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#03 | Favorite Books of 2024: Gorgeous Protective Spells for a Changing Year

Anabel Hafstad

Updated: Dec 20, 2024


Collage of favorite book titles 2024


I often think of my reading and books as a muggle’s real-life Protego spell. In the treasured Harry Potter books — making for some exquisitely cozy fall and winter reads, for those of you who haven’t tried them — the Protego spell is a 'Shield Charm' that protects its caster ‘with an invisible shield that reflects spells and blocks physical entities.’


You have to admit: that’s a pretty neat power to have.


Also, it's beautiful.


When called upon, the Protego spell produces a ripple of light radiating outward from the wizard’s wand, instantly forming a shimmering, translucent dome (or a wall-like shield) around the person in need of protection.


This barrier often glows magically in hues of blue or silver, and when struck by attack its edges ripple and shimmer like water in movement.


Screenshot of Protego spell in a Harry Pottery Movie
Protego Maxima, conjuring up an almost impregnable magical protection barrier. People who are outside of the shield cannot see and hear those who are protected within. Source: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

So that is what books are to me. And they have been so especially in 2024.



 

Books Are 'Just Extremely Long Spells'


This year, books have carried and protected me through a tumultuous time marked by multiple personal tragedies and repeated geographical uprooting, stranding me alone on an island and culminating finally in the premature death of my father this November.


I know for certain that this year would have done more damage, would have destroyed more of me, had I not had an army of books with me wherever I went.


The magic of books is of course that they physically erect a wall between reality and oneself — a surprisingly effective method to keep intrusions at bay, especially when combined with headphones.


But the ancient alchemy of paper pages runs deeper. Books are physical experiences producing real, physical effects — a powerful incantation of our bodies and minds.

Reading books, our breathing and heart rate slow.


After just six minutes of undisturbed reading, stress is reduced more so than when we listen to music or take a stroll.


Reading measurably reduces our cortisol levels and — especially with fiction — strengthens social intelligence, deepening our personal capacity for empathy.


Reading literally turns us into more loving, caring individuals.

Talk about the importance and meaning of fiction. Of imagination. Of stories and myths.


Last but not least — and I can 100% testify to this — the act of reading even just a handful of pages before going to sleep is one of the most powerful natural relaxants available to humankind.


Measurably more so than with other comparable leisure activities (such as watching your favorite show on TV), reading helps our brains transition from a day at work — or a day at simply trying to keep our shit together — to something else. It helps our minds grow quieter, calmer, with a remarkable efficiency.


And, if kept on our bedside tables, books helps us gain a deeper, more restful sleep.


A few weeks ago, one of my brothers — he evidently knows his bibliophile sister well — sent me the following quote:



The spell of books is not simply temporary. Its transformation is lasting; reading changes us and who we are, how we think and feel, from within.


Fantasy writer Jonathan Edward Durham therefore views books as 'just extremely long spells' turning us into different, hopefully better, stronger, more resilient people... for the rest of our lives.

 


10 Books Making for 10 Protego Spells


So here then are my favorite 'extremely long spells' of 2024.


This is a thoughtfully selected list of ten diverse, unique, and meaningful books — from fiction to poetry to non-fiction.


May perhaps one or two of its titles shield and transform you in this new year to come.


And who knows, maybe the one or other magic spell may even serve as this year's last minute Christmas gift?


Merry Christmas and a happy, safe, and protected New Year 2025 ✨


Signature Anabel

⬇️ PS: Vote for your favorite books at the end of these Quiet Pages! ⬇️



 


Magic Spell 01

'Bear' by Marian Engel (1976)



Cover of Bear

I devoured the slender and shocking Bear by Marian Engel in one piece at the beginning of this year, when the outside world was frozen stiff at -20C.


What we have on our hands here is arguably the 'most controversial novel ever written in Canada' (The Canadian Encyclopedia).


It was indeed a very strange, perfectly short, and surprisingly warm hug wrapping me in the problematically sexualized fur of a bear and his lover, Lou, a 27-year-old archivist.


