ESSAYS
The Holy Family on the Steps, Nicolas Poussin, 1648.
THE SIGHT OF UNDEATH: A Meditation on Faith
At a party earlier this summer an editor maneuvered me into falsely claiming I’d read a book I hadn’t read. Most of the time, when someone asks you if you’ve read something you haven’t, you can just nod and they’ll go on. It’s a form of politeness. They’re talking, this book has occurred to them, it’s important to the flow of their thought, and so they just automatically ask if you’ve read it and you nod politely and they go on. If people were scrupulously honest about which books they’d read, conversations at literary gatherings would become impossible.
Illustration by Virginia Mori
THE ANATOMY OF PANIC: A Personal History of Anxiety
I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. At noon we could look at our own faces. All the basic shapes were there, in bone. Bright winter sun turns kids skinless. Skins them. But there we were in geometry class. The teacher also taught physics. He was grotesquely tall. Thin. He’d demonstrate the angles with his bones.
From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
ON NOVOCAIN
I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”
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Illustration by Beppe Giacobbe
NIGHT SHIFTS: Can Technology Shape Our Dreams?
A voice says: “Close your left hand. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.”
I’m lying in bed. A sleep mask covers my eyes. A tangle of wires covers my left hand. At the tip of my ring finger, a sensor measures my heart rate. A flexible length of plastic embedded with circuits stretches from my palm to the top of my middle finger. This will record the hypnic jerks and spastic opening-hand motions that signal my entry into hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep, where thoughts slip free of conscious control.