The air is thick with a weird mixture of smugness and insecurity: it’s the evening of the last day of 2012, and everyone’s busy telling everyone else what they did this year and what they learned and what they’re going to do differently next year.

This year I almost didn’t go totally broke, which for a freelance writer/whatever is pretty good going, or so I’m told. I spent a month having a long-overdue love affair with the place I grew up. I swam. I went to weddings. I started a PhD. And so on. But for some reason the thing I think of, immediately and exclusively, when I think of what I did this year, is ‘write a book’, I guess because this is a thing I’ve wanted to do for awhile (well, forever, really). And then I did it and people kept looking at me funny when we spoke, like, why aren’t you more excited about this?. And I looked back blankly, because I didn’t know what the appropriate facial expression for “I don’t know why I’m not more outwardly excited about this; but also I’m more excited than it’s possible to convey” was.

Anyway, it’ll be in bookshops sometime next year and in the meantime you can order it directly from the publisher, if you’re so inclined. And here’s what I think after having written my first book:

1.
It takes longer than you think it should to write a book of publishable (debatable word, I know, I know) standard. Even if you once half-jokingly wrote 50,000 words in one month. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just takes me longer than I think it should to write a book of publishable(ish) standard. I don’t know how long it should take: I have literally no idea. Like, a year? A decade? A week? But this is a lesson I’m always learning and forgetting and learning again: that things, all things, take more time than I want them to take. So it’s important that I point it out, because by next week I’ll have forgotten again and I’ll be disappointed in myself again.

2.
Maybe don’t do a crowdfunded book (or even album/film/whatever) unless you’ve already written the book. Or at least written most of the book. Or at least have a very very strong sense of what the book is going to ‘look like’. Otherwise you’ll be nibbled on by guilt for a year as you sit at your laptop late at night frantically not writing, and you’ll worry that the thing you produced won’t match up exactly with the thing you promised because let’s face it, things never turn out exactly as we envision, and people will forget completely about the project, and you won’t know if it’ll be a pleasant reminder when a book arrives on their doorstep or if the book will just be a sour artifact of a wasted £20, and you’ll be completely broke for a long time, etc etc.

Obviously this is a bit of a catch-22: isn’t the whole point of crowdfunding to allow people to contribute to the process as well as the product – to give, for instance, an author the opportunity to take the necessary time to write the book? And yes, maybe in theory it is. I’ve written about this before, and I still believe it’s fundamentally a good thing. But there’s a flaw, and I can’t quite put my finger on it it, and I don’t necessarily think it’s a fatal flaw, but it’s big, and it goes something like: the world doesn’t move at quite the right pace for crowdfunding to be practical for large-scale projects, unless maybe you’re Amanda Palmer and you have a million fans in the palm of your hand already. So yeah, if I had written half the book already, or if it was an extended essay or something, that works. But everything’s moved on in a year. We need to slow the pace of consuming down if this is going to work for someone who says, I’m starting from scratch on this project which requires me to do quite a lot of background reading and research and fieldwork before I can even tell you exactly what shape it’s going to take, and then, after I’ve read a lot and transcribed all my interviews and had a hundred conversations about the subject matter with the people I’m working with, then I’m going to sit down and write, which is something which in itself takes time, and then I’m going to edit and rewrite because I’m not going to do something that I’m not happy with or proud of. And then the actual publication process starts: the copyedit, the proofreading, the typesetting, the cover design, the printing: all the other stuff that takes time too. Which is basically what I did.

3.
There’s no big “hooray!” moment. One day you’ll be sitting there thinking, how is this ever going to be a Thing? And then one day you’ll be emailing the manuscript to the copyeditor and then one day you’ll be reading proofs, and then one day you’ll be opening a box full of your own books. But there’s never a moment where you say, ‘let’s go get champagne and celebrate the fact that I’ve finished!’ Because you’ve never quite finished, quite. When you send the manuscript off, when you receive the proofs, when you hold the physical thing: people will say, isn’t it great, aren’t you so excited? You must be so excited! And you’ll say yes, it is great, and yes, I am so excited!, but you’ll also be thinking, but how did this happen? and what happens next?

