make meaning?
How do we borrow it?
How do we lose it?
How do we find our way back to it?
Lolita reminded me how seriously I take language.
My Dark Vanessa taught me to ask who that language belongs to.
Eventually, though…
you find and hear your own again.
There is something extraordinarily beautiful about that…
Simply noticing who is holding the pen.
Books have a wonderful way of lending us another consciousness for a while. And the best ones hand us back to our own.
So My Dark Vanessa didn’t give me answers.
It didn’t resolve anything.
It returned the pen.
And,
I’m not wrong to believe language matters.
I’m wrong to believe everyone else inhabits it the way I do.
I can already see the questions that would eventually lead me toward My Dark Vanessa, language, and authorship.
I’m leaving it here exactly as it was written.
Turns out I’m still catastrophically susceptible to a throbbing frontal lobe.
Very quickly, Lolita was the manipulation, seduction, performance, perception and intelligent language I wanted and needed from Nabokov. His prose is intoxicatingly sensuous and that first para completely captivated me.
Humbert cannot stop transforming existence into sensual and intellectual material: violence, longing, obsession, grief. He eroticizes everything he touches. His intellect is his camouflage. The intimacy of his language, while highly alluring, totally contaminates perception. Desire, beauty and horror become impossible to separate and that makes everything unbearably tense.
And yet, when the delusion reaches certain heights, he creates distance from himself through third person slippage, compartmentalization, justification. He fractures his own consciousness to survive it. I was riveted by it all.
I have circled how contemporary this one feels. And since I’m in my ‘existential becoming’, it raises lots of questions around this endless human impulse to aestheticize everything. Why the need to curate/romanticize/stylize experiences, longing, loneliness, suffering, etc. Is it all really to see and hold the joy and beauty in the everyday, or for attention, validation, atmosphere, identity, choose me? Who knows. But it’s compulsive and likely a slippery slope.
I will surely see myself out because I inevitably turned this lens on me too. Blah. Digression.
Observing myself participate in the seduction in real time was the real experience of reading this book. Attraction and repulsion operating simultaneously, monitoring my own reactions and tolerance levels while still feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated, was addictive.
So yes. Psychological voltage remains very much my thing. Unreliable narrators, my thing. Lolita is a dangerously intelligent read about desire, perception and self-justification and I had a sublimely intense reaction to it.
robyn reads books 