After the emotional density of The Piano Teacher, the woman behind The Wall gave me a little room to breathe.
It is a quiet, strange little book, and I found an enormous tenderness living inside its solitude.
Haushofer pens an intimate meditation on what happens to a person when the entire world, as they knew it, simply disappears.
I love the almost absurdly simple premise. A woman waking to discover an invisible wall has sealed her off from the rest of humanity. Left on her side: nothing. Isolation. No people, society or explanation. Just an impenetrable boundary and a handful of animals left behind with her.
There is so much beauty around companionship in this book. Simply a woman left to figure out life in a very unsentimental way. Just a calm, practical approach to sharing a life with other creatures. Feeding them, caring for them, and worrying about them. Even being needed by them. Loving them in a whole, intimate way without all the complicated machinery that seems to accompany loving other people.
“I lay on the bench, and when I closed my eyes I saw snowy mountains on the horizon, white flakes dropping onto my face in a big, bright silence. I had no thoughts, no memories, there was only the big, silent, snowy light. I knew this feeling could be dangerous for a lonely person, but I couldn’t muster any strength to resist it.”
It almost felt brutal in how unglamorous survival is here. There are no grand revelations or heroic transformations. Mostly, there is work. And more work. And the next day. And the next thing that needs doing.
I wasn’t riveted every second. There were stretches where the deliberately mundane rhythm tested my attention. But I think that was also the point because the more I settled into its measured pace, the more I realized that the book was moving exactly as its woman was living: slowly, deliberately, one necessary thing at a time.
“As I don’t like living day by day without a plan, feeling my way around in the dark, it was hard for me to stay calm. Impatience has always been one of my worst faults, but in the forest I have learned to control it to a certain extent.”
It beautifully captured a profound feeling of womanhood. It provided a deeply private and honest look at thoughts, feelings and the female body when the outside world completely disappears.
Some reflections on motherhood elicited an ache:
“My children had gone away; hand in hand, their satchels on their backs, their hair blowing about, and I hadn’t known that that was the beginning of the end. Or perhaps I’d had an inkling. Later on I had never been happy again. Everything changed in a wretched way, and I stopped really living.”
I understand completely why this andI Who Have Never Known Men get compared. Both create these strange, stripped-down worlds in which the absence of society becomes a way of examining society itself. But The Wall felt more earthy and immediate to me. It concerns the human condition in such a simple manner, just placing a woman inside it and making her live.
“My uncertainty sometimes made life exciting for me. Everywhere I sensed dangers that I couldn’t recognize in time. I had to be constantly prepared for unpleasant surprises, and all I could do was to bear them with equanimity.”
So I finished feeling less like I’d read a dystopian novel and more like I’d spent some time alone with a consciousness that had learned to live alongside loneliness. And that felt freeing.
Bleak but beautiful. Oddly comforting.
It resonated with me on a very personal level. As I expected it would.
I spent a good portion of The Piano Teacher feeling like Jelinek had taken me by the throat and dragged me somewhere I hadn’t agreed to go.
I agreed fucking quickly.
I understood Erika almost immediately. I could see what was happening inside her.
I could see the repression. The desire. The control. The shame. The watching. The violence. I could recognize the machinery. The problem was that I couldn’t quite figure out where I was supposed to stand while watching it happen.
And I didn’t want to just watch.
That was the strange pleasure of this book for me. I loved not knowing what it was “about.”
I loved being subjected to an assault on interiority.
An extremely audacious one.
Somewhere in all that claustrophobia, I started noticing my own body. So I took. I took pleasure in her pleasure, I took pleasure in her pain, I took pleasure in her cravings… fantasy… shame. I took.
The prose is so compressed it barely feels like third person. It is almost third-person consciousness. It’s goddamn psychic surveillance. Jelinek kept me technically outside Erika, but shoved me so deeply into the machinery of her mind that the distinction started to feel pointless. Thought, observation, memory, illusion, desire. All there, arriving at the same time, pressed against each other, pressing me against a wall.
I felt Erika so much.