4.
Writing a book is really thankless work. I don’t know why anyone would do it if they didn’t take pleasure from the act itself, or if they had any expectations at all of external encouragement or gratification. Does that sound negative? I don’t mean it to: I love sitting at my desk and looking out my window and reading things and typing things and feeling a little at sea sometimes, and going for walks and swimming for a very long time when things are going badly and not having time to go to the pool at all when things are going well. I love all that, that’s all I ever really want to do. But listen: no one else really gives a crap if you’ve written a book or are writing one (except for your family, of course. They’ll tell everyone they know, with embarrassing abandon, about how you’re writing a book). You won’t be paid well to do it if you’re paid at all. There’s no guarantee that it’ll be worth it in the end. When people you meet at the pub ask what you do and you tell them you’re writing a book, they’ll ask you what the book is about, and for the first ten months or so you’ll dread the question because you don’t quite know the answer yet, or you do know the answer, fundamentally, but you haven’t figured out a good way to articulate it yet. And then for the last two or three or four months or whatever, you’ll really want them to ask, because you have the perfect answer, and you have so much to say about it, and it’s so exciting! – except that their eyes will glaze over immediately no matter how garbled or practiced your answer, and they’ll smile and nod and be polite and ignore everything you say and that’ll be that. Sometimes they’ll ask if you have a publisher. You’ll say yes, and they’ll want to know how you managed that, in this cut-throat competitive world (“and at your age!” someone will say, which is both a compliment and a challenge), and you’ll have to shamefacedly admit that you don’t have some story about Being Discovered, you don’t have any literary accolades, you’re not a fresh-faced, Brooklyn-dwelling, New Yorker-worthy young talent that everyone will have heard of this time next year, you’re not Lena Dunham, you’re not special. You were just in the right place at the right time. You know some people at a small startup publishing house. You’re lucky.

People never judge you as strongly as you think they should for this, though. Usually they’ll just say something like, “but God, isn’t the whole 50 Shades of Grey thing so depressing?”, or, “ooh, my cousin’s a copywriter, she has a really great website, you should get a website!” or whatever, and then you’ll say “what do you do?” and they’ll tell you all about their job as an administrative assistant or how they just finished a doctorate in neuroscience or how they’re about to head off to spend a year translating poetry in Kyrgyzstan (it’s Oxford, that sort of thing is de rigueur).

And then for no good reason at all you’ll feel a bit like an asshole, because you know it looks like you just sit around all day looking out the window and reading things and typing things and feeling a little at sea sometimes, and that’s precisely how you spend your time, and even though you have no money and no guarantee of ever having money again you feel spoiled, or like you know a secret that other people don’t know, like you’re getting away with something.

❧

Apropos of my last post, I received an email from my mother yesterday with the following photo attached, as proof that I hadn’t imagined the photograph of my father on a bicycle with a Christmas tree in his hand:

And just for fun, here’s ours (the lights aren’t that gaudy in real life, I promise):

❧

In November we spend a week in the countryside, looking after children and animals and a great big farmhouse. The bathtub is so large that I can’t comfortably read in it; I stretch out, my full length, and my toes just touch the end of the tub, while the top of my head brushes the other. There’s certainly no way to negotiate a way to hold the heavy issue of Vogue I’d planned to leaf through. I come downstairs and say, “the bathtub is too large!” I didn’t know this was a problem you could have, but there you are: a bathtub definitively built for two, not one – or for one much taller than me, at least.

We drive the kids to rugby practice (I stand on the sidelines, watching, trying to understand the rules; he brings me a cup of tepid brown water masquerading as coffee and stands beside me, trying to explain) and pick them up from school. The autumn colours are lingering; “This is the road with the pretty trees!” I keep saying; “This is the A361!” he replies, bemused. The garden is patrolled – or should I say owned – by an aggressive rooster who fears us a lot less than we fear him. Once I’m chased all the way to my car, and then into my car, and I sit helplessly as the rooster continues to peck at the side of the vehicle, and I wonder if I can explain to the rental company that I’m sorry about the dents but have you ever been chased by a rooster?

