Day 51.2: How Personal Essays Read to Me
Jul. 5th, 2024 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionMaybe this is a petty observation, but personal essays read very privileged to me.Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but they always seem to center western, usually white, usually U.S. women taking holidays to France, or going to a farm somewhere, or becoming librarians, or visiting their grandparent's countries, and finding themselves (usually sexually). While I'm very happy for these women, something within me curdles, and becomes jealous of them.
When I read these essays I think: Wow, it would be nice to have a holiday like that. Although these women are often not very rich comparatively, within their national contexts, they are incredibly, incredibly rich internationally. They have time, or understanding husbands, or are single or divorced in cultures where marriage is not the last station for women. They can afford holidays - broadly, they can afford to move, to uproot themselves and graft their lives onto other soils. They live lives in contexts where culture is possible (although marginal), raised in schools where they are taught classics of literature. Fiction is possible - if not as a livelihood, then as an avocation.
Other ways of living are conceivable, and transition into those lives does not carry with it the certainty of social (and actual) death.
I am not saying these women are not brave. They are incredibly brave: these essays are hopeful sallies into the dark. I am saying that most often these essays neglect the scaffolding, the world-systems that allow them to make their leaps. And maybe I'm just very jealous.
Sometimes I read essays where these people die. Killed by their husbands. Killed by their cars. Killed attempting to summit mountains. I sympathize and am afraid because even them, thoroughbreds, die to the same things people die from anywhere. But also they leave behind empires and careers and plays. They leave lives well-lived. They are well-beloved.
I did not grow up anywhere of note, certainly nowhere with those scaffolds. Soon I will have to marry, probably, and then I'll have left only fanfiction and blogs. I hope for a Munroesque reinvention at 40 or 50, but I understand the chances are slim. I will write on the margins of these people's lives.
But please understand that I also wish I had their money and time and learning, and places where
On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow
in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie
against our white shingles. Children shout in the
street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we
will never die.
is possible. I hope that in their joy, they will remember the striae of fossils of millions like me, underfoot.
When I read these essays I think: Wow, it would be nice to have a holiday like that. Although these women are often not very rich comparatively, within their national contexts, they are incredibly, incredibly rich internationally. They have time, or understanding husbands, or are single or divorced in cultures where marriage is not the last station for women. They can afford holidays - broadly, they can afford to move, to uproot themselves and graft their lives onto other soils. They live lives in contexts where culture is possible (although marginal), raised in schools where they are taught classics of literature. Fiction is possible - if not as a livelihood, then as an avocation.
Other ways of living are conceivable, and transition into those lives does not carry with it the certainty of social (and actual) death.
I am not saying these women are not brave. They are incredibly brave: these essays are hopeful sallies into the dark. I am saying that most often these essays neglect the scaffolding, the world-systems that allow them to make their leaps. And maybe I'm just very jealous.
Sometimes I read essays where these people die. Killed by their husbands. Killed by their cars. Killed attempting to summit mountains. I sympathize and am afraid because even them, thoroughbreds, die to the same things people die from anywhere. But also they leave behind empires and careers and plays. They leave lives well-lived. They are well-beloved.
I did not grow up anywhere of note, certainly nowhere with those scaffolds. Soon I will have to marry, probably, and then I'll have left only fanfiction and blogs. I hope for a Munroesque reinvention at 40 or 50, but I understand the chances are slim. I will write on the margins of these people's lives.
But please understand that I also wish I had their money and time and learning, and places where
On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow
in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie
against our white shingles. Children shout in the
street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we
will never die.
is possible. I hope that in their joy, they will remember the striae of fossils of millions like me, underfoot.
