More than a few times she’d even prayed, selfishly, for The End to hold off until after she was dead and buried, so that she might be spared the pain of bearing witness to it.

For Easter I rewatched my favorite film, Jesus of Montreal, and reread my favorite novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Both of these, along with the sonnets of Donne and Hopkins, the complete novels of Graham Greene and the second season of Fleabag, describe unhappy love affairs with God, which I suppose makes that one of my favorite genres. At one point Angel Archer quotes Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” in its entirety. My unsettled mind latched onto “Reason, thy viceroy in me” and has been worrying it like a broken tooth ever since.

It’s easier to leave some parts of the church than others. It’s easier to leave the smiling horrible minister who was raping a teenager in the vestry, and all the others like him, easier to leave the inerrancy of scripture and a scholarship fund called Sons of the Parish than it is to leave sixteenth century choral music and the enigma of Jesus himself, remote as the Nabateans one minute, immediate as any other Palestinian freedom-fighter the next. I think Jesus is hardest to understand, or maybe believe, when he is at his simplest and most direct. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Okay I get that, I do, but Jesus I’m genuinely worried I haven’t saved enough for retirement?

Consider the lilies of the field, says Jesus, and I consider them a lot actually. Louise, my house’s benevolent ghost, planted calla lilies and roses in the garden, and while I indulge her survivor roses, I dig the calla lilies out by their roots as soon as I catch so much as a tender leaf unfurling. Sure, I can say they’re invasive and toxic to cats and that I’m trying to nurture wildlife habitat here, and God could say the same about me. This is Ramaytush land, pull me out by my roots, three-person’d God, you coward. So the lilies of the field are cold comfort to be honest.

My high school librarian Marie Suchting, may her name be blessed forever, never reread anything – she didn’t have time – but I circle back endlessly searching for clues. How in God’s name did I end up here? What ridiculous superposition of texts made this set of choices seem logical? I just wanted to be safe and happy and not to have to hurt anyone, and here I am working in the tech industry. Humbling to acknowledge how much of my ethics I owe to Hawkeye Pierce, how great my debt to Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. Reason, thy viceroy in me, frankly derives its political legitimacy from highly dubious grounds.

Then came the inexplicable shame. Of not being believed. Of not being worth more.

“…friendship risks the end of friendship…”

“The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.”

Happiness is not a solvable equation.

“There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—”it’s a haunted house.”

America is Not the Heart and How to Read Now
Have you ever really thought about Fremont? No? Why not?

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
Learn your blood-drenched history and mourn your courageous dead

Another Day in the Colony
Know that history is in no way done with us yet

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Comics aren’t supposed to make me cry (are they?)

Homage to Catalonia
Reread old novels now that you’re big enough to understand them

Nona the Ninth
Meet the soul of the earth

Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case
Understand how power corrupts

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Consider alternatives

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
Drive from San Francisco to Joshua Tree thinking about deep space and social justice

The Years
…so that when Annie Ernaux wins the Nobel Prize you can say “oh yeah Annie, I call her Annie, she’s great”

I wish I had spoken when it mattered

Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.

She had the terrible sinking feeling that whatever was going wrong right now, it was her fault somehow: that she hadn’t been smart enough or good enough.

Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.

Repeating patterns, the mistakes of yr parents, running but not getting very far. Not as far as you wanted but maybe farther than you think.

treaties are for settlers, too.

I’m sad she’s dead, for the usual human and parasocial reasons.

I’m genuinely curious if also worried about what comes next.

And I’m angry, I am so so angry, about the British empire.

As a white Australian I exist because of what Britain saw as surplus population it could send to administer its stolen wealth. The ways in which my life was predetermined, the ways in which I was raised and educated to be a colonial bureaucrat, were callous and calculating and fundamentally genocidal, and have left me traumatized.

The thing about Elizabeth. The thing! That I managed to grope towards just now, is that she was a human sacrifice to empire. She had no choice and no escape. She had to do her duty.

And she did her duty flawlessly. She was incredible at it. A genuinely awe-inspiring triumph of will.

And she shouldn’t have done that. For two reasons. One (the most important) is because the Empire is a death cult that murdered millions on her watch. The other is that her performance of that duty is and always will be forced on the rest of us as the standard we will inevitably fail to meet.

I admire her. But I will not seek to emulate her. Her indulgence of powerful men and her racism were ruinous even in her immediate family, and catastrophic for the world. What she did so amazingly well is a thing that should never have been done.

Which loops back to sorrow. Those glimpses of the woman she could’ve been: the 18yo ambulance driver, the rider galloping her own racehorse.

What a fucking waste and betrayal of all her strength and integrity, to pour it out in the service of maintaining a corrupt status quo.

What a waste of mine.

I didn’t know how a child was supposed to grieve, and no one told me.

The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room. He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life, that’s how we bring Dad back.

I care for Henrietta Lacks and all the names whispered in my ear by the live oak trees. I don’t care about the father of modern gynecology, honored on South Carolina’s golf course capitol.

Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

Me: Well, that was an intellectually productive bath.

Jeremy: Oh yes?

Me: I figured out existentialism.

Jo: Well done!

Me: You know how I was puzzling over Camus’ “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”? It’s not a thought experiment, it’s an imperative.

Jeremy: Right.

Me: Oh so you knew this all along?

Jeremy: Yep.

Jo: It means that Sisyphus has a simple job to do and knows how to do it and even though it will never be finished, that’s all you need to be happy.

Jeremy: No, it means you have to give people agency, even if what they are doing seems pointless to you.

Me: No! It means life is pointlessly hard work that will never be finished, but you have to invent ways to be happy anyway.

In this family we interpret Camus in ways that reflect our highly individual temperaments and perspectives TILL DEATH COMES FOR US