Theodora Goss

My thyroid and I got along very well for a long time. We had a good relationship — I lived my life, and it provided me with the hormones I needed. There was that incident about twenty years ago, when suddenly I noticed a bump on my thyroid. It was about the size of a quarter, and filled with something — it felt like half of a water balloon. I went to an endocrinologist, who gave me a long talk about thyroid cancer that was, I think, more for the resident who was helping him than for me. He put a needle into the water balloon to get some fluid to test, and the water balloon deflated. The test came back negative. It had been nothing — a harmless cyst.

So when I felt a bump on my thyroid again, shortly after Christmas, I had some context for it. I knew approximately what it could be. I managed to get an appointment at the clinic where my primary care provider works — it took waiting for two weeks, and I would only be seeing a nurse practitioner. Apparently all the actual doctors were busy. The receptionist was also busy talking to her friend while I tried to make an appointment. That was the start of my journey in making appointments, and every appointment system was as bad as that first one. I have a theory that the most difficult part of healthcare in American is making an appointment with anyone anywhere. The second most difficult part is, of course, the billing system. I have tried to explain to European friends about “co-pays.” They stare at me blankly.

The nurse practitioner ordered a bunch of tests, all of which came back normal. She also requested an ultrasound, for which I had to go to Boston Medical Center. The ultrasound results came back. I had some nodes on my thyroid. They looked normal. No follow-up recommended. But I still had a bump on my throat. My mother, who happens to be a doctor, said, “You need to have it biopsied.” So I wrote to the nurse practitioner, I need to have it biopsied. She gave me a referral to an endocrinologist. I called to make an appointment.

It took a month and repeated phone calls to get an appointment. There was the phone call during which I was given an appointment in six months; the phone call during which I was told that no, that was just for patients coming back for checkups, and someone would call me back; the phone call during which I was told I needed to talk to Ashley; the one where Ashley was not available; the one in which I was told there had been a cancellation and I could come in tomorrow, and I had to explain that I was a professor and would be in the middle of teaching class; the phone call with Ashley; the follow-up phone call with Ashley. And then I had an appointment, a month from the day I talked to Ashley. (You can’t call Ashley or anyone else to make an appointment. You have to call the central number, click all the right buttons through the recorded message, wait to music you have not heard since the 1990s, and then talk to someone who tells you that someone else will call you back.)

Between the time that I got the appointment and the appointment itself, the bump on my throat disappeared. That happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t an underlying problem. Anyway, I already had an appointment with an endocrinologist, so I went — just to make sure the bump had, indeed, been nothing to worry about.

The endocrinologist did another ultrasound herself. Apparently, the radiologist who read the first ultrasound had miscounted the number of nodules. There were in fact more than four, and most of them looked harmless, except two on the left side. “There’s a lot of vascularization there,” she said, holding a cold wand to my throat. I’m very lucky that I know what vascularization is. I mean, I have a PhD in English literature. It’s not a medical doctorate, but it is a doctorate in words — in what they mean, how they’re put together. It’s a doctorate in, when I don’t understand something, looking it up. At every point, dealing with the American medical system, I wondered how someone without an advanced degree in understanding language, someone who might not even be fluent in English, would deal with it. “We really should biopsy those specific nodules,” she said. So she did, with a long, thin needle.

The biopsy for the larger nodule came back “suspicious for malignancy.” Suspicious, not definite. Even if it’s definite, the problem with this kind of biopsy (an FNB, or fine needle biopsy) is that it’s never really definite. An FNB can only give you a percentage certainty. The official percentage for “suspicious” is a 15-30% chance of malignancy. That’s a very big chance that it’s not, in fact, malignant. But there’s only one way to be sure. “I recommend surgery,” said the endocrinologist. “I’ll have someone call you for an appointment with the surgeon.” So there I was in the appointment system again, but this time within Endocrinology. The Ashley of this system was called Blaise. Once you can speak to the Ashleys and Blaises of the world, everything goes smoothly. The trick is identifying who they are and then getting to them.

The surgeon and his colleague, a specialist in thyroid issues, did another ultrasound. Everything looked fine, they told me, other than those two nodules. My lymph nodes looked fine. The other side of my thyroid looked fine–the nodules there were harmless. But the side of my thyroid with the suspicious nodule, that side should go. They recommended a thyroid lobectomy, which means that the surgeon takes out half the thyroid. It’s serious surgery, but one with an excellent success rate. Even if the patient has thyroid cancer, the long-term survival rate is 99%. The one thing I remember from that first episode, twenty years ago, is the endocrinologist telling me, telling the resident, if you’re going to have cancer, thyroid cancer is the best kind to have.

The difficulty was, I didn’t know what I had. There was a 15-30% chance of malignancy, and a 70-85% chance that it wasn’t. That was the information I had, and I would have to make a decision based just on that. The FNB doesn’t give you certainty — it’s just a small number of cells pulled up through a needle. The only certainty comes after the surgery, when they do a full, real, official biopsy on the whole nodule. Then you know for sure. But by then, the decision has already been made.

