connect four

Hello,

Greta Gerwig once said, “You don’t miss it. From the first shot, you know when there’s an author there, and you know when it’s personal. You can feel it come through.”

I believe that. People, places, or things. You know it when you see it.

Last weekend, I walked into a Canto-fusion restaurant in Manhattan Chinatown and thought, “Huh, there’s an author here.” The host stand had a pagoda roof, and the cocktail had Sichuan peppercorn. There was a backlit exhibit of screenshots from the golden era of Hong Kong movies, proudly touting ‘Coming Soon’ at the top. It was obnoxious and nostalgic and kitschy. But there was something there.

I’ll give you another example. One of my housemates moved out recently, and he left a ‘free-for-all’ wooden crate on our stoop. While I was waiting for us to go to the airport, I picked up the yellow and black copy of The Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. The opening line read: “Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke to him after twenty seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do over.” Right away, I claimed the book for myself and put it in my purse.

There was a voice there. There is a voice here. Do you get what I mean? Can you hear it?

I think that there is a core essence in people, something that persists through time, that permeates their words and actions, that exposes itself through the act of creation. Maybe some would call that the soul. I don’t, but I do believe that it can act as connective tissue. These essences can resonate with each other. Occasionally, you hear someone casually explain what they know of love and life, and it’s revelatory.

There’s a thrill in finding it. Like walking into a restaurant, or picking up a book, or meeting somebody new, and you think, “Oh, I really like this. I haven’t felt this in a while.” It’s the excitement of discovery, but the excitement is drawn from a type of homecoming.

Shroothi recently told us a story about the meeting of two therapists in her bookstore. The woman brought in an edition of The Red Book by Carl Jung to donate, and a man, visiting from Alaska, snatched it up because he’s been wanting a copy. From what I understand, they chatted about his work with indigenous groups, and the pair exchanged numbers.

I’m not saying that this is about romantic love. I’m saying that aesthetics and sensibilities can form the basis for connection, for belonging. We reveal ourselves in the bits and bobs of life that we love, and we unveil others through the same.

Maybe it’s kismet. Maybe it’s meteor stardust or universal frequencies or man sliced in two—any one of a hundred cliches. Maybe Greta was right all along, and it’s the power of cinema. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I was sixteen, I went through a phase when my default phrase to fill the silence was: “I wanna go home.” Even if we were hanging out on the sagging couch in my old house in Sugar Land, it would pop out like a vocal stim or something. I want to go home.

This modern life is so jam-packed, so stimulating. There are 11,280 people per square mile in DC. If you ate out once a day, it would take you 7.29 years to try every restaurant here. Over 518,000 hours of new content are uploaded to YouTube each day. 569 new movies were released last year in just the US and Canada. As many as 2.2 million books are published annually. There are over 9.7 million artists on Spotify, and less than 20% of them have more than 1,000 monthly listeners. How can we possibly be expected to keep up? How do I find you through all this sound?

Sartre’s hypothetical, post-mortem confinement in No Exit prompted the final line: “Hell is other people.” Sometimes that certainly feels true, especially these days. But we aren’t trapped in an eternal exercise of existentialist philosophy, where reckoning with another’s subjectivity amounts to a form of psychological punishment. Life can be overwhelming. It’s possible that solace is with each other, too.

Everyone is trying to matter, is striving for purpose, is projecting their voice somewhere. We look for each other in the noise. I’m twenty-six now, and I think that I would like to go home.

Eight White Nights by André Aciman

A man and a woman meet at a Christmas Eve party, and they spend eight white nights together. Oskár is struck by nothing more than how Clara introduces herself. They bond over pretentious sensibilities, like Baroque composers, French art films, and having friends who own homes in Manhattan. Meanwhile, Oskár twists himself into knots as to whether Clara likes him at all. In some ways, it’s an interesting condemnation of over-romanticizing, a reckoning with the manic pixie dream girl. And yet, the story beautifully covers that spark of recognition, with people, places, and things: “Saint-Rémy, the town where Nostradamus and Van Gogh walked the same sidewalk, the seer and the madman crossing paths, centuries apart, just a nod hello.”

Tell me about something that made you feel this way recently.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie