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Editor's Note: Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collections "Work & Days," "The Forage House" and more recently, "Rift Zone" and "Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange." The opinions expressed in this comment are specific to the author. More opinions on CNNE.com
(CNN Spanish) - Reading fiction can offer us a place to take refuge now, and not only because it is comforting. It is because it helps us deal with big breaks.
There has been a lot of discussion about how much we need books right now, to comfort, distract, or console us from the pandemic and its toxic effects. I'm also reading: Keats' letters (that's my kind of fun) and Rachel Cohen's wonderful book "Austen Years" about her own life as a deep insider on Jane Austen. I have gulped down a couple of the good poem books that came out this spring, including Stephanie Burt's "After Callimachus," which reinvents a cheesy version of a real but ancient Greek poet that hardly anyone remembers, and "Spring and a thousand years (intact) ”by Judy Halebsky, where Halebsky imagines that he is corresponding with the 8th century poet Li Po. That is to say: when I read, I run away, very, very far. Eighth-century China seems excellent to me. And also the Keats moors.
Sometimes I can't stay long. My kids are home now, and sometimes I have five uninterrupted minutes first thing in the morning, sometimes I only have three minutes before I fall asleep over the book. Still, these eight minutes help. These alternate worlds divert me from the endless flood of news and Twitter memes.
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We need literature because books comfort us, distract us, and comfort us. That's true. They offer the opportunity to make imaginary trips, the opportunity to empathize with others over time, which remind us that we are not alone. But I've been thinking that an essential function of literature right now is to help us make sense of the tear in the context of time. We are all experiencing breakups. We have all lost the world as we knew it.
If we are luckier, we are waiting in a strange detained present, refugees in our homes, trying to survive. We may also be losing people we love, losing our jobs, losing the ability to get even the simplest of foods. We may be losing decades of work. We can realize that the home where we live is not the home where we need to live. It is a time of many small revelations: each day is a crack, a strange reinvention. Good books help us find the language to live in tears.
And indeed, time is broken. How will we verbalize that? Where I am is eerily silent. Walking through the abandoned streets of my neighborhood, early in the morning, I can only feel that we have entered the “transition” of a life here, one that reminds me of the transience of Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel “To the Lighthouse”, particularly the part where he describes the world from the point of view of the wind that hits an empty house. "Time passes": this suspends the wishes of the characters and creates a communion between them.
Sometimes, as I walk through the cemetery behind our house, (it's still open while the parks aren't), I hear my thoughts coming up in literary style: "Later I would think that afternoon would mark the end of the last day vaguely normal." , or “under quarantine, they began, for convenience, to do their exercises in the cemetery behind their house, a mountainous place where it was possible to do a little. The sense of irony was not lost on them. ” It is not that I am writing a story exactly, but that by unfolding a sentence around a complex verb tense, I am trying to understand the abyss around us.
"It would occur to you later that -" the time of that sentence is a conditional future. He suggests that what is happening now cannot be interpreted yet, it will have to be resolved, it may have a different meaning later on at a still unknown future date. It is the time of many of Proust and participates in a gesture in literature that tries to skip a break, to narrate the intimate moments when we recognize that we can no longer read a life according to its previous codes.
It feels very clear that for some of us, the world is unalterably broken. For some, there may be a previous world to which we can return. We really can't know for whom this will later seem like a breaking point and for whom this is just a strange juncture in time. I suspect that if we get past this, it will probably be a mix of both: each of us will carry a complicated, intimate, and possibly transformative story.
None of us can know now how we will feel later, what the future will be. This epidemic has enormous ramifications for our economy, for all public and political lives. But we are each forced to reread the most intimate corners of private life, corners that many of us only know in poems or stories, works that exchange the texture of time.
Where I am, we are safe enough, on a small circuit. Every day, I walk with my children to look at ducks and gravestones in the cemetery behind our house. There are robins, eddies and Steller's jays, suburban frogs and coyotes.
I have begun to notice the graves of 1918 and 1919 and I wonder how many of them are from people who died in the Spanish flu. My grandmother's mother died then, shortly after my grandmother was born: then, still a baby, she was sent to live with relatives. The strangeness of being raised that way marked and trickled her into the way I met her and it hung like a kind of scar in her life and felt decades later. I can't help but wonder how this moment will extend not only through the present, but also through time.
What will happen, since we are unknowingly invited to make sense of this season of change? What will we learn about our inner life as these days pass? How will this human transformation be digested?
I suspect this level of processing will take decades. What will all this mean later? We still cannot be ready to understand. When we are, it will be novelists and poets who, at long intervals, will help us solve it.
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