I talked to the endocrinologist again. She said I could choose surgery, or I could put off the decision until the fall. We could do another FNB, although it would not necessarily give us more information. “What would you do if it were you?” I asked her. Surgery, she replied. I talked to the surgeon again. During my first conversation with him, I had almost laughed several times. It had been almost like being in class at medical school. Perhaps because he knew that my mother was a doctor, and that I was a university professor, he had explained everything very thoroughly, in all its complex uncertainty. I had wondered, again, what my experience with the American medical system would be like if I did not understand Latinate terminology. But knowing big words doesn’t help you make a decision in a situation like this. “What would you do if it were you?” I asked him over the phone. Surgery, he replied.

In the end, I decided based on two things. The first was something the surgeon said. “If everything on that side of your thyroid was clear and easy to observe,” he said, “I would be fine with waiting and doing another ultrasound. We could see if the nodule changed over time. But that side of your thyroid looks weird.” It was the word “weird” that struck me. You don’t really want an endocrine surgeon saying your thyroid looks weird. The other thing was that I have lived in this body a long time. I trust it. I know when it’s trying to tell me something. First, it sent me a bump. The bump did not go away until I had already made an appointment with an endocrinologist. I think my body was trying to get my attention. Since then, I’ve been able to feel, not always but sometimes, that there’s something wrong on that side of my throat. I can feel a sort of pressure in a particular spot. It makes me just a little breathless and gives me a slight cough. When I told the surgeon about this, he looked at me skeptically. “Maybe you can feel the nodule inside your throat,” he said. “You have a thin throat, so you might be able to feel it.” In my experience, doctors never believe that you understand your own body. They’re pretty sure they know better than you — after all, that’s what they were taught in medical school. They’re the experts on bodies. But I’ve lived in my body a long time, and I know when something’s not right.

So that’s it. On Thursday I’ll have surgery. Theoretically, the side of my thyroid that is left should take over the function of the whole thyroid. Hopefully I won’t need medication, but we’ll see. I’ll have a scar on my throat. I plan to tell everyone that it comes from the time when I was a pirate queen. Or that I got it dueling in France, but you should see what I did to the Countess. Or that I usually wear a velvet ribbon, and watch out because my head might fall off.

More prosaically, I’ll do my best to get through end-of-semester grading. Then Budapest, then London, then the rest of my life. Half a thyroid is better than none, and I hope we will go on many more adventures together.

(The image is Woman Reading in Bed by Gabriel Ferrier. This is what I plan to look like for about a week after the surgery.)

I’m trying to make a space for writing again.

I’m writing this in my official writing room, or at least what is supposed to be my official writing room. During Christmas it was my daughter’s bedroom, but now the daybed is back to being a place to sit and work rather than sleep, and all the things she brought with her are back in her dormitory, and it’s just me and the desk and the books and notebooks and notes and laptop. And I’m trying to feel as though this is a writing room again.

I suppose I’m also trying to feel as though I’m a writer again.

It’s only the beginning of March, but this semester has already been so eventful. I feel as though I’m living in the middle of a windstorm. Among other things, there have been medical problems to deal with, and in the midst of it all I’ve felt as though my writer self has gotten a little lost. She is wandering at the top of high cliffs, in this wind that is whipping her hair back and forth, pulling at her coat, sending her scarf streaming out first one way then another. She is clutching her hat and trying very hard not to fall over the edge. She is a brave soul, but she has been buffeted by just too much.

And here I am in the meantime, the practical part of myself that works and pays bills and tries to save for the future, that grades student essays and makes lesson plans, and schedules medical appointments, looking at her wandering at the top of that cliff. And I feel responsible, as though I need to catch her hand, pull her back. Poor Writer Girl. What shall I do with her?

I think the only solution is to write again. And that means I have to make a space for writing in my storm of a life. I need a rock and a lighthouse. I suppose this desk and the laptop on it will have to do. The desk is the rock, the laptop is the lighthouse. And my job is to keep the light going, because there might be lost ships out there somewhere.

I’m quite sure I’ve let this metaphor run away with me. Metaphors tend to do that — they steal away the thing you were trying to say, and they tell you, Just go with it. It’s poetry.

Anyway, where were we? In my writing room.

The thing is that my brain doesn’t work right if I’m not writing. Somehow I need the activity of putting words on a page to recalibrate my brain, which makes it sound as though my brain is a compass, but not the old-fashioned kind, which doesn’t need calibrating. It’s a modern electronic compass, and sometimes it doesn’t point north anymore. And then my ship gets lost, and there are the rocks . . .

