letters from, along with a couple of other forthcoming pieces, is a series for paid subscribers to this newsletter. Here’s another post that’s free to read:
Hello friend,
Around dawn today I was woken up very early by a strange smacking sound, somewhere between thud and crack, and it was loud. I’d been overworked and sleep-deprived the last couple of days, and I felt actual anger, from somewhere deep in a labyrinth of hard-won REM, at the noise. Each time I heard it, I thought no and burrowed deeper into sleep. This morning, I wasn’t in my rental in Iowa City. I’d decided, semi-impulsively to visit my parents in Illinois for this weekend, partly because it is Easter this Sunday, and despite various Meaningfully Complicated Feelings on my part, I knew observing it together would mean a lot to them. My almost-completely-asleep brain had decided the thwacking was my mother, knocking sharply on the door of my old bedroom.
Once more I heard it: thwack.
Stop, I croaked, and then awakeness took me and I squinted into the minimally-furnished bedroom of my adolescence, bathed in gray-violet light, realizing with the rationality that consciousness bestows that neither of my parents would knock at my door once every few minutes for nearly half an hour. I got out of bed, confused and resentful. I padded over pale carpet, trying to figure it out. THWACK.
I whirled around.
It was a bird. A pigeon or dove of some kind, I thought. Brown and mottled. It was crashing into the glass of my bedroom window, not hard enough to stun itself, fluttering down to the earth, and then flying up again into the tree neighboring the house. What on earth, I thought, staring at the bird through the room’s drawn curtains, which are white and sheer.
I am the farthest thing from an expert on our birb friends, but somewhere in ole gal brain the memory of a factoid stirred: some birds, in spring, get more territorial. They fly into windows and mirrors, mistaking their reflections for avian rivals.
I flung open the curtains, and turned my bedroom lights on. The glass of the windowpane, now, hopefully, should have lost its reflective quality.
A minute passed. I watched the bird. I looked at my phone. I looked at the bird, which at this moment was flying right at the glass separating it from my face. THWACK. It fell to the ground, meandered in a circle. What the hell is happening, I said out loud to nobody. The bird rose up to its perch in the tree. It flew to a different branch. It stayed there for a while, trembling a little. It did not leave for a long time.
I, feeling mystified and helpless, climbed back into bed and slept for a couple of hours. The texts I saw upon waking jolted me into a full awakeness; something big and very painful had transpired in the life of one of my dearest friends.
We spoke to each other. Later, I had tea with my parents. My mother read from scripture. Later, back in my room, I worked. The bird, still in the tree, appeared to be sleeping, though what did I know. Later, my family had the traditional Good Friday meal of my people: kanji and and pire—rice gruel and spiced green gram. I went back upstairs.
The work I had to do was considerable and anesthetizing and I needed, eventually, a break from it. I stretched, got water. Earlier that day I’d considered rereading the crucifixion, the passages of scripture that have caused me nearly physical discomfort nearly all my life. I read this poem instead.
It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives
that drives us half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken,
our bodies existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
in our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.— Wendell Berry
Berry’s poem is, among other things, ecocide, war, and degradation. The destruction, our destruction, of the world. To destroy that which we were given / in trust: how will we bear it? I thought of the current events we have been living through, the polycrisis of climate, militarism, cost-of-living, ascendant authoritarianism, and remembered, once again, three things.
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