Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”

Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.

When there are no customers he can usually be seen sitting like a sack on the ground in front of his cottage, his thin legs tucked up under him, exchanging pleasantries with every passer-by.

Booby emptied his glass with eager haste and, as is the custom with confirmed drunkards, grunted and looked sad and preoccupied.

The whole experience of reading fiction might be understood as a series of “establishings” (“the dog is sleeping”), stabilizations (“he is really sleeping deeply, so deeply that the cat just managed to walk across his back”), and alterations (“Uh-oh, he woke up”).

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

Having stumbled back to the sledge Vasili Andreevich caught hold of it and for a long time stood motionless, trying to calm himself and recover his breath. Nikita was not in his former place, but something, already covered with snow, was lying in the sledge and Vasili Andreevich concluded that this was Nikita.

At its best, in my experience, artistic mentoring works something like this: the mentor strongly expresses his view as if it is the only and entirely correct view. The student pretends to accept that position: takes the teacher on faith (tries on his aesthetic principles for size, surrenders to his approach), to see if there might be something in it. At the end of the mentoring period (now), the student snaps out of it, disavows the teacher’s view, which is starting to feel like a set of bad-fitting clothes anyway, and goes back to her own way of thinking. But maybe along the way she’s picked up a few things. These are things she likely knew all along, of which the teacher simply reminded her.

My father had a big moustache, which often hid a small smile.

By the time I reached New Guinea in 1931, when I was twenty-seven, my mother and I were the only remaining members of our family, and she had become a great psychological burden to me, both needy and despotic, a tyrant who seemed not to know what she wanted for or from her last remaining subject.

He didn’t answer, but I wasn’t bothered. I was flattered that we’d got to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology.

She was a large woman, a mother of many children by the look of her long nipples and stretched stomach skin, which lay in neat folds like a stack of bedsheets in my mother’s linen cupboard.

I’d been put beside Mrs. Isabel Swale. Her husband, Arthur, already sozzled when we’d arrived, had drunk himself into an aphasic stupor and followed the conversation stupidly, as a dog follows the ball during a game of tennis. Mrs. Swale badgered me with questions about the Kiona without listening to the answers, so that her inquiry was disjointed and did not create anything resembling a conversation.

I have only been to America once. It is not easy to avoid the place, but for years I managed it.

My experience with AEDP has been fantastic and this book gave me a framework for understanding my experience. Diana Fosha's introduction is a concise summary of AEDP and valuable on its own. The book title is strange and doesn't match the quality of the content. 

...the phenomena of healing are invariably accompanied by vitality and energy, which have clear somatic affective markers.

“Positive” in AEDP has a very special meaning. It certainly includes positive emotions, like joy and gratitude and happiness. However—and I cannot emphasize this enough—the way we define “positive” in AEDP encompasses those as well as anything that feels right and true to the individual.

As a result of what we know about attachment theory and about how the autonomic nervous system works, most experiential therapists seek to activate the social engagement system and establish safety and connection.

If round one of therapy is how to get past defenses and anxiety, and round two is working to heal suffering and bring about increased effectiveness and resilience, in AEDP, there is a round three! Round three of AEDP, metatherapeutic processing (metaprocessing for short), involves experientially working with positive emotional experiences as systematically and thoroughly as we work with negative emotional experiences.

The transformational affects include, but are not limited to: the mastery affects of joy, confidence, and pride; the tremulous affects associated with the positive vulnerability of having new and somewhat unprecedented experiences; the healing affects of feeling moved within ourselves, and gratitude to and love for those who help us; and the realization affects of wonder and awe at the changes taking place.

Emotions are survival programs deeply embedded in the brain and not subject to conscious control.

Emotions are immediate responses to the present environment.