Now I’ve done it again, let the metaphor run way with me (or sail away with me), but honestly there is such a pleasure in writing these words and sailing away with metaphors, because here I am writing again and it feels like standing on that cliff, on a perfectly sunny day, and seeing all the sailboats down below, with puffs of wind blowing them here and there. Somehow, writing is exercise for a part of my brain that doesn’t get exercised otherwise. There is a part of my brain that simply loves putting down words and feeling the flow of them, like a river flowing to the sea or a scarf flowing through my hands.

Of course, making space for writing is not just about the physical space of my office. It’s about time as well, and I really have no idea when I’ll be able to make the time. But if I can make the space, I can make the time somehow. Anyway, that’s what I’m determined to do. And in the meantime, I’m going to make some changes to this room. I’m going to add a bookshelf, because I have piles of books everywhere. And I’m going to add a stand for my printer, for paper and the other supplies a writer needs. Because sometimes the best way to start a new habit, or restart an old one, is to redecorate.

There is something I realized once that has stuck with me, and maybe it will stick with you as well. Here it is:

In order to write a book, you have to become the writer who can write that book.

That goes for short stories, poems, essays — anything, really. In order to write something, you need to become the writer who can write it. Setting aside a space for writing won’t make you into that writer, but it will give you a place where you can transform. Where you can sit and work and grow into the person you need to be, in order to write the next thing. A writing room is a place of transformation. Who knows what you will become . . .

And now I have sat in my writing room, playing with metaphors and putting words down on paper (or rather, a laptop screen), and it feels as though a part of my brain has breathed out again — as though it had been holding its breath, and now it can exhale in relief. It feels as though I can see farther than when I started to type, and as though when I go to sleep, I will dream of lighthouses.

(The image is The Veiled Cloud by Charles Courney Curran.)

“The orchard was very silent and dreamy in the thick, deeply tinted sunshine of the September afternoon, a sunshine which seemed to possess the power of extracting the very essence of all the odours which summer has stored up in wood and field. There were few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so bravely along the central path a few days before, were withered. The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt. But in the corners the torches of the goldenrod were kindling and a few misty purple asters nodded here and there. The orchard kept its own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate, indestructible charm.”
–L.M. Montgomery, Kilmeny of the Orchard

It feels a bit strange to write that I had not read Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables until just recently. I had read a number of her other books, including other Anne books and some Emily books (about the adventures of Emily of New Moon), and several collections of her short stories. I loved her as a writer, but in some obscure way I was afraid to read Anne of Green Gables, her most famous book. I was afraid it would not live up to my expectations. I had watched the Canadian movie version, in which Anne was played by Megan Follows, and I loved it so much that I was worried the book itself might let me down.

I should not have worried. Anne of Green Gables is a wonderful book, both touching and very very funny.

Just before reading Anne of Green Gables, I read Kilmeny of the Orchard, and it’s . . . not. As in, neither funny nor particularly touching. It’s the story of a young man, a privileged young man, who goes to teach on Prince Edward Island and meets a beautiful, really stunningly beautiful, really incredibly impossible beautiful, young woman with one mysterious defect (his words, not mine) . . . she can’t speak. They fall in love, because he is basically the first young man she has ever seen, and she is just so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that she has no money, no knowledge of the world outside the farm she has grown up on, basically nothing to bring to a relationship except her beauty and untouched purity, and oh yes, she plays the violin. Plus she can’t talk back, although she and the young man seem to get along well enough because she can write on a slate.

This is a typically icky Victorian plot. You could find buckets of such books in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and as I’m sure you expected, in the end Kilmeny’s muteness turns out to be psychological. It’s cured by her love for Eric, the young man, which is a good thing because she feels as though she could not possibly marry him with such a defect (her words, not mine). As the novel progresses, all obstacles to their union fall away rather easily, like the fall of a silk robe from the shoulders of Gibson girl. Eric’s rich father could object, but he doesn’t because Kilmeny is just so stunningly beautiful that she would make an appropriate wife for anyone, plus she reminds him of his beloved dead wife, Eric’s mother. Yes, I know, icky.

So there we have it. What kept me reading Kilmeny of the Orchard, other than its very short length (134 pages)? Well, there is my love for turn-of-the-century literature. But there is also no denying that the book is beautifully written. Lucy Maude Montgomery is a cracking good writer, whether she’s writing great books or bad ones. As you can see in the passage I excerpted above. Her descriptions of the orchard, and of Prince Edward Island in general, make up for the weaknesses in characterization and plot. Their loveliness comes not just from the imagery she describes so well that I can see the orchard on that September afternoon, but from the sentences themselves. It’s in the way she puts them together.

“There were few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so bravely along the central path a few days before, where withered. The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt.”

What beautiful rhythm. It would not be at all the same if she wrote, as a modern editor might suggest, “The grass had become ragged, sere, and unkempt.” That would not capture the lilting, unhurried pace of a sunny September afternoon. The lilies queened it, as they do. The torches of the goldenrod — yes, I can see that, because goldenrod does exactly that, it stands up and blazes. Purple asters are misty because there are so many little flowers on a stem that from any distance they look like a purple mist. So her images are both evocative and precise.