In the kitchen we’re kept warm by the Aga, charming if inefficient, and one night we sit outside at the pub, jackets pulled tight around us, the dogs on leashes yapping at every passing leaf. It seems odd that we are grown-up enough to be actually acting as grown-ups; that is, to be the people in charge, even when we don’t feel up to the challenge, even when we feel quite like children ourselves, wanting to be taken care of, to ignore the world, to succumb to the belief that if I can’t see them they can’t see me. Most of adulthood, if I’m understanding it correctly, is about this kind of surprised realisation of accidental, arbitrary authority. I am alarmed as much by the prospect of being in such a position as by our apparent capability: not that we are brilliant at being the only grown-ups in the house, or even totally competent, just that I had always expected that this was something you’d have to be meticulously taught, something that didn’t come naturally, something that only years of practice (and the kind of confidence you only get from having Done Something Substantial – started a brilliant career, had kids, bought a house, whatever) could equip you for. At one point, over-tired, I turn to him and say: “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!” But we are, irrevocably, and so we bear our responsibility responsibly.

It bothers me a little that we can’t seem to be this way just for ourselves, that we need to be needed in order to act our age; but then, I think, who can, really, who does act their age, except when it’s required?

***

Back at home, I read the proofs of my book and let piles of post and other work stack up on my desk. The rain is coming down hard outside. I look out at the almost-bare cherry tree, black against the bland grey sky. A few leaves still cling to the branches; they shiver violently in the wind and remind me of fish, suspended on hooks. A sinister image for a seemingly sinister day (a big black fly has taken up residence in my study; its constant buzzing causes me to feel overly anxious). But later the rain stops and the clouds break apart and there is just one fresh hour, before nightfall, when it is warm and radiant out after all.

***

One weekend in December we come home to discover that friends have brought us a small Christmas tree, from a farm in Wales. It smells cool and fresh and I find a pot for it and give it warm water. I have this very particular image of a memory (or memory of an image) which isn’t mine: my parents’ first Christmas tree, the first Christmas tree that they had together in the first house they lived in together, before I was born. It’s a photograph, from the mid-1980s, I guess, or thereabouts. Slightly faded, in that particular yellowy faded way that photos get, with thick white edges. My father is on a bicycle, in shorts and a long-sleeve top (this is California, after all), with the Christmas tree tucked under one arm, or maybe balanced in the palm of his hand. His other hand is on the handlebars. For some reason the poignancy of that moment, frozen arbitrarily by my mother’s camera, and the memory I have (which may not even be real) of being told the story of that tree, has instilled in me a sense that this is a very special occasion, this first tree. So I’m happy to have it, even if it’s extraneous. Ours is about the same size as theirs was, though I’m not sure I’m quite a confident enough cyclist to have been able to carry it home by bike. I buy a string of cheap fairy lights from the hardware store and tell everyone I know that after five Christmases together we finally have our first Christmas tree.

***

The shops are full and the streets clogged with people buying things, but at the same time it feels like everyone has evacuated the city. The houses on either side of us have gone dark and quiet. At the pool, I have a lane all to myself. I go to the library in search of a particular book, and even though there’s nobody else about, I receive whispered directions from the librarian; I turn the pages silently; I muffle a sneeze. While I’m reading it gets dark, and by the time I unlock my bicycle the stars are out. A fingernail-clipping moon hangs over All Souls. The Iffley Road, deserted, seems wider and longer than usual. I’m tired when I get home: I need to pump my tires.

***

The Saturday before Christmas, we drive up to Suffolk for a wedding. This is a crazy thing to do; I know it’s a crazy thing to do, he knows it’s a crazy thing to do, but we do it anyway, because this is what being young is all about: driving to other people’s weddings three days before Christmas. Someday the kids of the people whose weddings we’re constantly attending now will be having their own weddings and they will do the same sorts of things and we’ll laugh and say, “what a stupid thing to do!” and then, presumably, feel humbled by our own forgetfulness, our own antiquity. Anyhow I rent a car and we dump our finery in the boot (me: a silk merlot-coloured dress and a pair of diamond and sapphire earrings that used to belong to my grandmother; him: a black suit, reluctantly, after discovering that the jacket that accompanies his kilt has been decimated, since he last wore it five years ago, by hungry moths) and drive to Suffolk. Towards the end of our journey we pull over and change in the car, and then we drive for twenty minutes or so down narrow, flooded roads to this little old church perched on a hillside. There’s nothing else around; we’re not far from the coast, and there’s an edge-of-the-world feeling, or an end-of-the-world feeling, perhaps, even though the Mayan apocalypse was yesterday and we’re still here. I complain about the parking conditions (I drive the car up a steep muddy bank at the side of a field, like everyone else; he tells me I’m still sticking out; I tell him that’s tough, I can’t move, the wheels are stuck, we’re going to be fucked when we want to get out, if they didn’t want people to block the road they shouldn’t have chosen to get married here, blah blah blah). My high heels, and they’re very high indeed, sink into the mud as we walk to the church. We’re shown to pews and given candles to hold, and as it grows dusky outside the church window is stained bluer and bluer. After the couple is married we try to light Chinese lanterns, but there’s a strong wind and only a few of them take to the dim sky. The reception is in a school gymnasium, decorated with fairy lights and bunting. We eat roast pig and spend two hours ceilidh-ing; I take my heels off and develop a blood blister the size of Alaska on the ball of my right foot. I haven’t had a blood blister of any note since I was a freshman in high school, when I was on the track team.