The three corners of the Change Triangle are core emotions, inhibitory emotions, and defenses. Core emotions, our inborn survival emotions, tell us what we want, what we need, what we like, and what we don’t like. Inhibitory emotions such as anxiety, shame, and guilt block core emotions. They keep us civilized so we can fit in with the groups we love and need. And they serve another function: they are a stopgap or fail-safe mechanism to prevent core emotions from overwhelming us. Defenses are the mind’s way of protecting us from emotional pain and being overwhelmed by feelings.

Because core emotions are hardwired in the middle part of our brains, they are not subject to conscious control. They can’t be. Core emotions and their impulses work automatically, propelling us to act immediately.

Our core emotions are really a bunch of physical sensations.

Inhibitory emotions preserve connection by overriding core emotional expression.

Defenses are brilliant and creative maneuvers the mind makes to spare us the pain and overwhelming sensations that emotions can cause. They are anything we do to avoid feeling core or inhibitory emotions.

...a defense is any thought, action, or maneuver we make that takes us away from being in touch with discomfort.

Anniversaries bring up memories, some of which may be completely unconscious.

It is not uncommon for people to shut down defensively when they feel angry. The shutdown response protects them either from being internally overwhelmed by emotions or from upsetting a caregiver who can’t deal with their anger.

By repeatedly repairing small breaks and ruptures in a relationship, we learn to trust more and more.

Gaining awareness about one’s body in space helps illuminate a story of our wants, needs, traumas, and relationships.

Specificity is a key ingredient in working with emotions and the mind. If you can elicit a specific feeling, image, memory, body sensation, or belief to work with, healing can occur.

Processing core emotions is a repetitive process of checking in to your whole body, noticing sensations, listening to the sensations for the impulse, seeing what the impulse wants to do, imagining that impulse carried out in a fantasy, and checking in again…repeating these steps again and again as needed until the energy from the emotion is released and one feels subjectively calm.

Frustration is a very common way people thwart or constrict the anger they consciously sense but do not know what to do with.

If someone says we caused hurt, we cannot deny it. Being hurt is subjective, and the victim gets to decide that it occurred.

Did you ever meet someone who can’t stop moving, working, talking, or being productive? If so, it is probably because he doesn’t like it when he becomes aware of emotions.

We can ask the defense, How are you trying to help me right now? The defense knows the answer and can communicate it. Our defenses work hard to protect us even when the threat that originated them is long gone.

If I was hurt by someone, I can expect to feel both sad and angry (core) but instead I feel ashamed (defense). • If I was violated by someone, I can expect to feel disgusted, angry, hurt, and frightened (core) but instead I feel only sadness (defense).

There are two main ways to get to the openhearted state: first, by experiencing our core emotions. … The second way to access the openhearted state is by looking for your C’s and seeing if you can make a conscious shift into being them just by being aware and applying your emotional energy.

I expected this book to help with feedback in the workplace — which it did — but it's also helpful more broadly for all kinds of communication. It addresses the emotional level of communication and the way misalignments happen in a way that reminded me of two other favorites, Nonviolent Communication and Hold Me Tight.

Feedback includes any information you get about yourself. In the broadest sense, it’s how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life.

The term “feed-back” was coined in the 1860s during the Industrial Revolution to describe the way that outputs of energy, momentum, or signals are returned to their point of origin in a mechanical system.

In addition to our desire to learn and improve, we long for something else that is fundamental: to be loved, accepted, and respected just as we are. And the very fact of feedback suggests that how we are is not quite okay. So we bristle: Why can’t you accept me for who I am and how I am? Why are there always more adjustments, more upgrades? Why is it so hard for you to understand me? Hey boss, hey team. Hey wife, hey Dad. Here I am. This is me. Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of these two needs—our drive to learn and our longing for acceptance.

In the workplace, treating feedback not just as something to be endured, but something to be actively sought, can have a profound impact. Feedback-seeking behavior—as it’s called in the research literature—has been linked to higher job satisfaction, greater creativity on the job, faster adaptation in a new organization or role, and lower turnover. And seeking out negative feedback is associated with higher performance ratings.

Trying to ignore a triggered reaction without first identifying its cause is like dealing with a fire by disconnecting the smoke alarm. So triggers are obstacles, but they aren’t only obstacles. Triggers are also information—a kind of map—that can help us locate the source of the trouble.

Truth Triggers are set off by the substance of the feedback itself—it’s somehow off, unhelpful, or simply untrue.

Relationship Triggers are tripped by the particular person who is giving us this gift of feedback.

Identity Triggers focus neither on the feedback nor on the person offering it. Identity triggers are all about us. Whether the feedback is right or wrong, wise or witless, something about it has caused our identity—our sense of who we are—to come undone.

Broadly, feedback comes in three forms: appreciation (thanks), coaching (here’s a better way to do it), and evaluation (here’s where you stand). Often the receiver wants or hears one kind of feedback, while the giver actually means another.

Managing truth triggers is not about pretending there’s something to learn, or saying you think it’s right if you think it’s wrong. It’s about recognizing that it’s always more complicated than it appears and working hard to first understand. And even if you decide that 90 percent of the feedback is off target, that last golden 10 percent might be just the insight you need to grow.

But often, feedback is not only happening in the context of a relationship; it’s created by the relationship itself. Embedded in the hurly-burly of every relationship is a unique pairing of sensitivities, preferences, and personalities. It is the nature of our particular pairing—rather than either of us individually—that creates friction.

… when we use the word “feedback,” we may be referring to any of three different kinds of information: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation.

Appreciation is fundamentally about relationship and human connection. At a literal level it says, “thanks.” But appreciation also conveys, “I see you,” “I know how hard you’ve been working,” and “You matter to me.”

When people complain that they don’t get enough feedback at work, they often mean that they wonder whether anyone notices or cares how hard they’re working.

Coaching is aimed at trying to help someone learn, grow, or change. The focus is on helping the person improve, whether it involves a skill, an idea, knowledge, a particular practice, or that person’s appearance or personality.

Evaluation tells you where you stand. It’s an assessment, ranking, or rating.

It is smart to avoid evaluation when your purpose is coaching. Don’t say, “You’re no good,” when what you really mean to say is “Here’s how to get better.”

One of the key challenges of feedback conversations is that wires often get crossed. There are two ways this happens. First, I might want a different type of feedback from the type you gave me—for example, I was looking for appreciation, but you gave me evaluation. Second, you may have intended to give me one kind of feedback, but I interpreted it incorrectly—for example, you sought to give me coaching, but I heard it as evaluation.

During the conversation, check in periodically: “I’m intending to give you coaching. Is that how you’re hearing it? From your point of view, is that what you need?” The receiver may respond that it would be nice to know if she’s doing anything right—a signal that she’s craving some appreciation and maybe a bit of positive evaluation.

If your organization has formal feedback conversations at yearly or semiyearly intervals (where, for example, supervisor and supervisee develop objectives or a learning plan for the coming year, with specific skills and outcomes targeted), the evaluation conversation and the coaching conversation should be separated by at least days, and probably longer.

This “what was heard” versus “what was meant” coaching mismatch is surprisingly common.

If we strip back the label, we find that feedback has both a past and a future. There’s a looking-back component (“here’s what I noticed”), and a looking-forward component (“here’s what you need to do”). The usual feedback labels don’t tell us much in either direction. So to clarify the feedback under the label we need to “be specific” about two things: (1) where the feedback is coming from, and (2) where the feedback is going.

we can test whether advice is clear by asking this: If you do want to follow the advice, would you know how to do so?

Intentions are rarely explicitly stated, and even when they are, we may or may not believe them. You say you are “just trying to help,” but it sure seems as if you are “just trying to get me fired.” The challenge here, as we’ve seen, is that intentions are invisible. They are locked up in the giver’s head, where even the giver may not be fully aware of them. And this makes intentions tricky. We care deeply about others’ intentions but we simply can’t know them.