And this: “The orchard kept its own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate, indestructible charm.”

Ok, yes, it’s thoroughly of its era, when old age for a woman was approximately thirty . . . But it’s beautifully written and I love the image it evokes, of the orchard aging in this way. You can see that the spring glory of its flowers has passed, it has borne its fruit, which may have already fallen, but there is something innate and indestructible — imagine the trunks of fruit trees that will stand like strong brown limbs through the winter snows, and blossom again in spring. In a sense, the novel is a love story between an author and the orchard she created.

Honestly, if I were Kilmeny, I would write on my slate, “Thanks, Eric, but this is a really nice orchard, I mean I really like this orchard, so have fun in the big city but I think I’ll be fine here. I have a violin, after all.”

The thing is, Kilmeny of the Orchard was published the year after Anne of Green Gables, and Anne of Green Gables is a really good, I mean really really good, book. It’s got all the beautiful language, but it also has perceptive characterization, excellent pacing and plot (will Anne be allowed to go to the church picnic with Diana and the other girls? I had to know. I could not put it down and stayed up until 2 a.m. to find out), and the one thing Kilmeny of the Orchard does not have at all, not even a little — it’s very very funny.

I had to find out how the author of Anne of Green Gables could have written Kilmeny of the Orchard, and the answer is that Kilmeny’s story was written earlier, as a magazine serial. After the success of the red-haired orphan who breaks slates over people’s heads, Montgomery’s publisher said “I want another novel and I want to publish it a year later,” and this was the only thing Montgomery could give him — a patched-up serial, while she wrote her next Anne book. I suspect that publishers have been responsible for bad books in exactly this way since they invented themselves . . .

While trying to figure out how Kilmeny of the Orchard came into being, I came across a review on Goodreads that I found particularly illuminating. The reviewer said something like, “Kilmeny is the romantic heroine Anne imagines herself to be, but can never become.” And I thought, yes! That makes perfect sense! Kilmeny has long black hair and is impossibly beautiful. Anne has red hair, as she often laments, and the most endearing thing about her is that she simply never shuts up. Anne of Green Gables is filled with long paragraphs that are simply Anne going on and on while Marilla says, “The muffins in the oven are burning.” And the muffins burn, and then we listen to Anne lamenting the burned muffins and her red hair, and spinning a new romantic adventure for herself, for another couple of pages.

I don’t have any great wisdom to offer here. Just a few observations: First, good writers are going to write bad books, sometimes. That’s just how it is. Both readers and writers should expect it. Second, if I really love a writer’s style, I will read a bad book by that writer, regardless. I will read L.M. Montgomery’s bad books with pleasure, ignoring Eric and even Kilmeny, pretending that it’s really a book about an orchard, and the happy ending is that those annoying protagonists finally leave the wonderful, magical orchard alone to dream in the September sunshine.

(The image is the first edition of Kilmeny of the Orchard, published in 1910.)

The strangest thing about turning fifty-five is that it doesn’t feel any different from turning forty-five, or even thirty-five. I suppose thirty-five was different because I was pregnant with my daughter, but I don’t remember feeling any particular age. And I don’t feel any particular age now. Twenty-five was different because I was working as a lawyer and trying not to be completely miserable in the world of corporate law. It was actually more different than fifteen, when I was still in high school and still myself, more or less. Still the self I am now, rather than trying to be someone else. I was writing poetry and reading literature, which is more or less what I’m doing now.

It feels as though the years between fifteen and fifty-five have been a return to who I am — a long, hard road that has taken me back to myself.

I mean to write this post last year, around my birthday, but I was in Budapest and so busy that there was no time. I suppose this post is really about time, about what a strange thing it is. I didn’t think much about time until I became a lawyer. Of course as I was growing up, there was time to wake up, time to get to school, the schedule of the school day signaled by a bell I hated the way a cat might hate the bell around its neck. In the regional dialect I grew up with, in Virginia, it could be “high time” for something, meaning it should happen now, and maybe should have happened some time ago. In college there were syllabi telling me when to turn in assignments, when exams where scheduled. There was a rhythm to the semester. The first time I remember really being conscious of the passage of time was in my early twenties, when it became “high time” for the girls I graduated with to get married. I remember feeling as though, if I was not married in my early twenties, I would have somehow missed a crucial step in the dance my girlfriends and I we were all dancing — as though life were one of those balls in a Jane Austen novel.

Later, I realized this was once again regional. The female law school students I met in Massachusetts were definitely not getting married in their early twenties — there was a ten-year difference between what was considered normal in Virginia and normal in Massachusetts. Instead, they were thinking about how long it would take to make partner in their law firms, and planning their lives around that particular track. In the law firm, I had my first experience of time and mortality. All of my work had to be accounted for in fifteen-minute increments so the law firm could bill by the hour. We lived under the tyranny of the billable hour, just as I had once lived under the tyranny of the school bell. One day, I remember trying to calculate how many billable hours there would be until I died. That was the beginning of the end of my legal career.

