Is it possible to live two lives?
It's that time of year, when the stock-taking happens, and the various reflective tools make their appearance. One year making way for another seems like a good time to sit down and count up, to consider what I've done and what I missed. But this year it's also a hard and precarious moment from which to reflect. In the summer, I bought a house - by which I mean I am mortgaged to my eyeballs. Now, my job is at risk - and in the short, frigid, term, the heating of said house is also at risk. 2024 was not the year I imagined. What it was - full of essays and unexpectedly rich connections. What is wasn't - solitary (I know, I know, that thirst that's never quenched) or stable (no, I'm not a horse, and a house does not always proffer roots).
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In 2024, I read almost everything Anne Carson has written, and watched and listened to her (this was a particularly tasty hour). A little while before that I tackled Ulysses, thanks to the Bloomsday inspired podcast from Shakespeare and Co. So, I'm flexing my readerly muscles and eyeing the six volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu (in English translation, alas) that make my bookshelves (mortgaged from my Dad, in cash and labour) look so handsome.
At the same time, I wondered aloud in a voicenote to my randomiser whether I might spend the year only reading women. The part of me that wants to read exclusively women and the part of me that wants to nobble Proust aren't so much fighting as existing alongside each other. In one of the micro-essays in her collection Having and Being Had, Eula Biss wrote 'is it possible to live two lives?' and voiced my fragmented experience. It's not just the desire to shape my reading life in seemingly contradictory ways. It's also the express decision I made when I committed to this house to live partly as a wood-dwelling thinker, opening the doors of a studio to creatives looking for a momentary slice of quiet, and partly as a gad-about-town, exploring near and far on the catamaran of wanderlust.
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The Biss has been a slow burn. Her ideas about consumption (the first part) were very close to the bone (skeptical of 'capital', especially in a state of mortgage, she quizzically explores what kind of wealth it is to live in a house that one, by the continued favour of the bank, owns). The current section, about work, is easier to palate, and is asking questions that I, too, have. What work we do and how we live our lives seem hard to wrest apart to me.
Diego Garcia, the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize winner (which I offered up as my book club pick for January) features two people for whom work is elusive - even the work they seem to want to do is sidetracked by pasties and scandinavian coffee and just one more tube (cig) or charity shop trawl. The tension between the scan of the horizon, determining some kind of direction, and the awareness of what is beneath the feet at this very moment, is so real (and, I love those parentheses):
(For a long time all this time I have been thinking about how I live, how I should live, if there is any other way to live - what is it to refuse the heteronormative family unit, though perhaps it was never refusal, perhaps it was choosing something else which had always felt until now conditional, provisional, near-future focused?
But then like everyone we got slammed into the ever present tense and all we can think of is how to live right now, at this moment, with what we’ve got.)
On certain days, it appears I dwell in a heteronormative family unit. Sometimes it seems I have that "peculiarly English problem of 'growing up in - and moving away from - the working class.'" (Smith, on Dyer). But looks are deceiving. If I've moved away from the working class in most facets of my life, still the old ideas - that my work, a degree of competence, and being not shy of hard graft - are somehow core to my sense of self. Being underemployed, consistently cold, and conscious about where every penny goes, whilst it feels almost Dickensian, is at least a far cry from being a class traitor.
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Hunting for a job is reminding me of my distaste for the modern construction of dating. In both, I felt peripheral - here are systems not designed for the likes of me. In both there's the dance between the general model (a career, or professional path; polyamory, monogamy, relationship anarchy) and the specific instance (this job or institute; this prospective date). Could it be that accepting a less than enjoyable job in the service of some notional career has invaded the way we look at and think about prospective lovers, considering how they might serve some idea we have about what a relationship must look like and facilitate? I'm reminded, too, of how I got this current job - how the conditions are irreplicable, how it seemed like a kind of pursuit that I enjoyed because the stakes were low and I could simply be myself. Contrast that with the prevalence of screening (one use of AI) and the neglect of the edge case and my dismay at the futility of it all is apparent.
Not wishing to submit to Tolstoy's assertion that only unhappiness is unique, there is much to be celebrated. Though there is certainly a life of weathering (literally) and constraint, there is simultaneously one of liberty and collaboration. Last year I met my match - and I mean that with all the richness of that metaphor. I practiced improvisation in love and connection, acceptance of conditions that are present but not definitive, and celebration of a waltz intelligent, fruitful, sexy and playful. That these two lives are being lived is incontrovertible, though still I am left with the question of whether - and how - it is possible.
When first I saw this house, and its studio out the back, I said aloud 'I just never thought it would be possible for me'. I saw clearly the opportunity to support art-making and artists right in that backyard. It was not to be my own four walls, bordering and guarding my solitude (as love, Rilke), but a space of many comings and goings for people who, like me, crave the woods from time to time in order to better think, make, recover. In this first six months, that hasn't yet happened. And why not? Sometimes, we get in our own way with some strange sense of readiness, by not sharing what we have to offer. So, in a very rough and ready form, here's a bit about the studio. You may know people who need exactly this. You may even need it yourself. And doubtless it will transform as brilliant people come and go. Do share!
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On the final day of the year, I finished Feel Free by Zadie Smith - I started it a few years ago (around the time I was embroiled in listening to Ulysses), but in paperback the denseness of the pages defeated me. Finding it in hardback in Oxfam this summer was a great boon - Zadie has been a terrific companion (even if we do seem to have different views about Sigrid Nunez). On finishing it, I was enticed into the Guardian's hotly anticipated books of 2025 (a new Sarah Hall! Xiaolu Guo doing a feminist Moby Dick!) to find that my wait to be accompanied again need last only until October. Joy!
I leave you with this, from Feel Free:
Essays about one person's affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom. And the reader is likewise unusually free, because I have absolutely nothing over her, no authority. She can reject my feelings at every point, she can say: 'No I have never felt that' or 'Dear Lord, the thought never crossed my mind!'
Enjoy your own freedoms, my friends.
PS If any of you fancy joining a Proustian epic, meeting every two months for each successive volume, hmu.