now, now, now
This Week in Reading
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
In Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, the protagonist— a writer also named Ruth— discovers a diary in a plastic freezer bag washed up on a northwest beach. The diary belongs to Nao, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl born in California who recently moved back to Japan. The book alternates between passages from Nao’s diary, and Ruth’s experience reading it on the other side of the Pacific.
I read this book for the first time in 2015, and for years after, I would recommend it as one of my favorite novels. It was still wonderful on the reread, but it didn’t strike as raw of a nerve. A different point of life, I suppose. I also found the topics discussed much more upsetting this time around—so just know that.
Ruth reads the diary aloud to her husband and becomes obsessed with the story, desperately seeking out information on the internet that can verify the existence of Nao and her family. As the book progresses, their two narratives become more and more entangled, Ruth’s investigations as a reader creating greater context for Nao’s writing, and seemingly altering the story itself.
Ruth is obviously a stand-in for Ozeki, but instead of acting as the writer in charge of the story, Ozeki has cast herself as the reader, engaging with the writings of another person. The diary’s existence, and Ruth’s reading of it, seem inextricable from each other. Nao addresses her entries to an anonymous person, an unknown friend she has created in order to escape her own isolation. She wonders about this unknown reader, wonders if they have a cat, how old they are, what they look like. At the same time, she acknowledges that this is private writing, and that her imagined reader does not exist. While some writing is not intended to be shared, no writing is truly private. We are always writing to an audience. Writing is an inherently vain activity. It rests on the assumption that the writer has something to say, and moreover, that someone else will care what that is. As much as writing is a solitary, introspective task, it is also performative. We cannot claim that we want to communicate without admitting that what we are really asking for, is to be heard, to be seen, to be granted attention from someone who may someday, pick up the words we have arranged onto a page. That is why I insist on sending this as a mass email, instead of quietly letting my thoughts rest inside my skull.
It is vain, to ask someone to read what we write, but the audience is a participant— not a witness— to art. To be an engaged reader or viewer is to activate the work. Art can exist without an audience, but it remains fetal, unborn, until it enters the world and can be seen and interpreted by others. When I install a show, my wall labels are a (fairly) concise description of my intention as an artist, but they are not the finish line for meaning. Viewer feedback does not alter my intention, but the boundaries of art can stretch to encompass many ideas. It can be all interpretations at once. Someone once hung one of my pieces upside down for months and I let them. There is no wrong way to look at art.
After 25 years on earth, I still have not learned how to shut the fuck up. The question is always: who the hell am I talking to? I think of my instagram story as jokes I tell the void, I make art that lives under my couch, I have piles of unedited essays in my gmail drafts folder. But of course, when I am talking to the void, I am really talking to you. This is a dialogue, even if most of you remain quiet on the other end. By reading Nao’s story, Ruth becomes part of it, and as I turn the pages of this novel, I become a third point in the conversation.
Ruth paces herself, trying to read the diary at the speed at which it was lived. The diary was written a decade before it washed up on her beach; Nao’s present, now the past. But as she reads, this past becomes Ruth’s present tense. Nao writes: “But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.”
I always say that I’ve never lived in the moment in my entire life. I shuffle the present into the recent past tense or the immediate future tense, projecting forward and back into time to create context, meaning, narrative. Living in the moment has always sounded like a fake concept to me. Stay present, yoga teachers instruct me gently, pay attention to what is happening to you right now, in this moment. But right now is so small! So unappealing in comparison to the infinite scope of human history! What is so great about the present, when compared inexhaustible potential of the future tense, unspooling ahead of us? Living in the moment is what psychedelics are for, quite frankly.
Time has begun hurtling by faster and faster as I get older. This is not a particularly astute observation. As I accumulate more and more time on earth, each passing year is a smaller and smaller fraction of the total. “Can you believe it is November already?” I, and every other adult bemoan. After talking and thinking about the midterm elections for two entire years, I was still somehow surprised that it was time go cast my ballot this week.
The concept of time passing relies on the premise that we are a static point, watching time march forward. But we exist within time, not outside of it. As Nao puts it, we are time beings, here for the time being. Time does not move past us, we move with it. We occupy not just the present moment, but all of time: past, present, and future, simultaneously. When we treat time as something separate from ourselves, it is easy to go to war with it. We dub time as good or bad, wasted or well-used. I have spent a good deal of this year trying to disentangle the concepts of productivity and happiness in my brain. (My fatal flaw!) “I had a good day, I got so much done,” I hear myself saying, as if those two things were synonymous. Efficiency and productivity are useful (and addictive), to be sure—but to conflate them with happiness is to inadvertently create another correlated pair: rest and unhappiness. There is no real value in attaching moral judgments to time. Time continues to pass at the same rate, whether or not we have deemed it good or bad. Labeling time as a waste does not give us more of it, it simply makes us feel bad, to no real end. All of this could all be summarized as an attempt to “be more chill,” a concept that is unfamiliar in my life, but sounds pleasant when described to me by others.
While I have yet to achieve the aspirational “chill”, as life gets busier and busier, I have noticed that the now has begin to stretch more languidly before me. There is so much happening at every given moment; I am too overwhelmed by it all to duck between past and present as I once did. Rather than a microscopic sliver of the whole, the present has become bigger, wider, more encompassing.
Thank you, as always, for lending me your time, for giving me an audience, and thus for giving my writing a point. I love you all.
Further Reading
This time of year I only want to reread old favorites instead of picking up new books. Other books I’m resisting rereading right now: The Secret History by Donna Tartt, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, the entire Harry Potter series.