Retirement places more time on your hands. Indeed, it is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

… one could get drunk there with pride and dignity.

The Saitos are, all in all, a very different sort of prospect from the Miyakes of last year. The Miyakes were, of course, decent enough people, but they could not, in all fairness, be called a family of any prestige, whereas the Saito family, without exaggeration, is just that. In fact, although Dr Saito and I were not properly acquainted before, I had always known of his activities in the world of the arts, and for years, whenever we had passed in the street, we had exchanged greetings politely to acknowledge our familiarity with each other’s reputations.

Towards the latter part of the afternoon, I felt it would be prudent to try and lighten Noriko’s mood somewhat, and this was the impulse behind my remarking to her as she passed through the dining room where I was sat reading: ‘It’s astonishing, Noriko, how you can spend the whole day doing nothing but preparing your appearance. You’d think this was the marriage ceremony itself.’

Ichiro came running towards me, his arms outstretched as though to anticipate an embrace. But then as he reached me, he appeared to check himself, and fixing a solemn expression on his face, held out his hand to be shaken. ‘Good day,’ he said, in a businesslike manner. ‘Well, Ichiro, you’re indeed growing into a man. How old are you now?’ ‘I believe I’m eight. Please come this way, Oji. I have a few things to discuss with you.’

After receiving the news of Matsuda’s death late yesterday morning, I made myself a light lunch, then went out for a little exercise.

Possibly my favorite Ishiguro so far (tied with The Remains of the Day)

Embarrassing as those moments were for me, I would not wish to imply that I in any way blame Mr Farraday, who is in no sense an unkind person; he was, I am sure, merely enjoying the sort of bantering which in the United States, no doubt, is a sign of a good, friendly understanding between employer and employee, indulged in as a kind of affectionate sport.

… as I went about my business, I would often catch various American exclamations of delight coming from whichever part of the house they had arrived at.

The landlord led me up a timber stairway to a small room, rather bare, but perfectly decent. When he inquired whether I had dined, I asked him to serve me with a sandwich in my room, which proved a perfectly satisfactory option as far as supper was concerned.

For the first twenty or so minutes, I would say we exchanged the sort of remarks strangers might.

I definitely wouldn't call this book hopeful, but it somehow made me feel more hopeful by contextualizing Trumpism as an "autocratic attempt", a known phenomenon with its own logic. It made me realize that I was feeling confused and worn down because that was the intended effect. 

The Obama story, which drew and built on the stories told by his predecessors, was that American society was on an inexorable march toward a better, freer, fairer world. It may stumble, the story goes, but it always rights itself. This was the meaning to which Obama adapted his favorite Martin Luther King, Jr., quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is also the premise on which the belief in American exceptionalism, or what the legal scholar Sanford Levinson has called the “American civil religion,” is based: that the United States Constitution provides an all-but-perfect blueprint for politics, in perpetuity.

The Reichstag Fire was used to create a “state of exception,” as Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favorite legal scholar, called it. In Schmitt’s terms, a state of exception arises when an emergency, a singular event, shakes up the accepted order of things. This is when the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules. The emergency enables a quantum leap: Having amassed enough power to declare a state of exception, the sovereign then, by that declaration, acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent.

A future historian of the twenty-first century might point to September 11, 2001, as the Reichstag Fire of the United States.

Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design—even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may have been the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brought was plagiarized, and most of it was unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended. Not only did it not achieve excellence: it rejected the idea that excellence is desirable.

Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role—on the world stage or on Russian television—that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics—and public politics is only the performance of power.

Trump’s incompetence is militant. It is not a factor that might mitigate the threat he poses: it is the threat itself.

n an autocracy, the politician’s primary audience is the autocrat himself, because he is the patron who apportions power and influence. In Trump’s America, Republican politicians perform for Trump—he is their primary audience—but his audience is his base, the people who come to his rallies and absorb his tweets. He distributes power by mobilizing these voters. As long as the Democrats are performing for the audience of their voters rather than for Trump, there is hope of reversing the autocratic attempt—but even now half of the country in which we are living is functioning, in the public space, like an autocracy.