The next time I remember feeling the pressure of time was in my early thirties, when I thought, if I don’t have a child now, I may not be able to. I was in graduate school, my then-husband was in graduate school, and it was not an easy time to have a child, but then everyone said there was no easy time, really. And I was thrilled when my daughter was born. That was the beginning of a different relationship with time, because when you have a child, you live with a small being whom you fervently hope will outlive you, will have a long and happy life after you are gone. You are presented every day with the fact that life is a cycle, and you are part of that cycle. You live with physical evidence of your own mortality. Of course, most of the time you’re too tired to actually think about this, but it’s there, like existentialism for John Paul Sartre.

And what is time now? My daughter will be turning twenty this year and as she had gotten older, I’ve lost that sense of time as so physical, so urgent. I feel, once again, somewhat immortal. I have to remind myself that my time on this earth is limited, and that I have things to do. Sometimes I wonder how much time I have left. But it’s more as motivation than existential crisis, because the other thing I’ve learned over the years is that there are two kinds of time. The first is the time of the bell and the billable hour, which passes and passes and passes, inexorably. But at the same time, there is yes, another kind of time — the time of subjective experience, in which a moment can last forever or a day can pass all too quickly. We can lose time, as when we scroll on our phones and realize, hours later, that time has passed and we have barely experienced the world. And we can have moments of exquisite being when we are fully alive, and it seems as though the experience will never end, that it’s etched in eternity. I have so many of those potential moments left that I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever. More practically, my grandmother died at ninety-six, and all the women in my family live a long time. So there is that.

Mostly what happens as you get older, I think, is that you return to the essential self you had when you were young. Somehow society covers it up, like layers of varnish on an old painting, and then time cleans it again until you are back to the original layer, like a Vermeer after a museum restoration. At least, that’s my theory today, and it could be wrong, or only apply to me. But I feel closer to my fifteen-year-old self than my twenty-five-year-old or thirty-five-year-old selves. And when I think about all the things I still want to do in my life, I think, there’s plenty of time — but I’d better get started.

(A photo I took of myself on my birthday, already thinking I would write this post. No makeup, no filters, but excellent lighting by the city of Budapest.)

One of the nice thing about working for a university is that there are always speakers and events, which are often free or not very expensive for students and faculty members. Last week, I was able to attend a reading and Q&A session with the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and I wrote down a few thoughts that I wanted to share here.

First, it’s always fascinating to hear good writers talk about their process. I’ve only read a little of Okri’s work so far, but what I read was an essay on writing that was very smart, so I wanted to hear what he had to say. And I found that his perspective on being a writer from Nigeria was similar to what I’ve heard from at least some Central European writers. His view on writing felt right for Hungary as well — at least for the way I write about Hungary.

Okri lived through the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960, which resulted in mass casualties from both the war itself and the resulting poverty and starvation. The war followed a long period of British colonial rule, so the people of Nigeria suffered the double trauma of colonization and civil strife. It was a very different environment than the one we were experiencing at that reading, sitting in conference room chairs arranged in neat rows, in a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that showed the Charles River at night, with the lights of Cambridge across the river and Boston to the right of us, as the river bends. If you looked carefully, you could have seen the gold dome of the Statehouse. It was the serenely privileged light of a city that had not been in a war for two hundred years, and as I sat there, I remembered the spring of 2022, when I was in Budapest and the war started just one country over, in Ukraine.

First there was an introduction by the novelist Ha Jin, then a conversation, then a reading, then a Q&A. Here is what Okri said that struck me enough that I wrote it down, and I scribbled for some of the conversation and most of the Q&A. The Q&A always ends up being the most interesting part of these sorts of presentations, and it is always left for last, so it’s usually done in a rush — which is unfortunate.

Nigeria, Okri said, according to my notes, is a palimpsest of realities — like Hungary, I would add. In that sort of situation, Western conventions of storytelling don’t work. When you have sedimented realities — that was the word I wrote down, and I think it came directly from him — you can’t tell a story in a linear way, so your choice of structure is already poetic and fantastical. Which means (I think, if I’m transcribing and explaining correctly), that sort of reality can only be represented, realistically represented, in a non-Western, non-linear fashion. He mentioned disliking the term magical realism, and I’ve noticed that everyone described as writing magical realism dislikes the word — it’s only people who themselves claim to write magical realism, usually from a solidly European tradition, who seem to like it. And he said that he started with his mother’s stories. That was his original experience of narrative.

