Antony Beevor: Stalingrad

The army’s exact losses are still uncertain, but there was no doubt that the Stalingrad campaign represented the most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history.

Keith Gessen: A Terrible Country

Simon Critchley: Notes on Suicide

This book is not a suicide note.


For reasons that we don’t need to go into, my life has dissolved over the past year or so, like sugar in hot tea.


If life is a gift from God, then God must allow for the possibility of suicide as the rejection of that gift.


“Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”
- EM Cioran

Gregor Hens: Nicotine

…
The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something.


And as I say goodbye, I am once again surprised to have come across existences that I never thought possible and that to the best of my ability could never have imagined. And i reckon that Jay Perry, MS, is thinking practically the same thing.


That I have left behind this phase of my life, hopefully for good, I owe primarily to my reading of Moshe Feldnkrais’s The Elusive Obvious, which I quoted from for the epigraph of this book. The merit o Feldenkrais is his bringing to our attention that for every learned behaviour, even the voluntary ones, there are alternatives, and that we simply need to learn them to gain our freedom.

Patrick Langley: Arkady

My brother had begun to teach me about the world and our place within it, how we lived in the shadows, unwanted, unseen. We were kids who came from nothing, were nothing. The city would only make room for us if we forced it to, the way you force a door with a crowbar, or use plumber’s freeze to smash a lock:

These little acts were ways of opening space to breathe in a city that didn’t want us, wouldn’t protect us, narrowed choices to a flatline.


A fan stirs the room’s thick heat as the officers talk. Jackson wags his legs under the chair and watches his shoes as they swing. The officers speak about beaches. A pathway. Red flags. The story does not make sense. When they finish it, Jackson looks up. The door is open. It frames a stretch of shrivelled lawn and a column of cloudless sky. Colours throb in the heat.

‘Do you understand?’ the woman asks.

‘We are sorry,’ says the man.

Blue uniforms cling to their arms. Black caps are perched on their heads. Jackson peers into the caps’ plastic rims, which slide with vague shadows and smears of light. The officers mutter to each other and swap glances with hooded eyes. The breeze through the door is like dog-breath, a damp heat that smells faintly of rot.

‘Where’s my dad?’ asks Jackson.

The man’s thumb is hooked through his belt. He stands like a cowboy, hips cocked.

‘We don’t know,’ he sighs. ‘Our colleague saw him a moment after. We’re sure he’ll come back soon. You have a small brother? We take you to the place, and you tell him. Tell him your father is coming back. We’ll find him. I promise. Right now.’

They are staying on the side of a mountain, a short but twisting drive away from the nearest coastal town. The hotel is enormous. From a distance it resembles a castle, its high walls strong and stern, its red roofs bright against the mountain’s grey. The valley below is dotted with scrubby bushes and half-finished breezeblock homes. At its centre, a dried-up riverbed runs through copses of stunted trees: a jagged path connecting the hotel to the town.

Frank is in the crèche with the other toddlers.

Cristina Rivera Garza: The Taiga Syndrome

Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.


The man was right: The woman seemed determined to be found. Like Hansel or Gretel, or both, she had sprinkled crumbs of words in every telegraph and post office they passed through. As they progressed, the cities shrank and the transportation became more rudimentary. Airplanes. Trains. Ferries. Barges. Rowboats. Kayaks. She gave the impression of being unable to stop. As if she were falling; it was the same with the messages, as if they were falling. In truth, what she seemed to want was for someone to catch her, to wrestle her down, like in rugby.


This form of writing wasn't about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.


Something tilted. So, she had somehow managed to create the forest and the paths of the forest that she'd imagined in the pages of her journal? She didn't seem like a strong-willed woman, but possibly she was. She didn't have the bold or brash attitude of those who manage to transform desires into reality, but if it's true that journals are full of desires, then this woman before me, leaning on the hard thighs of the man with whom she had fled, right after she had stopped breathlessly, without knowing what to do, on a dance floor, had turned those desires into a reality. Her desires. I was facing someone--I told myself several times, just to remember what was so obvious that it could become transparent and pass unperceived--who had managed to transform the world, at least what was around her, into the world of her desires. A trembling image, something that gleams. What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest?