Soul Searching (Reprise)

Time only runs backward in our minds

MARSEILLE — A few days ago, a little before dawn, something about the Nescafé and the cool air over the Vieux Port swirled together and conjured coffee in the woods — specifically the woods off the north shore of Lake Superior, where at least once every September or October I tried to go backpacking. Immediately, I wanted autumn and all its riches. You know the list, you’ve seen the memes: the long novels, arthouse movies, the sweaters, the scuttling leaves. I crave it every year, usually around this time (long before it arrives). To feel the same craving here, on the other side of the Atlantic, brought my first genuine wave of homesickness. It made me think of the long list I make at the end of every summer — which doesn’t differ much, and which disappoints me more with each passing year.

Sure, spring is about rebirth — but of the body, of the senses. Things thaw, things drip. They unfurl and swell. Then there’s summer, the body’s harvest. I don’t need to elaborate. And then there’s autumn, the rebirth of the mind. I never realized it before, but this is why it’s always felt like a beginning, to me, when things start to die: it’s the mind coming back, getting interested, growing restless. It wants us to walk and look around. It wants us to sit down to a long meal with friends, to talk for hours. It wants music and movies. My list, every year, is a list of things I’ve enjoyed in years past. It’s a list that’s fundamentally nostalgic; in a kind of panic, I try to create the same autumn every autumn. And while there’s nothing wrong with tradition — at least one visit, say, to an orchard, or at least one batch of coq au vin (the Balthazar recipe is worth the effort) — a series of them feels less like pleasure and more like denial. That is, denying that things have changed.

A genre that used to annoy me but that I now find somewhat charming is the why-I-left-New-York essay. As with most annoying essays, this is all Joan Didion’s fault.¹ And as usual, Didion nailed it: Yes, New York is tiring — because people get tired. People get old. The habits we don’t change as we change start to burden us, not support us. One day, it’s unbearable to look around and find your youth — the bars you went to, the lights that dazzled you, the food you relished — not only harder to recognize, but worse: unwilling to delight you, console you, or even welcome you. Unwilling to want you. Going on unchangedly in a city that’s changed, trying to live as you once did with a body that’s changed, is to set yourself up for rejection. That city, that past, that youth — none of it can be recaptured, at least not in life, not in the things you do from day to day. Either you contend with that, consciously, or you leave. Most people leave.

Nostalgia isn’t homesickness, in this understanding — not quite. With its overtone of loss, of irrevocability, and of yearning for the impossible, it’s something closer to time sickness: one can feel, one can see, that youth is gone. This is the core around which Proust builds his Search: an entire past springs out of sensory associations — a cup of tea, a little bell on a gate, an uneven stone outside of a familiar house — a mercurial and fleeting past that can only exist, that can only be recaptured or regained, through its transmutation into art. Throughout the novel, life evades the narrator (Albertine’s escape being the central, and admittedly most tedious, example), but art does not. Art is always there to console “Marcel” when life turns fugitive. It’s a delusion to think that one can capture and hold living moments or relive times past; time only runs backward in our minds, in our memories. But we can evoke those memories for others in our works — whatever those are. The Search is, in its own way, the testament of what the narrator, a self-professed invalid, has learned about time sickness, and how to endure it. It’s also why the Search still feels like the most complete and comprehensive artistic rendering of how it feels to have a life. As Brodsky said of art, one could also say of life: There are only two subjects, language and time.

In Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), he digs into the sensory associations of certain colors, shapes, and sounds — how a color can precede an understanding, depending on the experiences that our “soul” has had with that color. He explains this by the ease with which we record our first encounters with colors and objects, shapes and sounds:

Objects which we encounter for the first time immediately exert a spiritual impression on us. This is how the world is experienced by young children, for whom every object is new . . . This is how, as we grow older, the world gradually loses its magic. We know that trees give us shade, that horses are fast, motorcars faster, that dogs bite, that the moon is far away, that the person in the mirror is not real.

He likens a person’s sensory apparatus to a piano: “‘Nature,’ that is, the person’s ever-changing external environment, is constantly activating the strings of the piano (the soul) by pressing the keys (the objects we see).” These notes, and even chords (combinations of sensory input), can grow familiar; it begins to require effort to notice them, the way meditation, for example, is effort. But an artist, Kandinsky says, brings their own intent to this combination of elements — sounds, colors, shapes, words, and so on — which means that the “human soul is moved in a deliberate and purposeful way.” Rather than Kandinsky’s piano, I find it easier to imagine, here, an old church organ: the wind can idly, even hauntingly, play the pipes, but only human hands can play a progression of stirring chords. This, I think, is the most important distinction between life and art.

My craving for fall, for the rebirth of my mind, was born from a sensory experience — a combination of instant coffee (which I take camping) and cool air over a body of water (where I tend to enjoy camping). Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tisane, the formula evoked an impression that superseded understanding; it made me want before I understood, entirely, what I wanted. My autumn list tends to be a litany of sensory experiences — specific foods, fabrics, scents, liquors, locales, sounds. These are senses I associate, yes, with times of great pleasure; they are experiences I had when I was happy — most of them from the same pitifully brief period in my life, at this point a long time ago. In countless ways, I’ve been trying to recapture it ever since, and have depressed myself, over and over, with my failure to do so.²

Not to introduce another musical metaphor, but Kandinsky’s evocation of early sensory experiences, of seeing or hearing or feeling things for the first time — and of how those experiences, in some way, tend to take deep root in our memory — made me think of cassettes or VHS tapes. The initial impression, on virgin, magnetized plastic, sounds and looks pristine, but when you tape over it with a similar impression, and another, and another, you lose fidelity. This is, I think, why the “coming of age” novel is still so popular (rebranded and repackaged, for the most part, as YA fiction): readers enjoy a protagonist whose tape is still blank,³ whose ability to register new impressions is at its deepest, its most vivid.

The distinction I find most fascinating here is that, while the tape that records life grows thinner and duller, ever more brittle, the one that records art seems new nearly every time. A novel or poem you truly love doesn’t lose its brilliance; it only gets brighter. A movie you’ve watched nine times isn’t going to let you down on the tenth. The turn of phrase in a song or symphony — it’s going to get you every time, maybe even deeper, this time, than it ever has. A lot of this, yes, is the artist’s intent, but just as important is the audience’s intent — your intent, when you seek out these favorite compositions. Art is consensual by design — we choose to read, choose to watch, choose to hear. You open your soul to artworks, and deliberately, if for no other reason than to remind yourself, or verify, that you have such a thing, a soul. And for periods of time sickness, when you can’t recognize your life or feel welcome in it, there’s maybe no better cure than this reminder, that you can still feel as intensely, as colorfully, as you once did after all.

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Thank you for reading, and thank you all for sticking with Entertainment, Weakly. This week’s essay isn’t exactly a sequel or an expansion of one I wrote last year, but maybe it’s a reincarnation.

I still haven’t turned paid subscriptions back on, as I don’t feel like I can be accountable to anything like a regular schedule as long as I decide to work on the road. Once I get settled I’ll give paid subscribers a heads-up. In the meantime, I am still working, and still available if you have any work you’d like to do together. Until then, <3

1. Before your fangs come out and your eyes roll over white, let me quote Matt Pearce on Didion: “Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time” — a riff, I trust, on Benjamin’s “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one.”

2. Some advice I feel especially equipped to provide: Never, if life gives you the opportunity, buy a house on a dead-end street. Spiritually this is a terrible, terrible thing.

3. I suppose you could make the same argument for the endurability of the simplistic, middle-school romance and betrayal themes of most popular music.