When I finished the book, my first reaction was: what an astonishing, fucked-up piece of work.
The next morning, I felt sad for her.
Not pity. I don’t pity Erika.
I feel her.
And that is much worse.
Because feeling her doesn’t mean I can explain her. Jelinek keeps refusing to let me stabilize my judgment. Every time I think I’ve found a category for Erika, she seems to slip sideways out of it. I want to call her repressed, and then she wants something. I want to call her cruel, and then I see the hunger underneath it. I want to understand her desire, and then the desire itself becomes almost impossible to separate from shame, control, fear, fantasy.
I understand her. I just can’t contain her.
There is nowhere for all of it to go.
Let’s cut straight to the letter.
Jesus fuck, the letter.
Erika’s fantasy of what she wants from her student Klemmer stopped me cold. I recognized it.
I think it was the architecture of the fantasy.
Surrender. Punishment. Explicitness. Pain. Being overwhelmed. Having the feral thing inside you finally given somewhere to go.
I know that fantasy.
I know unfulfilled passion; I know the weight of blocked desire.
And there was something shocking about encountering it here, written so plainly, and realizing that I didn’t have the luxury of standing safely outside Erika and thinking, How strange she is.
No.
I was in it.
This is when Nabokov flashed through my body.
And yes, it’s time to project.
Because what happens when desire has nowhere to go?
I don’t mean Erika’s particular desire. I mean desire itself. What happens when something physical and insistent exists inside you with no outlet to become real?
Does it disappear?
Obviously not.
It gets managed. It gets watched. It gets turned into fantasy. It gets made private enough to survive.
Her entire relationship with her body feels like a negotiation she has been conducting for years, and she never quite gets the terms right.
She wants to feel.
She also wants to control what feeling means.
She wants to be touched and cannot tolerate being truly known. She wants to surrender and needs to script the conditions of surrender. She wants to be seen and spends so much of her life watching from a distance.
I kept thinking about how exhausting that must be. Well, I know how exhausting that is.
To be a the person who has to contain yourself.
What the actual fuck is happening between Erika and her mother?
I don’t even know what to call it.
It’s almost horror, maybe horror-adjacent. Love, possession, dependence, resentment, surveillance. These have become so entangled there is almost no clean distinction between caring for someone and controlling them. And so much need has accumulated that it all becomes physical and sexual; it even moves into identity.
Because Erika cannot get outside her mother’s gaze. And yet she can’t seem to exist without it either.
That scene made me feel physically uncomfortable in a way that had very little to do with the obvious transgression. It was the density of it. The feeling of two people who have been living inside the same emotional space for so long that neither of them seems to know where one person ends.
And then I came back to the body.
“Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.”
Because that is what I let Jelinek keep doing to me.
Even when Erika is thinking, she is bodily.
Even when she is watching someone else, she is bodily.
Even when she is fantasizing, she is bodily.
Even when she is numb, she is bodily.
I couldn’t get away from it.
And I started thinking about pain.
Pain as punishment. But also pain as evidence.
There is something terrifying about feeling so far away from yourself that sensation becomes evidence you’re still there.
I don’t know. I just can’t leave pain and the body alone these days.
Maybe because pain is so immediate. So physical. So difficult to intellectualize.
Then Jelinek gives Erika the thing she has imagined.
And it doesn’t work.
Klemmer beats her.
He rapes her.
And Erika feels nothing.
Nothing.
Because the fantasy was never simply about violence. It contained agency. She had imagined the conditions. She had written the language. She had decided what would happen to her.
She creates a language for what she wants. Then reality takes that language and weaponizes it against her.
So her fantasy is not fulfilled.
It is annihilated.
And afterward there is no catharsis. No sexual awakening.
Nothing.
A body that was supposed to finally feel something goes numb.
I lost my footing.
Was her fantasy about pain?
Was it about surrender?
Was it about being wanted badly enough to be overwhelmed?
Was it simply about feeling something?
I don’t know.
Who fucking knows.
I don’t really want to try to answer those questions. If I do, I feel like I’ve made Erika manageable.