During the summer in question, Lou embarks on a professional journey to a remote Canadian island embedded in a landscape of dense woods, gleaming lakes and rivers.


At seven, she got up and put her boots on; went outside to survey her kingdom. It was a grand one.

Alone in a crumbling mansion, Lou is tasked with documenting the house and library of one Colonel Cary.


Lou discovers her love for freedom and solitude. And for bear.


Who is, quite literally, a bear...


Bear, make me comfortable in the world at last. Give me your skin.


 

Magic Spell 02

'Dept. of Speculation' by Jenny Offill (2014)



Cover of Dept. of Speculation


Another pleasantly short and beautifully poetic spell cast on me at the beginning of this year, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill quietly traces the marriage of a Brooklyn writer and her husband slowly coming undone at the seams.


Both the narrator and her husband are never named, nor is their child.


When I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.

In the narrator's quiet existence as a writer struggling to write her second book, there are bedbugs. There are the at times nearly insurmountable challenges of loneliness, of early motherhood.


And there is the gradual weakening of elemental ties, of a once deeply loving friendship.


Before I came across this novel, I did not know it was possible to craft such profound storytelling magic from mere snippets; little vignettes, fragments of thoughts, observations, flashes of memories.


In the narrator's brain, there is the universe and Carl Sagan. There is Buddhism, there is T.S. Eliot, and evolution.


There is life.


There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.

Offill uses the literary technique of collage, meaning we are not presented a regular "narrative". But do not be afraid. This book is absolutely stunning and highly readable.


There's that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.

 


Magic Spell 03

'Winning Words: Inspiring Poems for Everyday Life' by William Sieghart (2012)


Cover of Winning Words

How often do I hear people say that 'poetry isn't their thing' — or they simply 'don't get poetry?' And I completely understand this sentiment. 


Sadly, poetry is far too often taught as a sort of intellectual riddle we must solve. Those of us who are clever and educated enough will figure it out, the rest of us isn’t bright enough, isn’t ‘cultured,’ ‘brainy,’ or ‘artsy’ enough. 


People reject poetry, because poetry — or what is taught as poetry — has rejected them. 


Teachers have subjected them to age-old classics originally taught for their newness, their inventiveness. But centuries later, most of us are not instantly able to relate to Shakespeare’s love sonnets, or T.S. Eliot’s lengthy modernist The Wasteland, with its excessive cultural references and quotes. 


For many of us, the recital of a poem has become a cause for rolling our eyes — and I understand it. 


To those I say: please do yourself a favor and read Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder.


It is a beautiful, highly digestible take on centering the ancient, soothing, incantatory power of poetic language and rhythm and even rhyme back where it belongs: in our comfort zone.


He argues that a poem is in fact a little machine. You run your mind through it, and it comes out altered. Something has happened to your consciousness. And if you like the effect, you can run your mind through the little machine over and over again, as with a favorite song.


Then consider (good!) poetry anthologies. 


I have had enough time to learn which poets I tend to like, but I’m often somewhat disappointed when borrowing one of their ‘the complete poems of’-collections. As with anything — movies, songs, books, people — some of their poems will then strike a chord in me, and I will feel something. Something like a twitching, dazzling delight. 


Then again, others will bore me to death.  


I fare much better with anthologies of poems curated and presented for me, under a uniting theme. 


If you want to see if poetry is in fact 'something for you' after all, Winning Words is an extremely good point to start.


(If this does anything to enhance my argument, let me just state that the great Helena Bonham Carter owns a copy and is an outspoken advocate for the transforming powers of poetry).





I blew through this anthology as if it were a novel — from cover to cover. This is unusual for me, but I found that the poems were so carefully selected, and so resonant, shimmering, so true, that I could not put the book down. 


One poem after another gave me a jolt. 


Everything Is Going to Be Alright

Derek Mahon


How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,

but there is no need to go into that.

The poems flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.


Many of the poems I’ve had to copy out of the book so that I could reconsult them, re-cast their spells on myself, once I’d returned the book to the library. 


I did not want to let them go.


