This all came about because we are reading Anna Solomon’s The Little Bride which begins without any pronouns, as though the character is talking to herself. I loved this book — its language, its strangeness, its capturing of place and character — when I first read it, but now that I am teaching it, I am struck by how skillful it is, how Anna puts us into the mind of her main character, Minna, right away. My students like Minna. And they like the book because of the strange things they are learning: Minna is in the middle of being examined by a team of doctors and nurses — a “Look” – to see if she qualifies for immigration to America as a bride. This gave me the opportunity to point out that readers like to learn new things, that even in fiction, research is a great tool, and that it is a good idea to collect strange information.

For example, did you know that during World War II, the English considered “poisoning” Hitler with estrogen? I might have already written about this, but I can’t get over the idea of estrogen as a weapon. They thought it would weaken him, lessen his aggression, make him more “feminine.”

I liked watching the researchers themselves, but mostly I liked watching the dogs. In our family, we turn to nature documentaries for solace. My favorites are Earth: A Biography, with that Scotsman Iain Steward who clambers down volcanoes and slides around in the Arctic. And anything with David Attenborough, especially Life. We scream when the shark eats the baby seal and cry (at least I do) when the zebra father stays behind the herd to help his injured son, even though this is his death warrant, and worse, when the mother reindeer searches for her dead baby. My son watches these before school while I make pancakes, which makes pancake making far more dramatic. Sometimes, I try to narrate our life like I am David Attenborough. “Most of the primate mother’s day is devoted to providing her hungry offspring with adequate nutrition.” Or, currently, “The injured primate mother is unable to provide her hungry offspring with the nutrition he needs for the day and tries to introduce him to the mysteries of food production.”

Unlike most people in the literate universe, I did not love The English Patient — I see this as my failing, not the book’s — but The Cat’s Table has an entirely different feel to it. It reads like a memoir, although it is a novel. The narrator looks back on his voyage to England from Colombo when he was eleven years old, and the ship becomes a little world, like the Ark, as one of the characters says. There is a prisoner, a beautiful girl, a rich aristocrat, a man who dies, a garden, a Weimaraner (I never knew how much Ondaatje loves dogs), a storm, a Captain, a rich aunt. The narrator sweeps back and forth in time, before the voyage, after the voyage, the voyage itself, even as the ship steams forward. It reminds me of Aharon Applefelds’s Badenheim 1939. Spare and weird and quiet and foreboding and beautiful, where the small events stack up into huge events. Cataclysmic ones, which the author never bothers to mention. There is no need; we know they are coming.

In my first month of college, when I was desperately homesick, but too proud to say so, my mother sent me another care package for my birthday. This time, it was a cake, my favorite kind. Even the wax paper she used seemed precious, the precise folds, the careful triangles — a relict from home. I did not know how to tell her how grateful I was back then. But that cake was a lifeline, as are these dates and this beautiful book.

It is astonishing how little we know about what is actually happening in Washington, and yet how much we think we know.

Kate ran around and got me my things, but the best part was that she told me her injury stories, of which she has plenty, as she is a fellow aging athlete. I listened with fascination. In fact, I am now fascinated by all such stories, as long as they have happy endings: the storyteller was injured, but now is all better. All better. It’s kind of like being lost and then being found.

I am not in my eighties, yet, but I felt twinges of recognition. Like Donald Hall, I can hardly walk, can’t drive, can really only sit and look out the window and, thankfully, read and write. According to the orthopedist, this will be my condition for a while. My old self, the one that whizzed around in her car, talking on her cell phone, overbooked, either late or early to something, fitting her son’s schedule around her own, seems remote, and now, the silence, the inabilities, the many limitations, the dependence on others for basics like groceries, seem more real, realer than the other life, and a prediction of what lies ahead when I reach Hall’s age, if I do, that is. As he says, he would rather be alive, housebound, than not alive at all. I do know that I will be back in the world soon enough, whizzing around in my gray car. But I also have learned, having been through this once before with my back, that this world of silence and stillness, of physical incapacity is always there, on the other side of the daily schedule.

To begin with, to single Speilrein out as the only “disturbed” one in this triangle is as absurd as it is unfair. Whatever else one might say about Freud and Jung, they were far from being entirely “rational” beings. And, far from being an emblem of passionate and irrational femininity, in fact, Speilrein was a highly trained medical doctor and analyst. She published important analytical papers and influenced many of the important analysts of the next generation. It is true that she began her career as a patient in the asylum where Jung worked, but she was far from being “crazy” in the sense the movie suggests. She was a “hysteric,” and as John Kerr points out in the book upon which the movie is ostensibly based, Speilrein’s “hysteria” was actually a run of the mill ailment of the period. No one thought of her as “crazy.” It is true that she and Jung became lovers (of a sort). But this is not all they were to each other. They were passionately entwined as thinkers and analytic colleagues; he was the lover/teacher that betrayed her. In addition, she was not simply the woman who came between the great analysts, she was an intellectual force in her own right and is actually yet another example of a woman whose ideas were ignored and overlooked simply because she was a woman. Both Freud and Jung are to blame for this.

The real danger of this movie is the danger of the cliches it reinforces, a danger that was brought home to me when a friend of mine told me he liked the movie because of how it depicts the complicated relationship between Freud and Jung. Oh, and that woman. “The woman?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “I can’t remember her name.”

In Venice, on the trail of the Marys

This picture is from my last trip to Italy, when the book stretched out and out and out. I feel nostalgic for that time, which now seems like an innocent, happier time, which it was not. I spent all of my time worrying that I would never finish.

But for now, tonight, I think it might be over, because I have a strange feeling of being adrift, let out of my shell. It is not a relief. It’s more like being homeless or exposed, like coming up from underwater and the air is cold. I can’t imagine what one does with one’s time, when one is not always thinking through a book. I guess one goes to meetings and goes out to dinner with friends and picks up children at school, all with a clear, open mind, as opposed to a mind wrapped in a cocoon.

I don’t really like it out here. I can’t wait to tuck myself into a new book.

I suppose lots of different professionals hear this kind of thing. But do they? I mean, do people say to electricians, “You know, I was almost an electrician, but then I realized I needed to get a real job.”

My first editor used to refer to first time writers, as in writers of their first books, with an eye roll. A kind eye roll, but an eye roll all the same. And now that I am on book 3, I know why. I don’t think my editor can solve all my book’s problems. I don’t think my agent can, either. I know that it takes a long time to write a book and that it takes daily, steady work. I do not think that I could re-wire a house. I wonder why people think they can write books.

After that exchange, I bought 5, yes 5, large chocolate bars (organic chocolate caramel crunch) from the startled health food store lady, just to cope.