And she isn’t.
That is one of the things Jelinek does so viciously. Again, she won’t let me put Erika somewhere comfortable.
I think about my own body a lot. About desire. About what it’s like to have things inside that don’t have anywhere to go. About managing myself into being acceptable, even worthy, intelligible, contained.
And about that feral part that doesn’t agree. Ever.
Okay. Sorry.
We’ve gone somewhere weird again.
But this is exactly why this digression doesn’t feel like a digression to me.
The book made the body impossible to leave.
Then comes the ending.
Goddamn the ending.
Erika stabs herself. And then she walks away.
That’s it.
No grand meaning imposed on the act. No beautiful literary redemption. No sudden psychological revelation.
She hurts herself. And walks away.
Brutal. A woman who spent the entire book trying, in one way or another, to get closer to sensation and release, reaches the end, injures herself, and simply keeps moving.
I underlined this entire passage almost immediately:
Noticing. Reality. Not understanding.
A sensation before thought.
All things that challenge me and confuse me these days.
And it feels so connected to The Stranger I wrote about recently.
She’s exploring how much of consciousness happens before we have an explanation for it. Even before we have language for it.
And on noticing:
What we see.
What we select.
What we feel physically before we understand what it means.
Clarice is so capable (or courageous) of staying inside an experience rather than explaining it. She’s comfortable here, maybe. I’m in such discomfort almost all of time.
But am learning not to rush to understand.
And as far as noticing, well, I notice too much.
I then turned the page and found this:
“Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant.”
Of course. Because she has impeccable timing. (Or could be because I’ve noticed I pick her up when life gifts me challenges.)
I’ve been thinking so much about consciousness, about noticing, about the space between sensation and thought. And now she is talking about what happens when you stop fighting that space.
She surrenders in words.
Clarice, how do I just flow? I cannot crack the code.
No notes on existentialism or absurdism. This is not Camus is brilliant or here’s what the book means. It’s not even Meursault’s resistance to the performance of the social arena. (Yes, even I’m surprised by my lack of interest in the latter, given my increasingly obsessive hatred for the performative out there.)
I spent the first forty-five pages of The Stranger waiting for Meursault to become emotionally available to me. It wasn’t out of sympathy that I wanted this, or even because I needed to find a way into his heart and mind so I could connect with him as a character. I just wanted him to be… available. To give me something to work with. We couldn’t quite get there.
What was available from Meursault was what he noticed. He kept telling me about:
The weather.
A meal.
The light.
A cigarette.
A woman’s laughter.
The sound of someone’s voice.
The heat. (Always the heat.)
Physical things. Sensation.
At first, I mistook this for some kind of detachment. I felt quite detached from him myself. Maybe it was absence. Whatever it was, I went straight to wondering what had happened to him. My curiosity can be almost annoyingly persistent when I encounter someone who behaves in a way I can’t immediately place, on or off the page. And this man seemed only to feel ‘alive’ when there was something physical happening. Sensory, even painful. I started looking for the information underneath it. What happened? Where did this come from? What am I missing?
Surely there had to be an origin story. Some wound. Some psychological key that would unlock the distance from which he narrated the world.
But then something happened that interested me far more than whatever answer Camus may or may not have intended here. I noticed a clear shift in myself. From wondering what he was about, to wondering why was I trying to understand him so much, (default wiring I guess that gets me in trouble sometimes), to attending to his consciousness and what it was doing.
As always, that distinction matters to me.
A year ago I wanted to know whether I was understanding a novel correctly. Now I’m desperate to know what it is like to inhabit another consciousness for two hundred pages.
I don’t want to become that person.
I want to know how a mind organizes reality.
Kafka’s K. tried to impose order on a world that continually refused him in The Trial. Yozo, in No Longer Human, seemed to perform consciousness, always aware of the gap between himself and everyone around him, forever trying to disguise it.
Meursault does something else entirely.
He notices. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, he tells us what he notices.
That became the question I couldn’t shake. Not even close. And yes, we’re going to project now, an obsession I excel at.
