The Sky Is on Fire, and I Must Go

Self-healing

The Sunday Letter #9

Spring has brought some exciting things: we’ve been house-hunting, and dreaming up a future home and the kind of life we might live there. We’ve popped into a few open houses, and conversely, over the weekend we stopped into an estate sale in an old neighbourhood. There’s something eerily intimate about walking into a home where time has stood still. Price tags covering the items that made up someone’s life. A mix of vintage glassware next to a smattering of ink drawings. A box of Joan Baez records on an antique chair, itself nestled into a walker. Two dogs rush to my feet and I wonder if they’ve lost their owner, if they’re grieving too.

We walk into the small kitchen of the character home, noticing how the light streams in, how the oven has been built into the wall of the house and a box protruding into the backyard had been built to accommodate it. A famous local writer walks past, himself taking in the view of a beautiful backyard, full of statues and a small walkway bridging over a frozen pond. I wonder about what will happen to this house, to the women at the entrance handling the sale, their stoic faces not quite making eye contact with those who enter.

I think a lot about what I’ll leave behind, who will touch my things when I’m gone, the imprints that will remain. I may not believe in an afterlife but I believe in respect for the dead, in respect for a life lived. I go home and listen to the lyrics to Farewell, Angelina, the Joan Baez record that had been placed at the top of the stack when I leafed through it. Originally written by Bob Dylan, the song goes:

Farewell, Angelina
The bells of the crown
Are being stolen by bandits
I must follow the sound
The triangle tingles
And the trumpets play slow
But farewell, Angelina
The sky is on fire
And I must go

There's no need for anger
There's no need for blame
There's nothing to prove
Everything's still the same

Just a table standing empty
By the edge of the sea
Means farewell, Angelina
The sky is trembling
And I must leave

I don’t know the name of the person who passed, but I imagine it was an older woman. I imagine her name was Angelina, and she liked vintage cookbooks and classical music. She liked Joan Baez and bronze statues. She like to sit in her garden, drinking coffee while she looked out at the frozen pond. I don’t know if a life can be measured by the things left behind, perhaps that would be too simplistic. But a person can be moved by even a momentary interaction with a stranger, and that, to me, is the essence of an after-life. Farewell, Angelina.

This week’s recommendations

From the BBC—A new architecture centre is set to open in Newcastle this week, and its opening exhibition “offers visions for making buildings more sustainable.” One of the exhibits, titled “the living room,” features a structure grown from mycelium, the root-like basis for fungus. By knitting a canopy of sawdust and paper waste, the architects were able to grow mycelium into “strong, light, self-repairing and fully compostable walls.” The director of the new centre, Owen Hopkins, noted that while mycelium isn’t yet ready to be used in real buildings, it could be soon:

I don’t think it will be too long before it becomes a material that is seen as viable in more conventional forms of construction…One of the things about it is, it’s essentially self-healing. If a crack develops or there needs to be more structural reinforcement, it can be grown in situ.

“It’s essentially self-healing,” was the headline that caught my eye. To be a home grown from waste, to be self-healing, to be able to grow in response to one’s needs—oh to be more like fungus.

A gorgeous feature from The New York Times Style Magazine: “40 legendary female artists — and the younger women who remind them why they make art.”

For most of civilization (and even now), the question was never what women could do — it was what we were allowed to do. Make art, live alone, have children, don’t have children: A woman’s choices are often circumscribed by the era in which she is born, and then again by how tolerant, encouraging or generous the men in her life — beginning with her father — are.

My brilliant friend Abby has started a newsletter called Vorare, and I can’t wait to read more: “I am voracious, insatiable, at times bloated from and retentive of the dishes on offer.”

Reading: “I just finished I Hate Men by Pauline Harmange and was quite disappointed at its very superficial white feminism. I'm currently reading Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou and The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante.”

Watching: “I have watched a lot of TV in my life and somehow I've missed a lot of major series so I'm on a bit of a retro watch with The Sopranos and Firefly. And of course I am addicted to the weekly dose of the final season of Succession.”

Listening: “I'm really into The Record by boygenuis and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek. I also created a spring feelings playlist that is dreadfully unorganised but I love it. On the podcast side, I'm loving If Books Could Kill (a hilarious podcast that breaks down the worst of pop culture nonfiction) and Sentimental Garbage.”

Life, etc: “Late breakfasts, apartment viewings, Yoga with Adriene's Center series on YouTube, long walks with friends and mango beer.”

P.S. You can find Sinnie on instagram @usingmylitdegree!

What are you enjoying this week? Let me know below ↓