I wrote down a series of statements about story. This is a sort of paraphrase:

Stories are the oldest human technology. They organize the chaos of existence. They create a clarity within that chaos, allowing us to see the world. They simplify, and in doing so, they give us a path forward. Stories are also a storage mechanism for cultural wisdom. They function as coded realities. They hold time — he paused, then said, “They hold the essence of time” (this is a direct quotation, I believe). I think I understand this in several ways. Stories hold the time of the story itself — they contain something that happens, a particular narrative, like a cup. They capture time, but they also take time. A story is not a painting: to experience it, you need to spend the time to read it. I feel as though this is somehow very important, but I’m not yet sure why. It has to do, I suppose, with the distinctive form of the story — it is not even a poem, which happens all at once. A story is the closest artistic event to a human life, which also takes time. Then he said, “I’m fascinated by stories that are impossible to tell,” and, “The deepest things are impossible to find a narrative for.”

When he was asked about what we face right now, the overwhelming problem of climate change, he said, and I’ve written this down on a card so I can remember it:

“We either transform or we perish.”

Write that down, because you’ll find that you need it in your own life, but we also need it as a civilization. Either we transform as a global society, or we perish, taking a lot of other species with us. We’ll find out which it is in the next few generations.

The most important idea for me, in terms of writing, came during the conversation, and then I asked about it in the Q&A. It was the idea of an aesthetic code. The aesthetic code of a story, said Okri, is the code by which the story can best be understood. For example, he wrote a story and later realized that it could best be understood as a series of gaps. This reminded me of what Henry James wrote about his novel The Golden Bowl: that when he started writing is, he envisioned it as a movement. Everything would revolve around Milly Theale without touching her. She would be the delicate center of the novel, but the action would move around and around her. When I first read this, I was fascinated by the idea of starting a novel with a movement. But I think many stories can be envisioned in this ways — they can be visualized. They have a particular shape, like sculpture or dance. In the Q&A, I asked him if he was aware of the story’s aesthetic code while he was writing it, and he said that sometimes, not always — that understanding it was like grace, but a grace that is earned through hard work. Which I think is a wonderful thought.

The other most important idea is something I’ve thought about before: it’s of the story as fractal. Okri did not actually call it that — he just said that the story should contain everything, just as reality contains everything. In reality, you look at one small thing (say, the way someone walks), and it contains so much — the whole history of that person, the things that have happened to them. Actors know this. When a really good actor develops a character, she thinks about how that character moves, and the way a character walks down a street can project the essence of the character. The small part contains the whole. Okri implied that stories functioned like this — although they show only a small part of reality, they somehow contain all of it, and the story itself is a fractal in that a small part of it also contains the entire story, so that a sentence can express the essence of that particular narrative (just as a character’s walk can express the character). I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, and I’m also not sure this is what Okri meant, because so much of my own thinking is wrapped up in it. But I remember reading, once, that a Jackson Pollock painting from his mature period had that fractal structure, whereas one from his earlier, less mature period did not, and it affected how I think about writing.

He also said, and here I’m paraphrasing again, that a novel walks in a constant dialog of oppositions. This reminded me of how I used to talk about writing when I was teaching in an MFA program. I used to say, what are you putting in tension in this scene? What things are pulling against each other? It doesn’t matter how much action you include, if nothing is in tension. Without that tension, your reader won’t feel anything, won’t be interested in anything. Things need to be in opposition to each other, whether it’s the galactic forces of good and evil or two friends having a disagreement.

Finally, he talked about dreams as a parallel reality, and described writing as making dreams real for people. I think this is important. Our minds can’t deal with the world all the time. We are created to shut down for part of every day, so that our minds can go do something else. They can go elsewhere. I have found that my dreams are often ways of processing my daytime anxieties, which is probably why I so often dream of being lost in either large cities or their equally large transit systems. Or more recently, in enormous airports. Stories can function in the same way. They are waking dreams that help us organize and deal with the anxieties of our existence. They create meaning for us.

And my final note from the reading had to do with The Odyssey. I didn’t write down the specific context for this statement, but toward the end of his talk, Okri said that it encapsulated a basic human narrative: “We’re all just trying to get home.”

I think that’s true, but I think we’re also all just trying to create home, to find our families, belong and find meaning for our lives. And that is what stories help us do.

The Famished Road is the book for which Okri received a Booker Prize.

I’m too tired to write this blog post.

Last week I tried to do all the things — all the administrative things I need to do at the beginning of a university semester. I still have a lot to get through. There are receipts to file, meetings to attend, emails to send or answer.

And I tried to write as well. I’m most of the way through writing a story I thought of several years ago, and that I started months ago but that was interrupted by teaching in London during the summer. Hopefully it will be done in the next few weeks.

And I had family obligations to deal with, which are not purely obligations — for example, it’s a pleasure to spend time with my daughter. Nevertheless, the start of the academic year is always stressful, for students and parents alike.

And now it’s Sunday morning, and I’m trying to write a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, on why we sometimes get so tired — and I’m too tired to write it. But I’ll try, nevertheless . . .

This post comes from a realization I had recently — or perhaps it’s less of a realization than a hypothesis. I remember that I was in Budapest, and it was afternoon, and I thought, What’s wrong with me? Why do I get so tired sometimes?

