Tin House Volume 20, Number 1: Poison
One night after I’d turned off my reading light but not yet sunk into sleep, an uneasy feeling swept up my back. I was accustomed to the sweep of shadows along the walls as the train emptied its passengers and they marched by my windows and cars braked at the corner stoplight, but one shadow had stopped, its source blocking the stripe of light at the corner of my closest window.
‘Hey, baby’ a voice murmured from outside. ‘Are you sleeping?
—MELISSA FEBOS, Intrusions“
Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.” So said Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss physician credited with creating laudanum. In our toxic times, it seems as if there are very few remedies and that all is, indeed, poisonous. What, then, must writers do? Come up with remedies? Use the poison to cleanse, to heal, or simply to attack what is attacking us?
The year is rapidly running down and soon I will have over 350 reading suggestions that make me panic. Time is running out. Sitting here in my office I scan the double files of books on my built-in bookshelves and realize that I will never read them all. Time is running out. If I stop and think about it, I’m torn between reading as many of the classical novels as I can fit in or concentrating on the more entertaining books that would probably be more fun to read.
The last couple of months I have been trying out various methods of selecting my monthly reading pool with varying success. Along the way I have accumulated a few tempting titles, generally new or recent books, and this month I included several in what might be a fun and enriching group of reading or, perhaps the shiny object titles will leave me disappointed.
I don’t understand.