Body and Soul
What I learned from a thousand old books, and one new one.
One evening a few weeks ago I spoke by invitation at a private club in New York City. Steeped in its history, the venue sported a quiet yet convivial elegance. A book signing with cocktails preceded a lovely dinner, after which I talked to fifty or so people about the genesis of my book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I explained the approach I took to the task of writing it and the processes — both practical and theoretical — I applied to the daunting challenge of curating between covers a gallery of literary exhibits that runs from The Epic of Gilgamesh, encoded on tablets in Babylon some four thousand years ago, to Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, published in 2017.
I’ve participated in scores of exchanges on these subjects in the nine months since the book was published, so I was on familiar ground, and I expected that familiarity to continue as we opened the conversation to questions from the audience. But right before we wrapped up the event, I was surprised by a question I hadn’t heard before. “You’ve had the opportunity to read and think about all of literary history, from thousands of years ago to today,” a man asked. “That’s a perspective not many of us share. What did you learn from all those voices? Are there common lessons you’ve drawn from the effort?”
The question gave me pause. First, because it articulated rather starkly the hubris of the enterprise, which I had more or less avoided confronting throughout the fourteen years I worked on the book; second, as the flip side to the hubris, it was humbling to be asked in earnest a question made for more systematically learned minds than mine. But I had indeed traversed the terrain, or at least cut a peculiar path through it, and I owed the hospitality of the crowd assembled before me — to say nothing of myself — a reply as thoughtful as the question.
I don’t remember precisely what I said. I suspect I was more eloquent off the top of my head than I’ll be in response to the stare of this blank screen. But as I stood thinking of what to say, the shadowy image of Gilgamesh I’d formed while reading his epic came to my aid, wandering a Babylonian bardo between life and death, mourning the loss of his friend Enkidu, searching for immortality but finding instead a fateful definition of the uncertain but unchanging human condition. And what came to mind as an answer, more or less, was this: “From the beginning, and repeated like recurring melodies played on different instruments for different forces, we find the same questions: Why are we here? What does it mean that we are here? Why do we die? How do we live in the face of our mortality? Why do we suffer? How do we weather the relentless loss that is our lot, and how can we hold on to joy and love and purpose and desire despite the losing?”
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Literature, of course, doesn’t answer those questions as much as it honors them; its artifacts are ceremonies of expression, emotion, and idea that inspire a faith that fosters resilience and, in Christopher Morley’s wonderful phrase, “understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty.” A few days after that presentation in Manhattan, I began reading a volume that does all this as tellingly as any new book I’ve read in quite some time: Constellations: Reflections from Life by Sinéad Gleeson. I’d discovered it serendipitously, by listening to an episode of a podcast called You’re Booked, hosted by Daisy Buchanan.
The format for Buchanan’s show is simple: she visits a writer to talk about the writer’s reading, in the writer’s home and — at least in the few examples I’ve heard — surrounded by the writer’s personal library. It’s smart, welcoming, and weighty with all the matters reading lifts into view. The first episode I listened to was Buchanan’s dialogue with Gleeson, a writer who was wholly new to me. It was a real conversation, not your usual podcast banter nor a conventional author interview, and from the outset I was captivated, especially by the way Gleeson actively referred to not only the content but also the physical character of volumes she invoked as presences, benedictions of the reading life; while the listener could not see them, they were sensed near at hand or across the room: here, on this table; there, on that shelf over on the far wall.
What one learned of Gleeson herself — her singular experience of bodily affliction, medical terror, illness, pain, and hospital stays; her attentions to childhood, love, loss, motherhood, age, and art — was enlivened by the grace of her alertness to these matters and her evident delight in living as well as reading. It made me want to know more. So there was nothing to do when the podcast was done but to order Gleeson’s collection of essays — her first book as an author — from the U.K. straightaway. (I understand it’s scheduled for publication in the U.S. next March.)
Constellations begins like this:
The body is an afterthought. We don’t stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Unless it’s involved in pleasure or pain, we pay this moving mass of vessel, blood and bone no mind. The lungs inflate, muscles contract, and there is no reason to assume they won’t keep on doing so. Until one day, something changes: a corporeal blip.
That passage introduces an essay called “Blue Hills and Chalk Bones,” structured as a set of recollections on the private and public manifestations of a mysterious hip ailment that arrived soon after the author turned thirteen (“The eventual diagnosis was monoarticular arthritis”), and which accompanied her through her coming-of-age and beyond with an ominous intimacy made all the more menacing by the adolescent awkwardness it amplified: “The arthritis caused my leg to drag. I got used to the limp, to the noise of the crutches, but with it gained a new self-consciousness.” Alternating her reflections on the powerlessness of patients and the cold gaze and harsh touch of treatment (“The kingdom of the sick is not a democracy. And every orthopaedic doctor who examined me during those years was male”) with memories of a student journey to France and a pilgrimage to Lourdes, she is never out of touch with pain, or free from “the familiar need to plead and convince, to prove myself worthy of medical intervention.”
