An essay of mine, “Shadows, Tokens, Spring,” is published in the Fall 2022 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.
I drafted it over a couple weeks in March 2020 while stuck in an apartment in Penang, Malaysia. I kept tinkering with the essay once I was back in Berlin, using it as a diversion from other projects. I sent it to VQR in early 2021, but due to the slow-moving machine of quarterly print magazines it wasn’t published until last month, and so reads to me a bit like a message from another world, one where a novel coronavirus is still changing our reality in ways we don’t yet understand.
Not that the essay is about Covid—it’s only mentioned once, and then briefly. I’m not sure how best to summarize its interests. There are five sections and a handful of recurring themes: marmots, plague, travel writing, the region once called Manchuria, tourism, ritual. I was more interested in how those themes might produce interesting vibrations of meaning when played against one another than I was in making an argument or—even worse—telling a personal history of infection and quarantine. I suppose I was feeling allergic to those personal accounts, so popular at the time, whose repetitions and samenesses made me think about our collective relationship to large-scale diseases, and about the invention of scientific rationality that has obscured the lingering presence of superstitions, prejudices, and myths beyond which we are meant to have evolved.
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Some recommended reading:
-My friend Ryan Ruby wrote a lovely essay on Nabokov, parenthood, and Berlin in this month’s Harper’s, an essay that reminds me of how obsessed I was with Nabokov when I moved to the city in 2014. By coincidence, I attempted many years ago to write a different version of just such an essay, featuring many of the same locations and references to his work, using marriage rather than parenthood as a personal catalyst, but never quite got its memoir and literary parts working together, a fact that makes Ryan’s achievement all the more impressive to me.
xoxo
Ben