There are ways in which my life can be physically tiring. I had just come back from London, where we were taking the students on excursions every week, and on most days I was walking at least two hours, to and from classes, to Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer for food, on street tours of London or in various museums. But I realized that I did not mean physical tiredness, that physical tiredness by itself did not give me that sense of exhaustion I sometimes felt, an exhaustion so deep that all I wanted to do was lie down for a while, someplace light and airy, or escape into the pages of a really good book.

What produced that kind of exhaustion? Sometimes, teaching three classes and holding office hours — after a long day, I would need to lie down for a while. Usually I would not lie down, but would go on working, because teaching would also give me ideas, would inspire me as well, so I would have all sorts of things I wanted to research, to prepare for the next lecture . . . But I would feel that same sense of exhaustion after a morning of answering emails, and to be honest, after a morning of writing. I would feel it after spending a day at a conference or convention, even if I had a wonderful time with other academics or writers. And after spending time with family.

Of course it wasn’t always exhaustion. Sometimes I would be just a little tired, but if I pushed myself, I would get more and more tired, until yes, there I was, completely exhausted. Why?

My hypothetical answer is that some things take emotional energy. Teaching of course, because at the same time as you’re explaining the history of rhetoric or how to use MLA citation format, you’re intensely aware of the students in the classroom. You know who is paying attention, who is looking at emails on their laptop, who has a question they are too embarrassed to ask. It’s a kind of teacherly intuition. Answering emails takes emotional energy, because you’re projecting yourself into the recipient, trying to see the email from their perspective, editing to make sure that recipient will understand what you’re writing. Similarly, with creative writing, the writing I love — that takes energy too. I’m projecting myself into the story, into the minds of the characters. I’m living in them for a while. And at the same time, often, I’m also projecting myself into the minds of potential readers, trying to see the story both from my perspective as a writer and from their perspective. Will they need a paragraph break here?

Being a parent always takes emotional energy. It’s intensely rewarding, and there are wonderful things you get back for the emotional energy you expend, but I have to be honest, and I think other parents would say the same — it can be tiring. Friendship, I find, doesn’t take the same emotional energy. Sitting and talking with a friend is closer to an exchange — you get energy at the same time as you give it, and after meetings with close friends, I find myself refreshed. It’s like reading a good book. Reading, if it really is a good book, also gives me energy. Faculty meetings take energy. They’re like teaching, in that I usually come away from them with ideas, things I want to try. But it takes energy to listen, interact, to be completely present. It’s the same for a conference or convention.

When I say that something takes emotional energy, that it tires me, I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way. Teaching, writing — these are all things I want to do. I’m happy to expend energy on them, just as I’m happy to expend physical energy on going on to parks or museums. What I was trying to understand is how they tired me, what sort of energy they required. And I think it’s emotional energy — the energy that flows out from you when you’re interacting with another human being, even hypothetically. Of course you can get energy from another human being as well — which is why, I suppose, I receive emotional energy from meeting with friends or reading a good book.

I suppose the important thing is, if you’re tired, to understand what kind of tired you are. Are you physically tired? Emotionally tired? Spiritually tired? Because there are different ways to deal with each kind of tiredness. For physical tiredness, you need to rest and sleep. For emotional tiredness, sleep is important as well, but so are taking walks in the park, reading books, meeting with friends. For spiritual tiredness, which is a category of its own, the remedy (I think) is something like spending time with trees and looking at the sky. You need to somehow drink in the essence of existence.

At least, the above is true for me. But I know that people are different, and fall in different places on the spectrum of introversion to extroversion. It may be that you, if you are an extrovert, get your emotional energy in large crowds, all shouting for a sports team. Or from being on a stage in of an audience, channeling their emotions. I am on the introverted arm of that spectrum, and my energy comes from small, quiet things, plus chocolate.

Today I’m so tired because last night I made a mistake. After a day of writing and dealing with administrative issues, which included talking to a chatbot and three different customer service representatives because two airline websites were both malfunctioning (Swiss and Lufthansa, I’m looking at you), plus trying to deal with UPS, I was so tired that I did not have the energy to get ready for bed. So I stayed up too late watching silly video clips on YouTube. Even thought watching films and videos involves absolutely no physical energy, I always find that it takes quite a lot of emotional energy, in a way that reading does not. I’m more tired after a movie than before. I did not get to sleep until much too late, so today I am both physically and emotionally tired. Maybe even a little spiritually.

I have a lot of work to do. But sometime today, I’ll take a walk in the park and do some reading — not for work, purely for pleasure.

And you know what? Now that I’ve written this, I feel better, more energetic. Writing may take emotional energy, but it also gives me something powerful, which is that I’m talking to you, whoever you are, and that’s a bit like communicating with a good friend.

(The image is Fresh Flowers by Lee Lufkin Kaula.)

