It’s funny. My vague memory of that Helen Garner essay you mentioned from True Stories — ‘Three Acres, More Or Less’ — seemed so different from yours. Or, at least, my memory seemed so different from my model of what your memory of it was, based on what you wrote in your last letter. It bothered me, so I did what one always ought to do: I called a taxi, got in, said, “The library, and step on it”. Soon enough, I was there, and I was reading the whole sweep of it again, correcting myself — bringing myself back into focus. A dozen other memories and meta-memories came, too. Every time I’d chased down a half- remembered passage in a university library. Every time I’d dodged a sense of overwhelm by retreating into the stacks. I felt like a dog digging a hole to deposit one fresh bone, only to discover a whole buffalo’s worth of others. (Aside: did you know that corvids appear to account for food spoilage when storing and recovering food? It’s interesting and complicated behaviour; I’m not quite so clever.)

In my memory, ‘Three Acres, More Or Less’ was an essay that circled around fragments of interactions with two men — Garner’s old father, and Garner’s old friend. In my memory, both men were “contemptuous as a farmer”: compulsively belittling and condescending in their interactions with her, and yet somehow under the impression that this was a mode of interaction to which Garner had meaningfully consented. Over a decade and a half, in the caricaturish reaches of my memory, I’d reduced the whole sweep of the essay of one sentence:

This is the nature of our friendship, I now recall: as if by agreement, I inflate, he produces the pin.

When I reread the essay, though, I was struck by the care with which Garner attends, in her descriptions, to the materiality of her solitary block: the stranded boat, tilted in the grass, that “belongs in a dream of some Greek island where all the buildings are brilliant white”; the “ornamental lake” at the terminus of the creek, at the base of the block, which she takes to calling “the bottom dam”, and which “shines like a drop of black ink” as the sun sets. The tasks; her inability to sit still. The portrait she seems to see of herself, even alone:

The box of the fuel stove is small but fire grows in it quickly and I heat the remains of the soup and eat it standing up, straight from the saucepan, as people eat who have not yet arranged the habits of their solitude to suit an abstract ideal.

She cooks lamb shanks on a fuel stove to make a stock for a soup she plans to eat. I remember only the product of that reduction. And, even then, perhaps only a thin version of it. It seems, now, as if the better part of the essay is concerned with the process. Somehow, it seems as if I’d stripped away all the sensations.

While I don’t think that you’re “just playing” at agency any more than I am, I do want to ask you about the Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem. In your last letter, you wrote that

There is something in the construction of modern human life that leads to strength of feeling - pleasure or pain - being preferential to its absence. That way the world keeps on turning, and one can continue to assert the boundaries of the self roughly where we expect them to be.

Don’t you think that there’s a paradox lurking, here?