We take about an hour to say goodbye to people, moving slowly around the room. Then we start driving again. At first it’s quite pleasant; we feel very adult, sober, leaving the party before midnight, driving away, chatting away. We turn the radio on, the rain has stopped for awhile, we take the gentle curves of the B roads smoothly, like in a car advert, passing through little villages, past trees, hedges, fields. On Radio 4 there’s a programme on about William Carlos Williams. Various people read out bits of his poems; I remember my mother reading me “This is just to say” when I was little.

“Forgive me/they were delicious”

“He was a doctor,” I remember out loud. (So was Chekhov, I’ve just learned, which makes me feel a little better about my own sort of double life, if also somewhat abashed). There’s this pleasing period where we’re just driving along on these British roads, listening to people talk about William Carlos Williams, whose poems I recognise from my own American childhood, who I knew was a doctor as well as a poet, and we remind me of what I imagined adulthood should look like during that American childhood: we become, briefly, the thing that no one ever really is. Then eventually we’re out on bigger roads, and the rain is falling harder, the visibility is poor, and the mood is tenser, because I can feel how little control I actually have over any of it – the car, the weather, the million little stresses – and because we’re both tired, and suddenly wondering if we’ve been a bit ambitious. The roads are virtually empty, though, and finally we get where we’re going for the night.

The next day, driving down the M11, the sun breaks through the clouds and I ask for my sunglasses, and there’s a moment on Desert Island Discs, just after Dawn French talks about her mother’s funeral, when Etta James is singing “At Last”, that feels particularly sweet. And when we get back to Oxford we have our little Christmas tree, and leftover beer from an impromptu party earlier in the week.

***

Since my pool is shut until the new year, I go for a swim at the community pool off the Cowley Road. I’m secretly hoping for Christmas music, like last year, but there’s just generic Radio 1-ish music coming through the speakers. At one point, about halfway through my swim, I recognise “Gangnam Style,” which I last heard in a grubby nightclub (is there any other kind?) in central Oxford on a Saturday night. The pool is basically empty: there’s a lifeguard sitting on the bleachers with his head in his hands, one man doing laps in the next lane over, pleasingly just a little bit slower than me, and an elderly man in the big slow lane, paddling doggedly up and down the length of the pool, looking disturbingly, desirably serene to me, with my pounding heart.

***

On Christmas eve, we take a bus into town and do all our shopping. It’s raining hard but it’s also unseasonably warm. In the covered market we run into some friends and pause to say hello next to a hanging deer carcass. Later we split up to buy gifts for each other and reconvene at the King’s Arms. I have half a pint of bitter; when I complain of hunger he buys us a pickled egg and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, puts the egg in the bag, shakes it up.

***

I like the long stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, particularly when we’re not at home, are excused, for a time, from the daily indignities of responsibility (“What’s making the fridge stink? Is this broccoli too old to eat? Can I borrow 55p? I hope the postman didn’t notice that I’m not wearing anything under my dressing gown. I hope we remembered to put the right bin outside. I hope that red wine I just poured all over the front room won’t stain the floorboards.” and so on). One day, when everyone else has gone out for a little while, I go into the garage and use the cross-trainer for half an hour. It’s an old machine that someone rescued from a skip and it makes an awful creaking noise, like it’s too tired to go on, it wished we’d left it well enough alone so it could rot slowly in the persistent English rain, but eventually I get used to it, and my boredom transforms itself into exercise-induced elation. I listen to music and feel pleasantly, mildly high, even though in reality there’s little as mind-numbing as using a piece of gym equipment in the corner of someone’s else’s garage, with nothing to look at but stacks of old boxes and children’s bicycles, long retired, leaning up against the walls, and bottles of wine and vodka on wooden racks. I have a memory of being in college, using the campus gym, which was in a basement and stank of sweat but sure as hell beat running outside in the middle of a Boston winter. It was also a social thing, a bit of a game. I ran very fast on the treadmill and was always gratified to see someone I knew there, a friend from class, a boy I almost-liked, someone whose presence, whose acknowledgement of my presence, validated the efforts I was making. Otherwise I was just running in place for an hour, working up a sweat but going nowhere.

