If I told you everything has felt too terrible to write anything not-fiction, would you know what I was saying? If I told you the pronoun “I” becomes more and more abhorrent to me the more I write and age? If I told you the idea of “having something to say” sounds empty, absurd, embarrassing, would you also know that underneath that is the fact that I want nothing more than every student that I love to get a book out in the world, that I, of course, still have a novel that I’m working diligently on? Already this parallel construction, if I told you if I told you feels dumb and overused, pathetic and embarrassing, would you give me a pass because it’s Sunday morning and I’m tired and didn’t sleep last night?

I meant to write you all a while ago but then some bad thing happened in the world. I meant to write to you and then some other bad things happened in my life. My dear beloved friend died two weeks ago but he was 96 so it has been strange how sad it made me. Of course it made me sad. But then I keep saying to myself, as if flat empty panaceas ever worked on anybody, he had a good long life and then the sadness harrumphs passed my throat into my stomach, and then I block it out and try not to think about it to get through the day. A family friend died the Monday after my friend. Not as long a life, but still pretty good. Other world historical awful things, a pile of professional angst. Prickly, not-soon-to-be-conquered kid stuff. And then the bloviating asshole who I don’t like on the internet said something dumb again. And then the bloviating asshole that is our president bombed a girls’ school. And then and then.

But I don’t want to write to you about any of this because I’m trying to reach again for other things that writing might be good for. If the “I” feels embarrassing. If “having something to say” feels ridiculous. I’m teaching a seminar this semester on Attention. It’s a class I made up. We’re reading Proust and Woolf. We’re going into Manhattan (this is at my job in New Jersey) to see art. I spend too much time thinking about Proust now. I spend too much time relating near everything I see, or what the children say, back to Swann’s Way.

Art, imagination, memory: not terrible spaces to be spending time when the world is what it is. That the world has often felt like this and yet people have loved and fucked, eaten good food, made art, had friends, is one of the main things I’m grateful for about prepping to teach.

Proust was born on July 10, 1871. The Franco-Prussian war went from July 1870 to January 1871. Provoked or not by Otto von Bismark, the French started the war, but Germany won and von Bismark got a more unified German Empire out of it. The French got the end of imperial rule and an eventual republican government. During the war, and, again, in the months when Proust’s (beloved) mother was pregnant, the Germans starved the city, and Parisians were forced to eat zoo animals and rats. That the government made the people starve and then capitulated anyway helped to stir the unrest that would still be roiling among so many Parisians afterward. In the months then just before Proust’s birth, some of the working men who had joined the army united and briefly overthrew the government.

This was called the Paris Commune, a progressive, feminist, anti-religious collective that ruled Paris for two months. They also killed some priests during their tenure and were ultimately overthrown by the French Third Republic. Proust was born only two months after that overthrow. One of the one-sentence descriptions of Remembrance of Things Past that I read out loud to my students on our first day was, “a man documents the detritus, delights, and absurdity of a crumbling society as he finds his way into the transcendence of art.”

After last semester, in which I taught a class called The Rumbling (a made-up term) and we talked constantly about the ways that history underpins near every interpersonal and social interaction, both in fiction and in life, I’ve taken to drawing timelines on the board for the lives of every writer that I teach. Ie, how did it inform Natalia Ginzburg’s relationship to fascism, love, life, etc to have been born in 1916 and die in 1991. To have been three when Mussolini took power, to have been two at the start of the first world war and 22 at the start of the next. Her husband was murdered by Nazis. She was Jewish. She tricked some German soldiers into helping her escape to Rome in a German military truck.

This isn’t an essay about Ginzburg or Proust, but these timelines have done fascinating things to how I understand the texture and the tenor of the books I teach and read. Of course, I think too of my children, whose timelines involve having been toddlers during the first Trump administration, who are now tween and teen girls under the second one. How these things live in our bodies whether we think or talk about them or not. How they live in differently aged and gendered bodies differently and then how they are transmuted as we age.

I did not mean here to tell you about any of this so much as tell you about how in my attention class we have been in search of pleasure and beauty. The timeline of my students, who are sharp, smart thoughtful, and all freshman, and so were eight in 2016, 12 in 2020 and high school seniors in the fall 2024. They have not been fully conscious in a world without iPhones. Our work together is trying to figure out how to pay better, more sustained attention. But then on the first day we talked about William Blake’s idea that there’s no such thing. Instead, Blake says, sustained attention is a process of turning back and back toward the thing on which you’re trying to focus, that sustained attention is less full immersion than continuing to have to choose to dive back down.

So then our question becomes how and when and why are we compelled toward things. What of that is forced and what of that is something we can get better at? What, amidst the world that we’re stuck in, leaves us feeling blank and empty? What makes us feel full, sustained? How can we elasticize the lens of our looking, listening, seeing, feeling?

As part of this task, I sent them on a beauty and pleasure scavenger hunt. They had to find five different things that appealed to each of the five senses, then find three things that appealed to multiple senses, then find three things that they find neither beautiful nor pleasurable, but they know other people do and try to make sense of the why and how of it. I had them document all of it, record the sounds, take pictures. They are reporting their findings to class this week.

Wherever you are on the timeline of right now and/or the timeline of how the present moment has subsumed you, it does seem to me like a good amount of being alive comes from reasserting control over your attention. That it comes, too, from not only finding beauty and pleasure but attempting to be subsumed by it.

Anyway. I’ve been aberrant here and can’t promise I’ll be any better. But, in the meantime, my ask, my prod for you is to go on your own beauty and pleasure hunt, to leave whatever awful thing you’ve perhaps been stuck in, snagged by, to let your attention dive as deep as it can into something that feels like sustenance.