Quarantine doesn't seem to have ended for me yet. At home again everyday since the end of final semester exams in May, other than the couple meetings with college friends over lunch and movie, and going to my grandparents for a few days. What do I miss? For the most part, it's the people watching.
I miss what Mrs Dalloway was when she decided to buy the flowers herself. Not exactly an assertion of independence, some alone time, but more likely to be able to be outside of the house with a purpose in hand not necessarily important, with the only intent of being alongside others. As I looked through my entries from 2020, there's a visible shift in observation between pre and post lockdown. The first three months were concentrated on my street-notes from my daily travels to college and back while the following months were in trying to discover new aspects in me to keep myself entertained. In April itself, the first month I lived sans the people watching, I discovered one of the universal truths among women readers—that to discover reading women authors is one of the greatest psychological pleasures a woman could have. It’s Tenderness. That’s the word, as Doctor Nolan aptly said in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
People watching was thus slowly replaced by close reading as the days of quarantine got added on. There are primarily two ways of loving, to love in parts, that is to love for particular things about them, and to love in whole, to love exactly and wholly for who they are. Close Reading is the first way of loving, the way more appreciative for creative indulgence than for human indulgence, as loving people in parts can be deceptive, there lingers the tendency always for the unlovable parts to overpower.
Close Reading—I didn't quite know the term until a few days back, though it was what I had been trying to figure out all through my quarantine. It was one of those terms that you've been trying to pin point to and can immediately recognize when you finally encounter it. I have newly created a Tumblr account, and for now it is being a good host keeping me cozy with its abundant luxury of information. It is from there I found this excerpt on close-reading from Jane Gallop's The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters:
I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.
What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.
The first time I noticed such textual elements (it was point 4 that I noticed first) was back in 2019 when I read Virginia Woolf for the first time. It was To The Lighthouse (a randomly chosen Woolf novel to enter into her world, after failing to enter via Mrs Dalloway, the more accessible one as per most readers, which is why I could never tell which one is the easier to enter from), and beside her style, it is her punctuation that left a mark on me all the more—on how parentheses, commas, semicolons and em dashes can be given life to, emotions to. It's possible that I've come across such elements in my readings before, but didn't notice them—I now know that it takes a certain deliberation to begin observing, a deliberation that is relieved to you only if you start looking without knowing at what. It was the nonlinearity of the thought-lines of her characters that made me read slowly and deliberately, made me cognize space and time difference between the world and our minds, a hundred thoughts passing as we take a walk, look out of our windows, have dinners. As Heather O'Neill wrote in a LitHib article, as she found herself going back to Mrs Dalloway during quarantine (which I read coincidentally this June, which is when the story is set in):
In Woolf's novels, time and identity is never linear. It is layered and fluid. Your childhood self is always so present, it is almost painful. The consciousnesses of people intertwine. Someone walking onto a bus affects the daydreams of everyone else on it, like throwing a stone in a pond.
Then again I found the usage of em dashes in Rabindranath Tagore's letters to knit a string of thoughts in only a few sentences, each of them running long as one's mind can lengthen, without letting the sentence get breathless or knotted.
It took me some time to find such patterns in the words (points 1 and 2), but once I came to recognize them I could see them everywhere—like the color blue popping out everywhere I looked while reading Maggie Nelson's Bluets. Or when I read Too Much and Not The Mood, and couldn't fathom how Durga Chew-Bose beaded a series of events in the opening essay, strung together by the simple, overused word heart. After a few pages in, you forget how even you got there like how one daydreams, here though you can read backwards and see how the illusion was created. A magic trick with its secret out in open but it's the sleight of hand still in charge, the mystery unstained. This mystery was intensified after I encountered Bluets. “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” That's how she opens her series of vignettes on falling in love with a color—each word of that opening line so simple but putting them together they provoke a rarely discovered intimacy between the mundane and ethereal. I kept going back to that line trying to figure out how even one gets to know oneself so intimately. Which takes me back to Ethan Hawke's words:
First we have to survive, then we have to thrive. And to thrive, to express ourselves, alright, well, here's the rub: we have to know ourselves. What do you love? And if you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you and it expands.
As my reading habit changed, as I learned to appreciate more what happens at each page than waiting for what happens next, to prefer more of stories with no climax, with no build up, only continuous reveal of what the situation is, who the characters are, being thrown in midst of their lives for a certain number of pages—I started to find correlations with my movie watching habit. Back in March I noted:
I have been thinking of two movies in particular: Mahaprithibi (1991) directed by Mrinal Sen and My Neighbour Totoro (1988) directed by Hayao Miyazaki. In Mahaprithibi, it starts with what usually will be a climax, a willing death of a mother. The movie is about that one day in that family's life, the very day the oldest son of the family was to return home from abroad. As there is no build up to the climax, there is never an opportunity for the watchers to demand for a release post climax. Life goes on, the tragedy of one morning to pass down trauma for years long. Climaxes in art shouldn't be the deciding factor of its beauty. If a story is spoilt merely by a reveal of information out of the intended sequence, it is not a well told story to begin with. Its beauty should be able to reveal itself in every revisit. In My Neighbour Totoro, there is no conflict to begin with, but the weight of the little decisions made in mundane things becomes the story itself, the magic is not formed by the division of the beginning, the climax, or end but by getting to have a portion of a continuation. Similar absence of climax is there in poetry, at least in most of them, climax is replaced by a climate, where the gravity lies in the contemplation, in the wonderment, in the observation, in the friction between each word used, in every pause caused by punctuation and the breaking of lines.
One of such poems that fills me up each time I think of it is The Orange by Wendy Cope:
Then a portal of undiscovered happiness opened up, when I found its twin— Oranges by Jean Little:
That's how the days are passing nowadays, sans relief or climax, only a perpetual reveal of events and test of resilience to combat the everydayness of living.
Until next newsletter,
Try loving in parts what you love in whole already and vice versa.