❧

It’s 2012 now. I didn’t do my usual end-of-year post to mark the transition. I started doing this a few years ago. I didn’t intend to make a habit of it, but I make habits very easily, by accidentally doing the same thing over and over again, and so it became a habit. I thought about it this year, after we’d had our nice Christmas with family and I had eaten a lot of turkey and nibbled at the Christmas pudding and taken naps and baths and read so many books in a short space of time that I was getting them mixed up in my head and was feeling ready to get back to making things again. But everything seemed too small to bother writing about, and simultaneously too large to even comprehend, too large certainly to fit in a few paragraphs – “time passed, or maybe it didn’t,” as Geoff Dyer writes. Last year, while time was passing, or maybe not passing, I worked. I went to Scotland and wore espadrilles in the rain and they didn’t dry out for weeks. We re-visited Wales, we re-visited New York. I left my job – “without one to go to!” as they say, biting their fingernails, but of course that was the point, to leave without having a clear sense of what came next. And I’m going have a book published this year, as a result of what happened last year when I had no clear sense of what comes next, and even so I still have no clear sense of what comes next, though that feels right somehow, that feels okay.

Anyway, instead of a chronological list of things we did last year, or things that happened to us, here’s a random assortment of things I (think I) learned last year.

- Everything takes longer than I think it should.
- Related: I'm nearly always at least ten minutes late.
- I like stuff (clothes, clutter, knickknacks, bric-a-brac) a lot less than I thought I did.
- Making food! Awesome!
- But chopping things quickly? Still a struggle.
- Being on the radio is fun!
- I get annoyed by the internet.
- But I'm also pretty good at shutting stuff off. I like leaving my mobile phone in a drawer upstairs and ignoring it. I do this on an almost daily basis, and often not deliberately.
- Decisions: still difficult!
- London isn't entirely evil.
- Oxford can be a cruel city, too. But I still like living here.
- Reading is necessary for a healthy mind and body.
- So is swimming.
- Walks, wilderness: also good.
- Other people's advice doesn't really matter.
- Except when it does.
- But trying to get somewhere using someone else's route is the surest way to get nowhere at all.
- I don't hate Christmas pudding as much as I thought I did.

I probably learned other things too, and I probably didn't really learn all of those things last year (I mean, decisions have always been difficult, and remind me about the third point next time I tell you how much I want a new pair of boots), but there you go: an assortment. That's all, an assortment.

p.s. The photo is from the walk we took on New Year's Eve - through the mist and the slippery hills in Cumbria, with some friends. Later we drank a lot of champagne and made little pigs out of lemons, pennies and matchsticks. It was nice.

❧

I. Christmas cards

This year, some are hand-delivered. At the farmers’ market, I run into some friends; they pull a card out of a coat pocket, but it gets lost amongst the leeks and the potatoes and I never end up taking it home, let alone opening it. Oh well, they say, when I tell them the fate of their offering. It was just a Christmas card; it said Christmas card things – and besides, I think, we’ve seen each other six times since; all the card contained, I suppose, was the representation of a relationship, while here we are, living that relationship. Later, drinking wine at a friend’s house late at night, she produces a card, and I’m vaguely ashamed to have nothing to offer in return, but then, I’ve never been good at this; even the cards I send to my family, back in California, arrive embarrassingly late if at all, little attempts to disguise the distance between us that only serve to magnify it.

Others arrive through the post, personal but to the point. Let’s see more of each other in the new year, one of them says, which I like; it’s an active card, an invitation of sorts. But people of my generation, maybe people in general, don’t send those long letters that my parents used to receive at Christmas – round-robins, sometimes, but not always, full of life updates: how little Susie is doing in middle school and how Howard is considering Harvard but he’s not sure he’s got the SAT scores for it and how even though Tom lost his job earlier this year because of downsizing or company restructuring or whatever the fashionable reason to lose your job is, they’ve picked themselves up, are doing well, even managed a family trip to the Grand Canyon this summer!