In Poetry as Survival (book number 9 on this list), Gregory Orr suggests that we collect the poems that protect us and delight us like herbs (or, in Merlin Sheldrake’s world, consciousness-altering fungi?) for our own, personal medicine pouch. 


This is what I’ve done. I still regularly run my mind through the machinery of these poems, and I savor the aftertaste they leave on my mental tongue. 


I’ll try my luck on you with another one of them:


Late Fragment

Raymond Carver 

 

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.




 


Magic Spell 04

'Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures' by Merlin Sheldrake (2020)



Cover of Entangled Life


First of all, let us all appreciate the fact that the author is called Merlin. How could this particular spell of a non-fiction read not be absolutely magical? I therefore mean no disrespect when, purely for the sake of today's magical theme, I shall henceforth continue to refer to the author by his first name (as opposed to all the other authors in this issue of the Quiet Pages).


This seems predestined and, frankly, unavoidable.


And so does the book's subject matter.


It is a challenge to adequately summarize a non-fiction read on the massive queendom of fungi, but let me just say that Merlin's passion for it is infectious, his knowledge of this usually hidden realm is limitless, and his capacity to describe complex processes in simple terms is admirable:


Mycelium is how fungi feed. [T]he difference between animals and fungi is simple: animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.

Mycelium — the incredibly fine filaments or root-like structures fungi make — is, in Merlin's words, a master at shapeshifting.


It is 'a living, growing, opportunistic investigation — speculation in bodily form. [W]hat shape is mycelium? It's like asking what shape water is.'

For him, the act of 'looking at mycorrhizal fungi under microscopes' is almost 'the equivalent of a marine biologist going for a dive.'


Merlin will take you along on this miraculous dive — through the ages of the Earth, through the layers of organic matter.





He will take you straight down into the dark soil of rot and decaying bodies, of fermenting beverages and mind-altering fungal substances that potentially — according to the 'stoned ape' hypothesis (this is a real thing, apparently) — gave us consciousness itself.


Evidence of religion, complex social organization, commerce and the earliest art arises within a relatively short period in human history around fifty to seventy thousand years ago. What triggered these developments is not known. Some scholars attribute them to the invention of complex language. Others hypothesize that genetic mutations brought about changes in brain structure. For [Terence] McKenna, it was psilocybin mushrooms that had ignited the first flickering of human self reflection, language and spirituality, somewhere in the proto-cultural fog of the Paleolithic. Mushrooms were the original tree of life.

Merlin (and McKenna) go so far as to ask whether it is not in fact we who use these types of mushrooms, but the corresponding fungus behind them is using us.


After all, fungi have been around for millions of years longer than any of us complex organisms.


It is likely that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time that there have been minds to manipulate.

Do we ferment the wine, or does the fungus ferment us — through the wine?


With Merlin, we learn how these fundamentally life-giving organisms affect absolutely everything on our planet, perhaps even in the universe.


As if this weren't enough, we are also offered profoundly stunning imagery, and beautiful wording.


Explaining how mycelial networks grow — by simultaneously lengthening their hundreds and thousands of 'hyphal tips' — Merlin writes:

You can think of your life like this. The growing [hyphal] tip is the present moment – your lived experience of now – which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the blue lines that you've left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus's recent history, and is a helpful reminder that all life forms are in fact processes, not things. The 'you' of five years ago was made from different stuff than the 'you' of today. [...] When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.

Remember this the next time you see your coworker, your dog, the cactus on your window sill, your mother in the nursing home.


We are processes.


Today we are only a snapshot of a complex movement through time and space.




 



Magic Spell 05

'Good Wives' by Louisa May Alcott (1869)



Cover of Good Wives

American novelist Louisa May Alcott was one of the first female commercial fiction writers of her times. Both an abolitionist and a feminist, she consciously fronted the domestic lives of women and girls and — from an early age — used the earnings she made from her writing to feed her immediate family in times of financial hardship.


So naturally, we love her.


Ironically, however, it took me years to actually read the first novel in the sequel, Little Women (1868). I found the title offputting. The second title in the series, Good Wives (1869) isn't any more appealing.