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
Every first-person narrator is selecting.
Not lying, necessarily.
Selecting.
Every sentence shared brings something into the frame and leaves something else outside it. And I think that selection becomes part of the reality we experience. What is noticed. What is described. What never enters the frame at all.
Meursault wasn’t intentionally withholding something from me (I don’t think). He was giving me his field of attention. The heat. The light. The cigarette. The body. The sound of his own voice. This was the world available to me.
That made me think about how I understand other people. I’m always working with what has been selected for me. Sometimes I’m trying to understand someone’s reality; sometimes I’m trying to understand the reality between us. Either way, I’m assembling some kind of working version of the whole from the pieces I’ve been given. All for the sake of understanding the position I occupy inside said reality, whether I’m reading a narrator or sitting across from another person.
It’s never the whole thing. I know that.
But I still have to live somewhere in the meantime.
And that can be tough.
So I select. I interpret. I make a provisional draft of reality and carry on as though, at some point, I’ll have enough information to revise it and land a final.
Which, of course, is probably bullshit.
Because when do we ever get the final version?
If you’re still reading, you’re welcome for that existential digression.
By the second half of the novel, I realized I was no longer really studying Meursault. I was studying the act of narration itself. I had become increasingly interested in the choices being made on the page. Why this detail? Why this moment? What is he unable to see? And, perhaps more interestingly, what does he see that everyone else seems to miss?
That is part of why the trial fascinated me. Everyone in that courtroom seemed to be constructing a different version of the same man. The prosecution selected one set of facts. Meursault had given us another. Everyone was arranging the available evidence into some version of reality that made sense to them. None of those versions felt complete to me, and I’m not sure any version ever really is. We are all selecting, all the time, and then living inside what we have selected.
I’ve been carrying this line with me for months, you’ve seen it in my posts: I want to meet a consciousness. Not just a character, but a consciousness. There is a difference to me. A character can serve a plot; a consciousness lets me experience a way of organizing reality that isn’t my own. That is one of the things I increasingly want from books. I don’t necessarily need to like the person I am spending two hundred pages with. I don’t even need to agree with them. Sometimes I don’t particularly want to understand them. I want to know what it feels like to stand inside their particular way of noticing (and selecting) things for a while.
Meursault gave me that in his attention to physical sensation: the heat, the light, the body, pain. There were moments when I found myself responding to that physical immediacy in a way that had very little to do with Camus and quite a lot to do with my own experience. I’ve known conversations where the body becomes the last undeniable place of certainty, where a physical feeling can be easier to locate than an emotional one, especially when everything else feels murky. Meursault didn’t explain any of this to me. Nothing in the novel told me to make that connection. I just found myself there.
This is one of the things I value most in literature. The author doesn’t have to hand me the connection. Sometimes it is enough for it to create the conditions in which my own mind makes one. In fact, to be clear and one hundred percent contradictory, for the love/hate relationship I have with ambiguity, when it comes to books, don’t interpret, don’t connect, don’t explain, but suspend me in some liminal space and let me enjoy my mental free fall.
Wow, extra points for two digressions.
So I find myself less interested now in asking whether Meursault is alienated, or whether he is absurd, or even whether his resistance to the social performance around him is somehow admirable. I’m more interested in what happens when an interior life and a social world seem to be speaking entirely different languages. The court wants to know what kind of person Meursault is. It wants to organize him into something legible, something that can be judged. And yet what I had spent the novel experiencing was something much stranger: a mind that simply kept registering the world in its own particular way, even when everyone around it was demanding a different explanation.
That question has followed me through a lot of the books I’ve loved this year. I’ve already mentioned my delight in the minds of Kafka and Dazai. Nabokov takes consciousness somewhere far more dangerous and Dostoevsky seems almost incapable of letting anyone settle.
And now Camus has left me with my own version of it.
I used to ask, What kind of person is this?
I think I’m increasingly asking, What kind of consciousness is this?
And then, inevitably, the question turns back toward me.
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?