The Kavanaugh hearing was the first congressional hearing in which people inhabiting the two non-overlapping American realities—one an autocracy, the other a representative democracy—were addressing two different audiences while speaking in the same room. Blasey Ford was addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee and a broader public. Kavanaugh, who deployed Trump’s favorite tone—aggrieved and aggressive—and one of his favorite tropes—a Clintonian plot—was speaking to Trump.

… the first three years have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible chance of succeeding.

Trump has an instinct, perhaps even a talent, for mangling language in both ways: using words to mean their opposite and stripping them of meaning. His knack is for inverting words and phrases that deal with power relationships.

His election victory entitled him—and, by extension, those whom he saw as his people—to adulation. Criticism, confrontation, and even the simple acknowledgment of political difference amount, in his view, to disrespect. Being disrespected makes him feel victimized—and he claims his imagined victimhood with glee. This claim turns the reality of power upside down, enabling Trump to come out on top by placing himself at the bottom.

Trump’s word piles fill public space with static, the way pollutants in an industrial city can saturate the air, making it toxic and creating a state of constant haze. The haze can be so dense that objects become visible only up close, but never in their entirety and never really in focus. In Trump’s America, every once in a while a journalist or a politician makes a statement clear enough to capture a fragment of shared reality—but it is only ever a fragment, and it is inevitably soon obscured by more language used to mean nothing or the opposite of itself.

Trump’s lies and his word piles both are exercises in arbitrariness, continued assertions of the power to say what he wants, when he wants, to usurp language itself, and with it, our ability to speak and act with others—in other words, our ability to engage in politics. The assault on language may be harder to define and describe than his attacks on institutions, but it is essential to his autocratic attempt, the ultimate objective of which is to obliterate politics.

The vocabulary of American political conversation is vague. “Authoritarian” is used to mean any regime or approach to governance that’s not democratic. The Trump era saw a surge in the use of such words as “fascism,” “coup,” and “treason,” often deployed less in reference to specific events or actions than to signal that American politicians were acting in ways American politicians ought not act. “Democracy” stands for everything we miss about the way politics used to be. But all of these words have clear, if sometimes multiple, definitions in political science, history, and law. If politicians, journalists, and even kitchen-table debaters adopted the habit of defining their terms, we would understand each other better—and begin the process of restoring language.

The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show “I can say what I want when I want to.” The power lie conjures a different reality and demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands: Are you going to insist that you are wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?

Unmoored from lived reality, the autocrat has no need to be consistent. In fact, the ability to change his story at will is a demonstration of power. Putin, for example, claimed that there were no Russian troops in newly annexed Crimea, then a month later affirmed that Russians had been on the ground, then spent more than a year denying that Russian troops were in Eastern Ukraine, then breezily acknowledged that they were there. His shifts from lies to truthful statements were not admissions: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives delivered at his convenience. He communicated that his power enables him to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.

Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies. Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

The word “presidential” came to mean moments when Trump acted in a way that a journalist could imagine an American president—a normal American president—acting. In April 2017, after the bombing of Syria, another prominent CNN voice, Fareed Zakaria, lauded Trump for briefly not acting like a deranged clown. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” Zakaria said. “I think this was actually a big moment . . . For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.” Trump had acted and spoken the way a president might, and this was news. Less than three months into the presidency, his being unhinged and uninformed had become normalized because it was, in fact, now the norm, the everyday reality of American life.

If the word “unthinkable” had a literal meaning, this would be it: thinking about it makes the mind misfire; it makes one want to stop thinking. It brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,” she once wrote. “This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. It is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy, and the restrained tone of the media compounds this feeling by failing to acknowledge it.