But make no mistake.


These novels are profound, and their author must have been an incredibly warm, caring human being.


The Little Women series offers a glimpse into the extremely heart-warming, gentle, wholesome family of the four March sisters and their mother, 'Marmee'.


As such, this 19th century classic is no less quaint than any novel by Charles Dickens.


While their father is serving in the American civil war, the 'little women' struggle to celebrate their first Christmas without him.


In these trying times, they are confronted with illness, poverty, the loss of loved ones.


“Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.”

And while seemingly impossible to tell apart in the beginning, each of the sisters is a decidedly wonderful individual one quickly gets to know and care for. Of course Jo, the unruly and boyish aspiring writer, is my forever-favorite.


“I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.”

Each chapter is a spoonful of nourishing soup on an icy winter's day. The Little Women books are also perfect Christmas reads: many thousands of Alcott-lovers out there reread her works every year.


After I was finished with Good Wives, I instantly wanted to go on with the next one: Little Men.


Because somehow, soon two centuries after their publication these 'little' treasures still are powerful reminders of the importance of whoever we call our family.


Of extending to them our loving care, our unconditional kindness.


“You can go through the world with your elbows out and your nose in the air, and call it independence, if you like. That's not my way.”


 


Magic Spell 06

'Olive Kitteridge' & 'Olive, Again' by Elizabeth Strout (2008 & 2019)




This is the truth of how I accidentally came in possession of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: my husband had purchased two or three Norwegian hardcover editions of something or other, which he then however decided to return after all.


Now, the price of one Norwegian hardcover book will give you three, maybe even four English paperback titles.


So what did we do?


We went mad at the bookstore. In our frenzy, we fished for books like flying confetti. It was a glorious day.


Investing only minor attention in what titles we picked, we embarked on a regular book haul. Olive Kitteridge seemed like a pleasant piece of confetti, so in the cart it went.


But fact is that, from the second I started reading it, I was right there. With Olive, the middle-aged, slightly bitter, often a little blunt, a little mean main character going through life's challenging ups and downs:


A husband's death.


A son's estrangement.


The goddamn menopause.


She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.

There is a reason why this title won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009.


The reason is that, by the end of it, you cannot leave the world of Olive, however mundane it at first may seem.


You want to stay with her, with all of the characters of her small town, you want to know what happens to all of them in this little microcosmos of coastal Maine — a place that sounds naturally beautiful and wild and, in some ways, not unlike Norway.


'All these lives,' she said. 'All the stories we never know.'

So what you do is, you immediately buy the sequel — Olive, Again — and do precisely that. You stay with them.


The Olive-novels erect a universe of their own. They are a deeply moving, cyclical, nuanced portrait of not just one human life, but multiple human lives interwoven with each other.


And if there's something I love in brilliant writers, it's their ability to multiply and magnify their genius: some of the side characters mentioned in Olive's story actually have their very own books — such as The Burgess Boys, a story of two brothers, whose nephew is involved in a hate crime.


So if you're looking for a rather extensive Protego Maxima spell, this is it. I spent the entire month of March under its shield. I went from novel to novel; from Olive to Olive again to the Burgesses to Lucy Barton (another character in Strout's universe).


And I still miss Olive dearly.


It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.


 

Magic Spell 07

'The Mermaid of Black Conch' by Monique Roffey (2020)



Cover of The Mermaid of Black Conch



So if you find yourself hesitating because of the book's suggestive fairytale title, this is a mistake.


The Mermaid of Black Conch is, while certainly calling upon ancient myths, anything but a fairytale.


Technically categorized as magical realism, I urge you to give this one a trial period of 20 pages, even if you're usually put off by the realm of the fantastical.


Because somehow, Monique Roffey manages to make the novel's central character, Aycayia, come frighteningly alive and vulnerable and powerful.


This is a century-old, delightful, and at times decidedly creepy mermaid — a cursed young outcast of the indigenous Taino peoples born many hundred of years ago, now suddenly stranded in this world, our world (albeit in our world of the 1970s).


