No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021) (read in 2022)

“When she walked through the gates of Saint Stephen’s Green the new book, the communal stream-of-consciousness, began to flow toward the rigid bust of Joyce.”

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”

“Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”

“She had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember “Can a dog be twins?” instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.”

“She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had to be.”

“How she wished she had never read that article about octopus intelligence, because now every time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new potatoes she thought to herself, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.”

“A photo of a hot actor in a 2014 staging of The Elephant Man, in which he played the main role without prosthetics, just by twisting his torso and making a weird face. This was the test, she thought to herself, and waited to feel either hilarity or outrage. Neither came. He looks like he’s doing a pretty good job, she decided finally. I bet his mom is proud of him, which is what she thought about most people she encountered these days.”

“Someone had sat them on little stools in their display cases, so they would not get tired—of what?—of the long direct daylight of being Beanie Babies. Someone had cared for them. Perhaps everyone was a god with their eye on some small sparrow. Perhaps everyone was the collector of some soft rare commemorative, stitched with a visible heart and worth millions on millions in the mind.”

“Where had the old tyranny gone, the tyranny of husband over wife? She suspected most of it had been channeled into weird ideas about supplements, whether or not vinyl sounded “warmer,” and which coffeemakers were nothing but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ.

““A hundred years ago you would have been mining coal and had fourteen children all named Jane,” she often marveled, as she watched a man stab a finger at his wife in front of the Keurig display.

““Two hundred years ago, you might have been in a coffee shop in Göttingen, shaking the daily paper, hashing out the questions of the day—and I would be shaking out sheets from the windows, not knowing how to read.” But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?”

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”

“Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening, for instance, to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments that rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realizing that other people could see them?”

“[…] where she would distill the whole sunset cloud of human feeling to a six-word lyric.”

“Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”

“She had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember “Can a dog be twins?” instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.”

“Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”

“You found the candida overgrowth board, glowing its welcome along the highway of sleeplessness, and stepped through the swinging doors, which immediately shut fast behind you.”

“Your behavior was subtly modified against humiliations, chastisements, censures you might receive on the candida overgrowth board. You anticipated arguments against you and played them out in the shower while you were soaping your hair,”

“Someone was dead, she had never met him, yet she had zoomed in on the texture of his injuries a dozen times, as she might squint at the pink of a sunset she was too lazy to meet outside. And that is what it was like.”

“When she walked through the gates of Saint Stephen’s Green the new book, the communal stream-of-consciousness, began to flow toward the rigid bust of Joyce.”

“The unabomber had been right about everything! Well . . . not everything. The unabomber stuff he had gotten wrong. But that stuff about the Industrial Revolution had been right on the money.”

“A reporter had once asked the unabomber if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison.

““No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general.””

“Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??”

“We reveled in these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree to which they comforted us.”

“It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.”

“The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine. That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a car, and said, more.”

“She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had to be.”

““I don’t think you’re a pervert at all, Sam. If you were a member of my generation you would cum in a special jar over a period of months and then post pictures of the jar online. A foot fetish . . .” She took a deep breath. “A foot fetish is like a beautiful meadow in comparison. A foot fetish is Pachelbel’s Canon.””

“But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.”

“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.”

““Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?”

“All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.”

“How she wished she had never read that article about octopus intelligence, because now every time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new potatoes she thought to herself, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.”

“On the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that the dictator had finally gone too far. The next day, on the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that no he hadn’t, and in fact that it was no longer possible to go too far.”

“A photo of a hot actor in a 2014 staging of The Elephant Man, in which he played the main role without prosthetics, just by twisting his torso and making a weird face. This was the test, she thought to herself, and waited to feel either hilarity or outrage. Neither came. He looks like he’s doing a pretty good job, she decided finally. I bet his mom is proud of him, which is what she thought about most people she encountered these days.”

““A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.”

“Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?””

“Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.”

“The doors of bland suburban houses now looked possible, outlined, pulsing—for behind any one of them could be hidden a bright and private glory. The woman who had once been called the voice of God, who had been absent from the stage for two decades, went on singing in her own home, her partner heard her. He felt sorry for the rest of the world, he said. “I just had a lot of something—what was it?” the singer had once told an interviewer. “So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful sun!” The doors of suburban houses might be shut up on that sun.”

“Someone had sat them on little stools in their display cases, so they would not get tired—of what?—of the long direct daylight of being Beanie Babies. Someone had cared for them. Perhaps everyone was a god with their eye on some small sparrow. Perhaps everyone was the collector of some soft rare commemorative, stitched with a visible heart and worth millions on millions in the mind.”