Bálint Magyar suggests that where totalitarian regimes of the past sought to control media, today’s autocracies seek to dominate it; and where a totalitarian regime sought to suppress media rights, the autocrat seeks to neutralize them. The end result is not a controlled communications sphere where reality is dictated from above, but a weak one, where nothing can be known, no reality is tangible.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, there had not been a briefing in one year.

By choosing to act as though in the war on reality it was possible not to choose sides, the Times—and with it, the American media mainstream—became, reluctantly though not unwittingly, the president’s accomplices.

Speaking from a place of moral authority—and moral aspiration—is the strategy historically adopted by dissidents in undemocratic regimes such as totalitarian Poland, apartheid South Africa, or contemporary autocratic Belarus. Trump, an attempting autocrat, intuits that moral authority poses a threat to his project.

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority—not the capture of moral high ground, not the assertion of the right to judge good and evil, but the defeat of moral principles as such.

The media recognized the comments as racist. And still they fell into the rhetorical trap set by Trump. CNN pointed out that Trump was “falsely implying they weren’t natural-born American citizens” and other media stressed that only one of the four women was born outside the United States—as though this mattered. One doesn’t have to be a natural-born citizen to be a member of Congress, and, more important, one doesn’t have to be any kind of citizen to have an opinion about the United States government. Even commentators who recognized the racism of Trump’s comments unwittingly participated in policing the boundary of the narrowed circle of “us.”

Together, these studies paint a portrait of Trumpism: racist and sexist resentment given voice by Trump and affirmed by his election leads to greater violence against the growing number of people whom Trumpism defines out of American personhood. The hate crimes of the Trump era have included: Charlottesville in August 2017; the October 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where eleven people were killed on Refugee Shabbat, a nationwide event initiated by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, by a man who had posted online screeds such as “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people”; and the August 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a white supremacist killed twenty-two people, most of them Latino. The hate crimes also include attacks on mosques or Islamic centers in almost every state in the Union; several thousand anti-Semitic incidents; and violent crimes against transgender people, especially transgender women of color, at least twenty-two of whom were murdered in 2019.

In Bálint Magyar’s terminology, we are at the stage of an autocratic attempt—an attempt that may still be rebuffed and reversed by institutional means. The impeachment process in Congress was an attempt at such a reversal. Its failure demonstrated that, just as Magyar has written, a monopoly on political power—having both the executive branch and the Senate in Republican hands—can enable autocracy. The next chance at reversing the autocratic attempt of Trumpism will probably come in November 2020, at the polls. To succeed at reversing the autocratic attempt—and to hold on to that victory in the face of what is certain to be massive and possibly violent backlash—we will have to do more than vote, and more than campaign. We will have to engage both formal and informal political institutions, and we will have to understand anew why these institutions exist.

His headphones were dangling around his neck, so he put them on, hands shaking a little; pressed play on the CD in his Discman; and let the Brandenburg Concertos settle him. He only listened to Bach when he was desperate for order.

…but Dad was gearing himself up to say something, a gradual process that involved shifting around in his chair, some throat-clearing, lifting his tea halfway to his mouth and putting it down again, so Paul and Grandma broke off their staring contest and waited for him to speak. Grief had lent him a certain gravitas.

“I don’t disagree. But I think,” Walter said, with more confidence than he felt, “that this could only have been the work of a bored adolescent.” In truth, he was deeply shaken and was taking refuge in efficiency. 

“How do you bring in guests and supplies?” Walter was having some difficulty grasping the appeal of the place. It was undeniably beautiful but geographically inconvenient, and he wasn’t sure why your average executive would want to vacation in a cellular dead zone.

It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence.

Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.

Her relationship with the pool was adversarial.

They went out to the terrace, which had Italian pretensions.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Olivia said to Lucas, which in those days was one of her signature lines. (A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.)

He was skinny and unpleasantly pale, a strictly indoor creature.

He was ridiculous in some ways, but beneath all that he was a serious person, she understood that, he was a serious person who worked very hard.