She stared at everything like she seemed to be reading everything: the air, the shadows, the floor, the light. [S]tern and quiet, she watched me smoke my cigarettes, like she know about smoke. I thought her people must once have lived an ital life and I learn in time she was greeting it all back. She saw meaning in every natural thing that lived. She was saying ‘hello’ again.

Because of her age, Aycayia carries with her the loss of centuries. The loss of homes and entire populations. Extinction through Spanish conquisitadores, through illness, the savagery of slavery and brutal subjugation.


My family own all of this part of the island she say Land is not to be owned I tell her

Set on a Caribbean island and saturated with the richness of Creole English, this all-absorbing read will take you aback with its ability to make you care about times, places, and humans (plus mermaids) you perhaps never especially thought of.


her own son born with no language so we had that in common I had forgotten mine thousands year old language vanished from my mouth ... Speech is freedom

And all the way through, the mermaid wears a pair of green suede Adidas with three white stripes.





 


Magic Spell 08

'Awayland' by Ramona Ausubel (2018)



Cover of Awayland

It is no secret that I love books like others love good wine. I tend buy them impulsively because I cannot resist — but then I may not immediately read them. Often, I store them in my very own, private (and ever-growing) 'book cellar', knowing that one day the book's time will be right. So it was with Awayland.


I am not naturally drawn to short stories, although after having read a few strong titles I can feel my preferences shift. Awayland is one of the reasons for this shift. Arguably, so is Olive Kitteridge (Magic Spell 06) — though with Olive, the stories do feel more like a temporally and thematically connected narrative.


Here, we hold a beautiful little volume of tender, otherworldly short stories divided into sections called Bay of Hungers, The Cape of Persistent Hope, The Lonesone Flats, and The Dream Isles.


The stories are fantastical, geographically varied, and surprising.


There is the mother — looking at a bombed-out hotel in Beirut — who seems to grow more transparent with each day, until she is completely invisible.


It was so quiet, that bombed-out hotel. How strange, the girl thought, that only the visual evidence of a war is recorded.

In October, when I read this book, my father's destructive illness — diagnosed only a couple of months earlier — began breaking him down completely. Perhaps building an uncanny parallel to the increasingly foreseeable outlines of his impending death, the invisible woman's daughter must helplessly watch her parent fade away from life.


And she remembers the realities and people now forever inaccessible, forever lost to her.


She had visited her grandparents when they were alive, eaten sugar-syrup pastries in the sun, driven into the mountains and looked out at the sea. [...] They were alive and together and God, whichever god was theirs, had shaken this day out like a crisp sheet for them to lie down to.

Ausubel's prose is stunning and lyrical, her imagination boundless.


There is the girl who, perhaps wrongfully convinced that she must die, wants her lover to amputate his hand and have her own hand attached to his arm instead.


The hand is a near miracle. There are 27 bones: scaphoid, hamate, phalanx. One is called the lunate, which is deeply concave and moonlight. Summer turns her wrists, appreciating for the first time two tiny lunar bodies she has been living with all her life.

Her boyfriend, aware of Summer's descent into a form of degenerative madness, is aware of her idea and stages a meeting with an invented doctor in Thailand.


Love's job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunnel into the soft undergrasses.

And then, of course, some of Ausubel's stories are deeply humorous. We deal, for example, with a cyclops attempting to use an online dating platform to find his true love.


The cyclops' description of a perfect day is, in his own words, 'descending belowground early, full of milk and blood and meat, to forge iron.'


He seems hopelessly unequipped to fill out the platform's standard questions regarding his interests or ideal love match. Even his tagline ('Secret: do what no one else is doing') comes across as an unlikely winner:


I'm eight feet tall and I have one giant eye.


His idea of the perfect first date?

Everyone has had good times. Everyone has a picture of himself in front of a pinkening sunset with a glass of white wine. Choose them if you want to. Choose me if you want someone to hold you above his head in the moonlight, bite your wrist until the first rust comes out.

Choose Awayland if you want a adventurous spell transporting you across continents and eras, and deep into the trenches of the human heart.



