More on: Culture

Today, in a comprehensive fulfilment of biblical promise, your iPhone, which counts your steps and is acquainted with your ways both public and private, will offer to route your path home and watch over your lying down.

It’s as though the movie represents an alternate life for any of us. Take away a job. Take away a spouse. Take away an able body. Take away good mental health. How many of us could maintain our current lifestyles for long before we’d feel the crunch, the walls closing in?

It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.

For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.

Paschal could not leave his beloved mother’s head bare. How could he? For he knew that nature gapes with lack. He knew that we’re meant to be hooked up to something else, as if our skulls were plugs. Or to put it another way: he knew that all of us are amputees from moment we’re born.

The monument is essentially didactic: look on my works, ye mighty. But the ruin, the legless trunk, is often the real lesson, on the passing of time and the erosion of reputation.

It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights, pacifism, and income equity.

I want to go back to Manderley and drag myself up the stairs at midnight. See myself. Pull my baby up through the water from the land of the dead.