Olivia did not, in fact, particularly like Lucas’s new paintings. They were derivative of Edward Hopper and could only have been more obvious in theme if he’d maybe painted the word LONELINESS across them in red.

“What a fortunate thing,” Olivia said finally, “being good at everything.” She herself had only ever been good at one thing, and possibly not even that.

Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not.

“You okay?” Ned asked. “Not at all,” Vincent said. “You mind if I take five?”

“We were just talking about you,” Olivia said when Vincent returned to the deck with a fresh round that she’d mixed inside. “I hope you made up some interesting rumors, at least,” Vincent said.

She arrived early and lingered outside for a while as a cross-section of affluent Brooklyn assembled on the sidewalk in their uniforms: flat-heeled boots and complicated arrangements of scarves for the women, beards and unflatteringly tight jeans on the men. It was a pleasure to watch them meet one another and

“Please close the door,” Jonathan said. Vincent did as he asked, but he said nothing further, and no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks. She placed the Saks bag by the coat stand, took off her coat and hung it, removed her gloves and draped them over the Saks bag, and finally, having run out of things to do, sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, crossed her legs, and waited. They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.

He’d thought the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse, but any given evening can always get worse.

“You’re still enjoying the city?” Mom always said the city in the way a preacher might say Gomorrah.

… the RV in the driveway had at first seemed malevolent, some kind of horrible joke, like their financial mistakes had taken on corporeal form and had parked there next to the house.

Marie seemed a little distant in the first few days, as they drove up out of Florida and into the South, but he knew that was just the way she dealt with stress—she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself—and by the end of the week she’d begun to come back to him.

“As in she’d literally stand there on deck filming the fucking ocean,” the steward said. “Pardon my language. Never saw anything like it in my life. I caught her doing it once, asked her what she was doing, but…” “But?” “She just kind of shrugged and kept doing it.” He was quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

… this was probably the last time in his life he was going to have a drink at a bar in Germany, but the flattening influence of the nearby airport meant that everyone was conversing in English.

“I was his last secretary before he went to prison.” “You weren’t.” “Oh my god,” Keisha says, looking at her boss in the way administrative assistants do when it’s just dawned on them that the boss was once an administrative assistant.

“Well, probably only from a word-derivation sense,” Keisha says with the hesitance of people who know no one else is nearly as interested in the topic as they are, and the conversation moves on, Simone forgets to ask what she means…

“Are you going to stay much longer, do you think?” “No.” He hadn’t exactly thought this through before he said it, but the answer rang true.

The waiter who lived in the next room had sex with a sous-chef every night, and Paul, who was extremely single, could hear every noise they made.

… after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.

Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.

“Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again.

I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.

There were no cafés where I grew up but they existed within my books and flourished in my daydreams.

We endured a parallel existence, shuttling back and forth between New  York and Detroit, brief rendezvous that always ended in wrenching  separations.

When he embraced an idea he looked at things from every angle.

Packed prudently, our bags were quite manageable.

The bathroom was narrow and candlelit with a few fresh flowers in a  small vase resting atop the toilet tank. Like a tiny Mexican chapel, one  that you could piss in without feeling blasphemous.

She had a dusty appearance, as if she had emerged from the bowels of a foundry.

I stayed in Berlin a few more days, revisiting places where I had already been, taking pictures I had already shot.

By the time I got back to New York I had forgotten why I’d left.

A thick torpor coupled with a surprisingly internal luminosity gave me  the impression I had been overcome with a numinous malady transmitted by  the Berlin and London fog. 

We drank tepid coffee and engaged in a semi-successful cultural conversation.

I badly needed coffee, so I entered a small café and took a  seat. Unfortunately the Silver Moon Café was not a café at all, but once  entered, it was nearly impossible to leave.

I had accomplished my mission, losing only one pair of glasses.

My real estate lawyer attempted to sway me against buying the bungalow  due to its ramshackle state and questionable resale value. He failed to  comprehend that these were positive qualities in my book.

