Intimations book5/24/2023 Not the celebrated memoir on my nightstand written by a poet who’d famously dined with a tyrant, not the favorite novel I’d turned to during a farewell Zoom conference, where my colleagues all brought parting words of joy from their own favorite works, where I compared New York, the town I’d called home for two decades, to the imaginary one called Gilead: “This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. A note I took in the middle of one spring night said, “WHY NOT WRITING?” I answered myself in my notebook in the morning: “I DON'T WANT ANY OF THESE IDEAS.” I had also not been able to read, not before bed, not on the plane west. Since March, I’d felt certain of my capacities diminished. Buying a pre-owned Subaru in Portland, Oregon, a few weeks later, I explained to the salesman that the move had been long planned, by which I meant that we weren’t part of the exodus from the city prompted by the plague, something I’d also explained to the handyman repairing the wall we’d waterlogged by drilling into pipes above the toilet while hanging a medicine cabinet in our new apartment.
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