Health + Youth

Evenings we sit in the living
room, together. Friday I take

my mother’s slot (noon)
at the beauty salon. Ruth,

who for forty years washed
her hair, washes mine.

We’re all in the desert
together. Your mother

liked the water cold,
Ruth says—news to me.

From a thousand
mouths, our dead assemble.
—“Shiva,” Andrea Cohen

“War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing. ‘It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,’ Scott maintains. All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: ‘the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.’ Early tablets consist of ‘lists, lists and lists,’ Scott says, and the subjects of that record-keeping are, in order of frequency, ‘barley (as rations and taxes), war captives, male and female slaves.’ Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.”
—”The Case Against Civilization,” John Lanchester

“Lynn I sat in the movie and asked myself, how does Darren Aronofsky know exactly how it feels to be married to my husband?”
—“Hating ‘Mother!’: Readers Speak Out”

“The little sister was asleep. The two fishing cabins rocked on their stilts, the dock ground agains the shore, the wind spoke through cracks in the window frames, the palms lashed, the waves shattered and roared. The older girl held her little sister.”
—Lauren Groff, “Dogs Go Wolf”

“It’s a kind of performance, of course, all teaching is pretending; I had stood before them as a kind of poem of myself, an ideal image, when for a few hours every day I had been able to hide or mostly hide the disorder of my life, hide most of all the hunger that disorders most, and if I hadn’t succeeded entirely with Z. I had almost succeeded, if he had seen glimpses of what I was he had never until tonight seen me fully. I had leered at him, I had touched him, I had been a caricature of myself, I thought, but that isn’t true; I had been myself without impediment, maybe that’s the way to say it.”
—Garth Greenwell, “An Evening Out”

“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.”
—Sam Shepard, Paris Review

“You don’t know what you need when you’re a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you’re deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement. At the time he was my teacher, [Denis] Johnson was still making the leap from writing poetry—pseudo-Beat lines, musical yet exact—to writing fiction. He was finding his own way, while we were finding ours. I didn’t know it then, but he was giving me—in our small interactions, in the strange dynamic of the class—an encouragement that would help, retroactively, as I read his work in the following years and began to discover my own voice as a writer.”
—David Means

“By the time I was seven, my father had a new wife and a new baby. That baby was often sick. Every time my father planned something with me, like going to the children’s theatre or the zoo, the baby would get sick and he’d have to cancel. The good thing was that every time he cancelled he promised something else, something much more exciting than the thing we had to skip. I would think how lucky I was that I couldn’t go to a concert, say, because now I would get to visit a theatre! And when the theatre was cancelled I was promised the circus. And then the circus was cancelled, too, and I was promised something really special: a cross-country skiing trip. We’d take the train to the countryside and spend the whole day together. We’d ski through the woods with backpacks full of food, and we might even see some winter animals. I thought was incredible luck it was that my baby sister had been sick for the concert and the circus and the theatre! My father said next weekend. ‘Next weekend’ turned out to be an elusive time frame. The weekend after next was technically ‘next weekend,’ too, and the weekend after that, and the weekend after that. ‘You’re breaking her heart!’ I heard my mother scream on the phone. She was wrong, though. I was O.K. with all that waiting. I knew that one of the next weekends would have to be the ‘next weekend.’ I didn’t doubt my father even when winter officially ended. ‘Everybody knows the March snow is the best,’ my father said, and I repeated it endlessly. ‘My father and I are going on a ski trip soon. We’re just waiting for the best snow.’ Meanwhile, the snow in Moscow was melting at a discouraging rate. ‘There is still plenty of snow in the country,’ my father said. In the middle of March, a neighbor’s sick dog died. I asked my mother, ‘Why won’t my baby sister die, too? It would make it so much easier for everybody.’ She scolded me, but I overheard her recounting the conversation to my grandmother and laughing.”
—“Deaf and Blind,” Lara Vapnyar