Later at my hotel I heard gulls screaming and watched as two of them  plunged toward the recesses of the tilted crown of the great roof  outside my terrace. I believe they were conjugating or whatever bird  fucking is called, but after a while they were silent, so either they  were satisfied or had died trying.

I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

On the whole I thought more than I wrote, wishing I could  just transmit straightaway to the page. When I was young I had the  notion to think and write simultaneously, but I could never keep up with  myself.

Behind her smile I could see so many other things, a catastrophic sadness.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

There were books lining the walls and halls, books that I knew and books I wished to know.

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the  middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?

Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a  giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of  petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time.  Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback  loop. He’s been the puppet of his own constricted desires.

… women in danger of being strangled should avoid any fashion accessories that tie around the neck.

Nothing with a beak can be truly cute, in Charmaine’s opinion.

Men don’t like to think about makeup, they like to think everything  about you is genuine. Unless of course they want to think you’re a slut and everything about you is fake.

You still working on that? as if eating is some kind of a job.

So he sought help from a physician whose tolerance for experimentation outweighed his fear of malpractice

When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they  think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just  following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster.

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city  of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization.

[T]he laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague.  What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”?  And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as  rote discipline?

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own  curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for  the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other  people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.

What I remember is my ignorance. I remember watching her eat with her  hands and feeling wholly uncivilized with my fork. I remember wondering  why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to India for spring  break and returning with a bindi on her head and photos of her smiling  Indian cousins. I told her, “Nigga, you black” because that’s all I had  back then.

He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range  of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls  in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water  eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated  way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite  season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she  is as intelligent and capable as anyone.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and  fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice  policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

I would walk through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size  of living rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these  restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they  were laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a  decade to catch on.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel  no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

His manner was like all the powerless black people I’d ever known,  exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plunder that they  could not prevent.

To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.

It recalled New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear.

She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy  years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black person’s  precise age.

A must-read (especially if you’re looking to cry on the Subway)

The children were like children from anywhere, maybe a little less so.

He was due some vacation days and he took them.

Fucking her you felt like you were really getting something accomplished, like you were a team, you two were good at it, that it was  a thing that could be won.

Who the hell is this?” the nearest man asked. He’d gone bald, and an outsized Adam’s apple moved in his lank neck. The one behind him was  from the looks of him a relation, bigger and with a full head of hair. A son or much younger brother or a cousin from one of those families where the kin bear too much resemblance and together seem like  iterations of an old idea.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one  in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already  staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around  among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on  something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space  between those two possibilities, drifting.

When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved  downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum  commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there.

“I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.

The house was rank with sleep and the night was windy, full of tree sounds.

Well, Doll always said, Just do what you’re told and be  quiet about it, that’s all anybody ever going to want from you. Lila had  learned there was really more to it than that. But she was very quiet.

Everything she said seemed to surprise him a little. No wonder, when it surprised her, too.

She thought, What would I pray for, if I thought there was  any point in it? Well, I guess the first thing would have to be that  there was some kind of point in it.

It was just like before, and everything was different.

There was a kind of haste in his cheerfulness. She had hurt him, and he couldn’t quite hide it.

She understood the word “resurrection” to mean just what she wanted it to mean.

The old man would look into her face for sadness or  weariness, and she would turn her face away, since there was no telling  what he might see in it, her thoughts being what they were.

One time when you weren’t even walking yet he took you  fishing with him. He had his pole and creel in his hand and you in the  crook of his arm and he went off down the road in the morning sunshine,  striding along like a younger man, talking to you, laughing. He came  back an hour later and set the empty creel on the table and said, “We  propped the pole and watched dragonflies. Then we got a little tired.”  And what a look he gave her, in the sorrow of his happiness. He might as  well have said, When he is old enough to understand, tell him about the  day we went fishing.

Beautiful, beautiful prose and deep characters. Lost my interest a bit towards the end.

Nadav Spiegelman

My Bookshelf