Chekhov’s Mistess

Marginalia: 7 July 2005

I was reading Jane {a murder} last night – it’s past midnight – and came across a passing mention of Anne Frank’s diary. I remember reading about it not long ago – I don’t know why it was in the paper – but I was struck with the story of how Anne’s father found the diary after she had died and how he waited two weeks before looking at it, but then made himself read her words, the words of his dead daughter. That was wrenching enough to think about, before even getting to the historical context of her diaries and how she came to die at such a young age.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m struck by how becoming a parent has changed my sensitivity to just about everything, like having a mild but persistent sunburn, I’m more sensitive to touch now. I’ve lived long enough to have experienced love and death and instances where I feared, if only fleetingly, for my own life; I’ve made and lost money and friends, changed careers, moved around, gotten married, but never have I felt anything with the sustained intensity of being a parent.

The cover of the New York Times Magazine several weeks ago had a story about parents of soldiers in Iraq. A line of the leading paragraph said of one family that the grandfather clock in the hallway was set to Iraq time. I cried for those people.

As a writer, being a parent is enlivening, despite the time and energy that a toddler sucks out of you. It seems as if I was missing one of my five senses before and I wouldn’t know what to do with it now if I didn’t enjoy writing. I remember as a teenager thinking that if I was supposed to “write what you know,” that I couldn’t possibly write anything because I hadn’t done anything yet. Interestingly, it was about that same time that my high school experienced a student going on a rampage and murdering a teacher during class; well before but very much like the incidents that seem to happen with increasing regularity now. I never thought about writing about it. But now I’ve experienced a lot things and I think I have a lot to say, I’ve waited all this time, I’ve worked on my writing skills, but then I think about the great artists who were so so sensitive even at a very early age, that they could express for the rest of us those same raw emotions.

I admire and envy those who can capture in words the sensations of life. Like when W.H. Auden wrote “For in my arms I hold / The Flower of the Ages / And the first love of the world.” How did he understand so well the uniqueness of love? Later in that poem, As I Walked Out One Evening, he says “O plunge your hands in water, / Plunge them in up to the wrist;” I’ve always thought when reading it that he meant ice cold water, but he doesn’t say that. Maybe because he starts the next stanza with the word glacier, but nonetheless I think of it as shocking because it’s cold and you can’t really do anything else when your hands are plunged in water but to “…stare in the basin / And wonder what you’ve missed.”

In Jane {a murder}, which I’ll write about more when I’ve finished, Maggie Nelson gives us perspective on a person she didn’t know, her aunt who was killed four years before she was born. This book is something between a prose and poetry, but it works really well to the extent that you (I) don’t really care what it is, because it flows well even though the story is told in fragments of diary entries, memories and other pieces. I picked it up off of my pile of questionable TBR books for no particular reason and once I read the opening I was hooked:

She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying.The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.


Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.


Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?

That, I think, would be an easy passage to overdo and screw up, but I think it’s great and it seems that it is telling in several ways of what is to come. Luckily the entire book doesn’t carry that same level of intensity because it would be difficult to read, but from what I have read so far, Nelson kind of creeps up on you with the inner-life of not only the woman who was murdered, but in regards to this incident, her family too. When she says “the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full” she is talking about a life.

Marginalia is where I write random thoughts on the day’s reading.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: July 07, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Song of Myself: Diary

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