These four pieces by Sven Birkerts are a previously unpublished Almost Island exclusive.
READING ONESELF
A former student asked if I would read her book manuscript and I agreed. I wanted to honor the friendship, the faith, all that work we had done together. She had been my student years ago, so many years that I can barely remember the rhythms of our correspondence or what kinds of things I was then commenting on, but I remember the feeling of the work clearly enough, and now she's brought it all around, finished she hopes. We meet in a Starbucks in Cambridge. She greets me clutching a big black cardboard box in both hands, and my first reaction is a suppressed wince. Before I've really even looked at her I've taken in the thickness of the box, I'm already wondering if it's packed to the top. “Oh, it's not all the way up to the top,” she laughs. Have I given myself away? “No, no,” I say. Then, a chuckle, “Think of Moby Dick.” She sits down. We think of Moby Dick. I give her an inspecting look, tap my fingers on the lid of the box now between us on the table. We smile real smiles. All that work. “Hey,” she says, taking off the lid. “I want you to see this.” On top of the manuscript is an old college evaluation form--my final comments on our semester together. Typewritten. When M and I worked together I was still using a Selectric II. Seven or eight years, an era. She wants me to take out the page and read what I wrote. “This is what helped to keep me going,” she says. I nod, but in truth I never believe anything I say can have that kind of effect on a person. But how wonderful if true. As I start to read, slowly, aware of her watching me, I'm also aware that I'm preemptively flexed against something. The return of my own rhetoric? I don't know. I work to connect with the slightly strange-looking typed sentences. And suddenly there's this feeling, I've had it before--more and more in recent years. I am reading something I've written and I not only don't recognize the sentences--they've gone from me--but I don't quite map to the mind that produced them. It's very much like catching your reflection for a split second in a store window before you realize it's you. Though there, almost always, the shock is negative. I look like that? With these sentences it's the opposite. My eyes catch sight of what my hand did. I actually admire the image, the figure of speech, the confidence of the rhythm. Not the rhythm I would write in now. But I feel it as distinct. And with that comes the dim--because still mainly suppressed--question: was I better then? Was I sharper, more concise and edgy? I suppress, but not because I have an answer. I don't know, will never know. The fact is that we write as we are. You can doctor up a thought, change or improve an image, but you can't really impersonate a style. Visiting an earlier prose version of yourself is like facing an old photograph, the looking is mainly about taking in the differences. But then we also change how we judge, don't we? Contemplating the photograph, I retaliate against my younger, sharper face by finding it naïve, without character. Reading myself, I recognize an obviousness that I like to think I've been getting past. I'm think I'm better now, further along in hacking away the approximations, more confident of what a sentence can do. All that. It's the necessary logic of the inverse: that as we lose our best youth, we get closer and closer to real expressiveness. It's sad, though, that we usually attack our best subjects before we know what to do with them, and attacking them wears them out for our later purposes. What to do now with all this style?