Feelings

I heard an interview yesterday with David Sedaris, talking about the publication of a second volume of his diaries. “Doesn’t reading your old diaries sometimes make you cringe?” asked the interviewer. Sedaris explained how he curates and edits the entries. He mentioned, too, that the more recent ones are so much better than the early ones, and that’s because the early ones were all about how he felt. Good writing isn’t all about the writer’s emotions, he said, or something like that. Don’t be writing about how you feel.

I immediately thought about how often I write about my feelings…and the feelings I felt in that moment were of shame and inadequacy, reminded what an amateur I am, and I sighed. I remembered a few favorite essays by David Sedaris, and it’s true they evoke emotions, but without ever spelling out what he was feeling. They present interactions and situations that prompt feelings in the reader, and they do so with a deceivingly light touch, with wit and humor woven through even the most weighted of narratives. He has written about a sister’s suicide, the death of parents, so many kinds of cruelties, and yet, the feelings we readers assimilate are entirely our own. I relate to the family dysfunction and tragedy, of course, but his essays also remind me how often my siblings and I somehow laughed our way through it. Maybe humor and sadness keep very close company. There are good writing lessons here, too. Suggestion may be stronger than thick crayon. And we’ve known this all along, but it can’t be overstated: nouns should far outnumber adjectives.

Anyway, I thought, enough with the feelings! It’s my blog and I can do what I want to, but let’s take a break from the feelings. My grandson and his parents are due to arrive in California from England tomorrow, and we are in the midst of a global pandemic, and you can imagine how I am feeling about that.

Yesterday, I walked on a windy beach at low tide with my friend Kappy, and she told me she had recently reconnected with a childhood friend, and I thought about Carol, my own childhood friend, and realized that 2021 was the first time in more than fifty years that I hadn’t received a Christmas card from her, and I wondered if she is okay. A memory came back to me of being in her family’s Brooklyn apartment, circa 1958, of walking up two flights of stairs, climbing over a dog gate at the threshold, and her Kerry blue terrier, Sable, jumping up against my legs, which always threw me a bit off balance, as harmless as it was. There were the alien kitchen smells of other people’s food and habits, and the furniture was bulky and different, and her stern preoccupied mother barely looked up, and although I was only three buildings away from my own house, it felt like another country. Through a tiny window I saw a white sliver of a moon in a dark blue sky, and it somehow oriented me, and I knew even then I would never forget it.

All was story and wonder once. An empty glass on the table, a city shaking off its sleep, the rain-washed streets that gleamed like rivers…nothing was indifferent, everything breathed and spoke.  There were ceilings of sky and a thousand shades of meaning, dark-eyed smiling mysteries, and glimpses of sea. The genial ghosts of history made themselves welcome, and the stars of a billion galaxies swirled behind my eyelids. Feelings? What did they matter? You rode one out right onto the next.

We who can perceive the balm of the sky beyond the window and the wink of a friendly moon are fortunate indeed. I need to walk in the shine of the natural world today, and I’m going outside as soon as I wrap up this whatever-it-is.