Books to Help You Open Up
Whether it’s June 21st or not even in 2021 at all (my feeling on this timeline fluctuates daily), it’s important to remember that at some point in the future, even though the pandemic will change how we live forever, we will see each other again. If you’re feeling maybe less than celebratory about this, and feeling weird about that, I’m with you. I can’t wait to be back at work, and I can’t wait to be able to socialise normally with my friends, and, crucially, to meet new people, but for me the excitement is always tinged with anxiety over the things I don’t want to go “back to normal”.
As someone who works in a customer facing retail job, a lot of my concerns around lifting lockdown are naturally about consumerism and customer behaviour. I hope, as I hoped after the first lockdown last year, that we can learn to be more patient with people in jobs like mine. I hope also that we can shift our reliance on online shopping too: this spending, so often driven by emotional dissatisfaction, adding things to our baskets without even really thinking, ends up hurting us and the people around us in myriad ways. It will only benefit both ourselves, our communities, and the planet if we can come out of the pandemic with a more mindful approach to spending and consuming.
I’m anxious that these things won’t change though, that people will be more demanding than ever, having kept it all bottled up for so long. There are many, many ways to be anxious when thinking about restrictions lifting — we hate them, but we’ve lived with them long enough now to also want to cling to some of the security offered by them. There’s nothing wrong, and in fact I would say it seems quite normal, to be worried on some level about what will happen when we exit lockdown, and to be worried about things other than coronavirus case numbers. The pandemic and the measures we have used to counter it will affect us for a long time, but many things will not change, or will tend towards how they were before, for better or for worse. So in the spirit of trying to be hopeful but having it tinged with anxiety, here are a couple books that might help you feel calmer about the next few months. They’re not entirely optimistic, as that wouldn’t be reflective of the general mood. Instead, I wanted to choose two things — a novel and a piece of non-fiction — that might give a more grounded perspective on where you are in your life and what the future might look like, if your outlook is a little like mine right now.
The Heavens by Sandra Newman
The Heavens starts in New York in 2000: it’s not perfect but in many ways it’s a liberal utopia, with a leftist female president fighting for green issues and universal basic income, no wars, a sense of camaraderie and hope pervading everything. Kate and Ben fall in love at a party, and Ben is swiftly sucked into Kate’s life, surrounded by politicians and artists. But Kate has another life, the one she lives in her dreams: when she goes to sleep, she wakes up in England in 1593. Gradually, Kate begins to sense that things she does in her dreams affect the waking world — ever so slightly, the world is different after each dream, tending horrifyingly towards a worse, and for the reader much more recognisable, world. Kate and Ben’s relationship falters as Ben struggles to keep up with what he believes to be Kate’s delusions, her depression, and her unwillingness to participate in the world she sees as false.
When I read The Heavens, it was October 2019 and I was on a plane to Barcelona. I cried for most of the journey. Sandra Newman, if you read this, I have to ask: did you somehow write this book specifically for me? It is everything I want — magical realism, deft, brilliant world-building, Shakespeare, philosophical questions — written so beautifully, but more than that too. I don’t have recurring dreams as such, but I do regularly have incredibly stressful dreams in which I know some crucial information that will change the situation around me, and no one will listen to me or believe me. Because I’m very pretentious, I call them my Cassandra dreams, and waking up from them can fill me with a kind of background hum of despair and a sense of everything being slightly off for the entire day. I obviously didn’t realise on that plane journey how resonant this book would feel in 2020: something about the way The Heavens captures the paralysing depression of watching, powerless, as your world slowly seems to go wrong felt more haunting than ever this year.
The Heavens is a deeply empathetic story, and Newman tells it with grace and gentleness, like a welcome hand on your arm to guide you through an unfamiliar party, a soft whisper in your ear to introduce you, non-judgementally, to each new person you meet. Nothing is overdone or over-explained — it all just is, and what you bring to the story will inevitably colour your reading of whether Kate is delusional or if her experiences are real. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what’s real: the power of this book comes from the fact that it’s a novel about coming to terms with the world you are in, and trying to make the best of it. In seeing the potential for what could have been when everyone else is blind to it, Kate has the momentum to push forwards, in small ways, at making the world a better place. You can pine for different paths we could have taken, but you can also take a breath and start doing the work needed to make the path we’re on now lean in the right direction.
Missing Out by Adam Phillips
In Missing Out, his 17th book, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips introduces the concept that “our unlived lives — the lives we live in fantasy, the wished-for lives — are often more important to us than our so-called lived lives”, but the book doesn’t explore this idea in the way you’d expect. Instead of delving into what these unlived lives say about us, Phillips focusses on the actual mechanisms of what we feel when we experience “missing out” or “not getting it”. It’s not necessarily the content of the unlived life that shapes us, it’s the fact that it’s unlived.
Never has the sense of the unlived life been more literally defined than during lockdown: not only are we acutely aware of the things we would be doing in a parallel universe without a global pandemic, but we are also increasingly having to face up to the fact that what we imagined we would be if we had “more time” is not realistic. It’s impossible to read Missing Out without applying it to your personal experiences, certainly in 2021: so much of what Phillips says resonates with every beat of modern life, and especially life during lockdown, to the extent that I felt I had surely missed the point of the book if it was all hitting home so neatly, particularly the chapter ‘On Frustration’. Phillips writes with such beauty and craft that each sentence feels like a magic trick, complete with prestige-like turn and conclusion as he draws you into his line of thinking, as masterful as laying out the solution to some complex logic puzzle, as confounding as the puzzle itself.
I feel like Phillips is maybe the perfect voice to speak to the divides we feel now, even if Missing Out was published nearly 10 years ago. Everything for Phillips is about communities, about how to successfully live and thrive in communities, and how groups can live together. In a brilliant interview with BOMB Magazine, Phillips states in connection to a question about alternative education systems:
I would want a world in which there is less art and better relationships, if those two things are even connected. I’d want it to be clear that the only game in town is improving the quality of people’s relationships. Everything is about group life, and there’s no life without group life, it’s as simple and as complicated as that.
Everything is about group life, and that’s why Missing Out is not about our individual fantasies and what they signify. It’s not about reading dreams. It’s about how the sensation of loss of those dreams affects our relationships, both with other individuals and with groups as a whole. Phillips also takes care to stress that the frustrations of “missing out” can be experienced not just by individuals but on a societal level too.
In terms of helping us towards an emotional readiness for opening up to the world again, it’s important to remember that the longer we are isolated from our fellow humans — that is to say, the longer we are frustrated in our desire for “normality”, whatever that means to each of us personally — the more we retreat into the methods of dealing with frustration that we learned in childhood. As Phillips puts it: “We never, in other words, recover from our first false solution to feeling frustrated — the inventing of an ideal object of desire with whom we will never feel the frustration we fear. The ideal person in our minds becomes a refuge from realer exchanges with realer people.” Phillips’ point is that “people become real to us by frustrating us”: we understand that others are real, independent, autonomous beings when they don’t satisfy our every whim, as our imagined ideal companions would. There’s frustration in this exchange, but pleasure in the frustration, as we understand the significance that when one of these real people satisfies our desires, it’s because they are choosing to do so. I think there’s a real danger of forgetting about the gulf between idealised figures and real people when we return to the world of social interactions; we have experienced so much deeply unpleasant frustration over the past year that we might have forgotten entirely that there is, somewhere, most days, some pleasure in it.
“The fact that there are frustrations seems to imply, of course, that there are satisfactions, real or otherwise. The fact of frustration has, that is to say, something reassuring about it. It suggests a future.”