I saw her on the airplane from Budapest to London. I saw her first from the back, and I thought she must be a girl, around fifteen or sixteen, because she was so small and slender. She walked like a teenager. Then I noticed her bun of gray hair. And when she turned, I realized she was closer to eighty-five than fifteen. She had a small, elegant head with high cheekbones and tan, wrinkled skin, an aquiline nose. And her hair, quite a lot of it, all different shades of gray, was pulled back in the high bun I had seen.

What had deceived me, in part, about her age was that she did not move like an eighty-five year old woman. She stood straight and she moved easily, naturally. Of course I know I’m dealing with stereotypes here — not all women move the same way at any age. But I remember how my grandmother moved at that age, and this woman moved like a yoga instructor, or maybe a former ballet dancer, the kind that becomes a teacher and stands at the front of the ballet class in character shoes, more poised than any of her students. She reminded me of my grandmother, actually. My grandmother had those same high cheekbones, and similarly her cheeks had been hollowed by age, a look that young actresses try to achieve by having the fat sucked from beneath their cheekbones. Be patient, I would tell them. Age will etch your cheeks. Age will make you elegant. My grandmother also had a full head of gray hair, although hers was short all her life.

Like my grandmother, this woman was Hungarian — I know because I heard her talking to a man who might have been a son or son-in-law, and a little girl who was certainly a grandchild, who hung on her hand. She was wearing what I thought was a knit dress until I later saw it in the window of the High Street Kensington Zara and realized it was a sweater-skirt combination, in various shades of gray that matched her hair. Very elegant, and probably expensive. Her shoes had the sort of heels that are more comfortable than flats — medium sized, thick without being chunky, very walkable. And again, elegant.

I noticed all this in the relatively short time I watched her walk onto the plane, then wait in the line to disembark, and then disembark — both times I was behind her. I noticed so much partly because I notice women’s clothes. As they pass on the sidewalk, or as I see them sitting or standing on public transportation, I notice and say to myself, Oh, I like that! What if I tied my scarf the way she’s tying hers? Ok, I see wide legs are in now, and they look good with a long sweater. But could I wear that, at my height (or rather shortness)? Oh, no, not those shoes. She’s going to trip over them any minute . . . It’s not really a way of judging the wearer (although sometimes, to be honest, it’s a way of questioning her judgment). It’s more a way of figuring out what might suit me, who I want to be. At least in the matter of clothes. And of getting new ideas, because I’m not really very creative when it comes to clothes. I mostly know what suits me now, because of all the mistakes I made in the past — years and years of mistakes. We won’t talk about my unfortunate Laura Ashley phase, when I tried very hard to be that romantic boho girl. Or the phase, in graduate school, when I decided to wear only black, day after day. I don’t remember why, but I had just gone back to school after four years as a corporate lawyer, and I think I was in rebellion against all things corporate, against hierarchy and patriarchy (embodied in the very real, non-theoretical hierarchy of partners that I had to work with, some of them gleefully nasty to new associates, both male and female). It was as close as I came to punk, in a Victorian mourning, gothic sort of way.

Anyway, my point is that I noticed this particular woman, not just because she was elegant, but because she was old, as I discovered when she turned around. I could call her elderly, but the point I’m trying to make is that she was eighty-five or so and elegant, and I thought, I’m going to be eighty-five too someday. I’m going to be old, and people are going to call me elderly, and I might say, No, I’m just old, my dear. But there’s no guarantee that I’ll be elegant. But . . . she was. So if she was, I could be too? If, at that age, she could be on a plane from Budapest to London, wearing the latest Zara, I could be too?

I’m not afraid of getting old, but I am afraid of getting old the way my grandmother did, slowly losing her ability to travel, to work at her painting and embroidery. No longer tending her own garden, cooking the recipes in the handwritten recipe book I’ve inherited. The elegant woman, speaking Hungarian to her granddaughter, was a slender beacon of hope.

I still have a while before I’m old, or elderly, or whatever you want to call it. But I’m planning ahead, because I know I’ll get there eventually. (Assuming the politicians with the nuclear buttons don’t blow us all up first, which is always possible.) I suspect the most important element of her elegance was yoga or ballet or pilates, one of those disciplines — whatever it was that allowed her to move so freely. And the second most important element was the absolute comfort of the clothes she was wearing, of her sensible but stylish shoes. It took me a very long time to realize that the pinnacle of elegance is being comfortable in your clothes, your skin — of knowing and being yourself.

I’m not there yet, but in the meantime, I’ll keep admiring elegance, wherever I see it. I was not elegant when I was young, as my high school photos (in which I always looked uncomfortable) amply prove. Now that I’m sort of in the middle, I’m doing my best — no longer quite as awkward, intermittently confident. But really, the goal is to be elegant by the time I’m old, like the woman I saw in the airplane from Budapest to London. Here’s hoping that, by the time I’m eighty-five, I’ll get there.

(The image is Portrait of the Princess de Beaumont by John Singer Sargent.)