This kind of correspondence served conflicting purposes – to highlight both the banality of everyone else’s lives (they’re human too, just trotting along at the same speed as the rest of us) and the magnificence of everyone else’s lives (they’re doing all kinds of amazing things that I’m not doing!). Who didn’t feel a pang of jealousy, knowing that acquaintances were traveling further, making bigger decisions? Who didn’t, also, know that these kinds of details, the cheery attitude, the photo of the smiling family lined up on the edge of the Grand Canyon (the edge of the abyss!), were just fragments? Those notes contained nothing more or less than a series of clues, designed to add up, when pieced together by detective-friends, to a life grander than the life actually lived.

II. Curation

Now we don’t need to send end-of-year updates. We’re busy constructing and tending to our grander selves all year round. We broadcast the bits of the truth we want other people to see every day, primarily online, combing our public image, curating our personal histories.

I’m thinking about this when I come across this post by Cheri Lucas on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Facebook Timeline. I’m struck by the connection Lucas draws between Lacuna, Inc. and “my curation of my own history” and am prompted to write my own rambling mini-essay in the comments:

“Maybe what’s interesting here is the collision between two kinds of curation – the curation of personal memory and the curation of one’s public self, or one’s public image, anyway. The former has always occurred – not as drastically, as literally, as it does for Joel and Clementine, but in little ways (misremembering the last months of a relationship, forgetting certain things, placing private but heavy emphasis on others, say). I know when I tell people I meet now about relationships I’ve had in the past, I’m not telling a whole story, or even a true (in the sense of factually correct) story – but I am, usually, at least telling a story which is emotionally true for me, based on my (curated) memory. But now, as you point out, “I am able to highlight what is important in my life—or what I want others to view as important—and fill in missing details”. We can not only present (and broadcast) a certain version of ourselves; we can also edit it, for an audience, we can do on paper (or Facebook, anyway) what we’ve always been able to do in our minds forever. I don’t know if this is a ‘bad’ thing, if any of it can be quantified, but I think it’s certainly raising questions about memory and identity that are fairly unique to our era.”

III. Casual Correspondence

I wrote a month or two ago about how the question of whether or not correspondence – in its grand sense, its life in letters sense – is dead, or dying, because of technology, doesn’t interest me. But the art of staying in touch – well, now, that’s different, that’s a rare art indeed these days, and “rarity…is the precursor to extinction,” as Darwin writes.

For me, casual correspondence is too difficult these days. Why write to someone (or even – the horror! – ring her), for no specific purpose other than to make contact, when you can track her movements (however heavily edited) online? And if she doesn’t broadcast any aspect of his her online, you hesitate: perhaps it’s deliberate, perhaps she’s hiding, perhaps your friendly advances are unwelcome. My inclination anyway, in an environment where we’re saturated with the details of other people’s lives, is to assume that the dissapearer has disappeared for a reason, has gone underground in order not to be found.

So we forget how to make contact, how to say hello, how are you, what have you been up to? There are plenty of people I want to say that to, but not only do I feel disinclined, I feel I lack the vocabulary – and also the medium – with which to do it. I don’t know how to say let’s stay in touch, but more than that, I don’t know how to stay in touch.

I do know this: staying in touch – or, rather, the art of staying in touch – is interactive. It is is not adding someone as a friend on Facebook so that you can passively observe; it’s not consuming the fragments, the breadcrumbs. It’s talking about the fragments and the breadcrumbs, filling the spaces in with conversation.

You could look at something like Facebook and think, how efficient! It’s saving so much time; people don’t have to write a million letters and emails anymore; all the necessary information is in one place; it’s never been easier to stay in touch! This is true, on the surface; but what it ignores is the possibility for different selves, different levels of revelation. I worry (probably needlessly, nearly all of my worry is needless) that if everyone sees precisely the same thing, we’ll forget how to tell different people different things – not in order to mislead, but in order to tailor relevant information, to revisit shared history, to retain a sense of dignity. And we’ll let this art, this tiny art, shrivel and become extinct.

❧