that are books too and still do. The codex, the box that is a bird, the door into a world, still seems magical to me, and I still walk into a bookstore or a library convinced that I might be on the threshold that will open up onto what I most need or desire, and sometimes that doorway appears. When it does, there are epiphanies and raptures in seeing the world in new ways, in finding patterns previously unsuspected, in being handed unimagined equipment to address what arises, in the beauty and power of words.
The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there’s joy.
3
As a reader I roamed free. As a would-be writer, it was more complicated. In my teens and well into my twenties, I mostly encountered the literature of heterosexual men, where the muse or the beloved or the city they explored or the nature they conquered was a woman. Throughout my teens, I wrestled with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which seemed to have something valuable about trees and alphabets I could never quite extract from its erudite jumble. It’s a book that seemed to assume that the poet’s orientation is that of a straight man to a female goddess; it might have encouraged some young women to smile enigmatically and levy tribute, but I wanted to be a writer, not a muse.
I also struggled secretly against the men around me who were convinced that they were the artists and I was the audience. Young women like me were supposed to exist as orbital figures, planets around a sun, moons around a planet. Never stars. When I was eighteen, one man was so adamant that I was his muse that he inspired in me a vivid sense that I was literally standing atop a pillar; I can still summon up a sense of being stranded in the hazy grayish atmosphere of nowhere. On a pillar there’s nothing to do but stand still or fall. I was happy to listen and read, but I was mutely against being only a listener and reader, though all I could do about that was bide my time and build my work.
I had been clear that I wanted to be a writer since the year I had learned to read, but I hardly ever spoke of this, for fear of mockery or discouragement. And until my twenties I wasn’t writing much beyond what school required, though sometimes what I wrote for school worked out well. I was reading, hungrily. Classics, reassuring books, discomfiting books, contemporary novels, popular fiction, history, myth, magazines, reviews.
There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst. Sometimes one piece would crash into me: I still have the poem “Never Before” by Philip Levine, from the New Yorker in the fall of 1980 (I clipped Levine’s columns and taped them together into a narrow strip, now yellowed, exactly as long as my arm, with a deeper amber where the tape joins the sections together. It looks like a bandage but reads like a wound).
It is a poem of devastation:
Never before
have I heard my own voice
cry out in a language not mine
that the earth was wrong
that night came first and then nothing
that birds flew only to their deaths
that ice was the meaning of change
that I was never a child
It spoke to me when I was very nearly a child. Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in the New Yorker in installments the same second half of 1980