 


Magic Spell 09

'Poetry as Survival' by Gregory Orr (2018)



Cover of Poetry as Survival


We are now nearing the end of the year: I carried this book on me on the flight that would lead me to my father's deathbed.


I think I knew what November had in store for me. For us. And I packed this Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival, sensing that I was going to need it. And I did.


When someone you love dies, you are forced to — somehow — survive.


Survive this: watching them scream in agony. Being unable to help or soothe their pain. Cleaning up splatters of their blood. Whispering soothingly to them, convincing them that it is okay — they are allowed to let go. When every fiber of your own feverishly alive body-presence wants to scream: please don't.


Don't leave — just yet. Let this not be the last sunrise Earth will give me with you on it.


As you watch their bodies falter, you will increasingly understand that bodies can be left.


And they will be left.


Nobody prepares us adequately for this moment — our culture is terribly busy keeping death at bay — but eventually many of us will have to face the catastrophe of immeasurable loss.


We will be involuntarily subjected to the new reality of a life, a planet, without the person we loved in it.


And we will have to survive it.


The famed literary critic Gregory Orr speaks of poetry, and in particular the form of the 'personal lyric' — the small, private things we may write only for ourselves — as a tool of survival.


Human culture 'invented' the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crisis represented by the extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one. The survival begins when we 'translate' our crisis into language [...].

The personal lyric is an ancient practice, coming close to the power of incantations and spells, practically woven into our genes. Its function is to help us externalize and regulate our deeply layered emotional lives.


In Orr's understanding, a crisis can be anything — but it always is a moment experienced as intense disorientation and complete disorder, not unlike the one experienced during an earthquake.


During earthquakes, people are advised to stand in doorways because they are stronger and safer than anyplace else in the house. It's possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page where a poem appears.

For Orr, the reading — or making — of a poem is a stabilizing force and a psychological tool of protection in times of personal chaos and unraveling.


Survival happens as follows:

But in the act of making a poem at least two crucial things have taken place that are different from ordinary life. First, we have shifted the crisis to a bearable distance from us: removed it to the symbolic but vivid world of language. Second, we have actively made and shaped this model of our situation rather than passively endured it as a lived experience.

Gregory Orr should know: as a child, he was responsible for a hunting accident that killed his younger brother. Two years later, his mother — only thirty-six at the time — died of a routine hospital procedure. At the tender age of eighteen, he watched his country fall into spells of political violence during the Civil Rights movement.


It was a librarian named Mrs. Irving (bless her) that introduced Orr to the power of poetry.

She had us write all kinds of things: stories, sketches, plays, haiku. I wrote a poem one day, and it changed my life. I had a sudden sense that the language in poetry was 'magical,' unlike language in fiction: that it could create or transform reality rather than simply describe it.

While perhaps more on the academic side in tone, Poetry as Survival draws on a wealth of beautifully resonant poetry, and it literally helped me survive the weeks immediately before and after my father's death.


In the presence of minds that — at times — lived thousands of years ago, I felt understood and heard.


The earth is all that lives

And the earth shall not last.

We sit on a hillside, by the Greasy Grass

and our little shadow lies out in the blades

of grass, until sunset. (Native American poem)


When I wasn't able to write anything else — because nothing really could be said — I was able to put pen to paper and erect the safe doorframe of personal poems in a profoundly unsettling time of trauma and loss.


The difference between a lyric poet and a person who does not write poems is that the poet has an arena in which to focus his or her encounter with disorder.

I had that arena, that doorframe. I was able to force the experience of severe disorder into the symbolic shape of letters and words, thus to a certain degree 'actively making and shaping' the model of my situation — 'rather than passively endur[ing] it.'


In other words, I was able to survive.


You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waited holding a plank by the shore,

Now I will you to be a bold swimmer

To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. (Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself', section 46)



 

Magic Spell 10

'Zeit der Verluste' by Daniel Schreiber (2023)



Cover of Die Zeit der Verluste

This is such a deeply appreciated protective Protego spell cast upon me by a wise and loving friend, who immediately sent me a copy of Die Zeit der Verluste (The Time of Losses) in the mail after my father had passed away.