A marvelous essay on “Hair” follows “Blue Hills and Chalk Bones,” and it moves from personal incident to philosophical investigation with a similar disarming curiosity, exhibiting the same gift for ruminative choreography and fierce apprehension of the silent structures of health, gender, biology, and fashion that echo through our lives. “In my aunt’s kitchen in the 1980s, in a Dublin barber’s in the 1990s, in a dedicated leukaemia hospital wing in the 2000s, I have stared at the aftermath of my hair,” Gleeson writes. “Strands curled like question marks on the floor.” And: “Each strand contains everything that’s ever been in our bloodstream. Are memories there too, lurking between medulla and cuticle, embedded in each lock?”
In “60,000 Miles of Blood,” Gleeson’s inspired grasp of impression is allied to a veteran patient’s scrutiny of medical art (she teaches us, for instance, that 60,000 miles is the distance that all the blood vessels in an adult body would stretch, if straightened and measured as a continuous line). Blood as symbol, its deification via the eucharistic sleights of the Catholic belief that pervaded Gleeson’s upbringing, is matched to blood as all-too-human symptom, evidenced in the existential crisis of Gleeson’s cancer and chemotherapy, with its regimen of treatments, its tests and vials and fears. She discusses the uses of blood in transgressive art, and the cultural patrimony by which its spilling is ennobled at the expense of its embodied and life-giving imperatives:
The shedding of blood has historically been seen as a male act of heroism: from rite-of-passage fistfights, to contact sports and combat. Infrequent, random events seen as standalone milestones; stories to tell once the pain — and enough time — has passed. Female bleeding is more mundane, more frequent, more get-on-with-it, despite its existence being the reason that every single life begins.
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What Gleeson’s mind draws from her focus on the body, on her own scars and suffering and the broader themes they evoke, is, as the title of her book suggests, a map of experience contingent yet continuing, illuminating in its contours. We trace its connections through a meditation both dramatic and tender on the death of a friend; a poetic annotation of the McGill Pain Index; examination of the politics of bodily autonomy; memories of a grandmother (“I see one woman in particular. All the moments of her life piled up like bones. The countless actions, the days of her youth she recounts to us, a drip feed of her past”); and a memorial for a beloved aunt who lived a life unpartnered (“When I think of it, even now, I feel it like a shove, her loneliness”) and whose presence in the world is turned inside out at its end by Alzheimer’s:
This illness transforms only the interior. The body becomes less a prison than an aquarium. Visitors, the people you love, looking in, regarding the body-snatched version of your mind. You, looking out, your whole worldview distorted as if by water and that thick, impermeable membrane. You now, and you as you once were, on separate sides of the glass.
“Panopticon: Hospital Visions” is a brilliant anatomy of hospital stays and the journeys of pain they hold in place (“Hospital requires a packed bag, but no ticket,” she writes), while “On the Atomic Nature of Trimesters” and “The Moons of Motherhood” are ponderings of pregnancy and parenting that are alive with apprehension in both senses of the word:
The due date is still a month away. My daughter and my body are about to part ways. The bones have had enough, and I wonder if there were whispered negotiations. Could you leave early? This isn’t working out. What I know of my daughter now, with her kindness and empathy and ready-for-anythingness, is that she would have politely agreed. Maybe even smiled, before steeling herself and launching into the world.
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“Pain — unlike passion — has no commonality with another being, it has no shareable fragments.,” Gleeson writes in “A Wound Gives Off Its Own Light.” Yet in a way her book belies that assertion on nearly every page, sharing what cannot be held in common via imagination and eloquence, making of her own “complicated bones” a skeleton of private human meaning strong enough for others to embrace in the public theater of the page. To make of a body of one’s own a room with a view so revelatory is a genuine act of magnanimity.
Which is to say that Gleeson’s book encompasses life in a way that concentrates the lessons of so much literature before it with a singular vigilance. It’s fierce in its soulfulness, yet humble in its understanding and carefulness of life and beauty. Will it last as long as Gilgamesh? Probably not. But right now, its sentences sing with an eloquence that courses from ancient days to our own, keening with our never-ending probing: Isn’t life mysterious, painful and dangerous, suffused with sorrow and lit with joy, ineffable and yet demanding words?
Filled with the scars and suffering that mark one woman’s incarnation, Constellations is visceral in the way few books are, stained with blood and sustained by it, a heart buoyed by its beating. It’s also smart and funny and angry and tender, true to life, and to art, and to love, in vital ways. Vital writing, vital reading.