Perhaps it took courage to mail it? I shall have to ask her.


But it was a perfect and perfectly protective healing ointment.


For those of you who read German, this is Daniel Schreiber's deeply moving reflection on the loss of his father.


In Das Jahr magischen Denkens schreibt Joan Didion, dass Trauer ein Ort sei, den niemand von uns kenne, bis wir ihn erreichten. (In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that grief is a place none of us know until we reach it.)

We are all going to lose our fathers. Others will grieve doubly: for the father they lost, and the father they never had in the first place.


Possibly my favorite sentence (of innumerable favorite sentences highlighted in my copy) is this one:


Und es ist so schwer, der Welt nachzusehen, dass sie uns unsere Endlichkeit zumutet, so schwer, dem Leben zu verzeihen, dass es vorbeigeht und, wie alles, ein Ende findet. (And how hard it is to watch the world confront us with our own finitude, how hard to forgive life for slipping away, for ending, as all things must.)

This book is about the tender, quiet moments of this loss — but also about the inevitable accumulation of losses over a lifetime: of people, missed opportunities, places, times. It's about how, the longer we live, the more we lose.


It's about how to deal with the fact that certain realities will never return; how to deal with the fact that our losses will alter us, against our will, permanently.


Ich frage mich, wann dieses unheimliche Leben, das ich führe, aufhören wird, wann ich wieder in jenes Leben zurückkehren kann, das ich vor zuvor geführt habe, das Leben, das ich kenne, als meines wiedererkenne. (I wonder when this uncanny life I am leading will come to an end, when I can return to the life I led before, the life I know and recognize as my own.)

In the largest sense, it is about collective losses we are all experiencing at this moment in history: many of us are marked by grief at the loss of basic rights and principles we thought were safe, were ours to keep.


World orders we assumed were fixed, stable, unassailable.


Planets we have treated as though they were indestructible, mere unfeeling resources that are ours to exploit and alter beyond recognition.


Set during a foggy winter in the gradually sinking marvel of a whole city — Venice — Schreiber writes:


Etwas irritiert mich an dieser Aussicht, die als vergänglichkeitstrunkene Erzählung die Wahrnehmung Venedigs in verschiedenen Ausführungen schon so lange prägt. Etwas, das ich nicht in Worte fassen kann. Denn trotz allem machen sich Menschen hier die Mühe, das Backen kleiner Winterkrapfen zur Vollkommenheit zu bringen. Jeden Tag öffnen Sie die Tür zu einer kleinen Pasticceria, bereiten Espressi und Cappuccini zu und verkaufen ihre Pasticcini für wenig Geld. Was hält sie davon ab, nicht in Lethargie oder blossen Hedonismus zu verfallen? Ich möchte etwas von ihnen lernen, kann aber noch nicht sagen, was genau. (Something about this view, which has long shaped the perception of Venice as a narrative steeped in transience, unsettles me—something I cannot put into words. Despite everything, people here take the trouble to perfect the baking of small winter pastries. Every day, they open the door to a tiny pasticceria, prepare espressos and cappuccinos, and sell their pasticcini for little money. What keeps them from falling into lethargy or mere hedonism? I want to learn something from them, though I cannot yet say what exactly.)

Schreiber reflects on Jonathan Lear's idea of 'radical hope' — the stark refusal to give into one's own despair.


Womöglich schenkt uns gerade diese Form der Ehrfurcht eine Ahnung davon, dass die Welt so viel grösser als unser Verständnis von ihr ist. Lässt uns ihre Schönheit spüren, aber auch ihre Endlichkeit und ihre Gewalt. Und unser ausgeliefert sein. (Perhaps it is precisely this form of reverence that grants us a sense of how much greater the world is than our understanding of it. It allows us to feel its beauty, but also its finiteness and its power—and our vulnerability to it.)

Schreiber's Zeit der Verluste culminates in a quiet sort of radical hope; the renewed insistence on a type of deep-running marveling, a consciously practiced reverence for life.


Even if we are eventually doomed to lose everything.


Including life itself.



 

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