I started composing this essay in my head during the first (and last) church service I attended in 2022, on New Year’s Eve. I only go to church in Kenya, when spending holidays with my family. During my childhood we went to mass every Sunday, initially the 9 a.m. mass for the first few years, then the 7 a.m. mass to dodge traffic on the way back home as our hometown—and our local Catholic church—swelled with people in the mid-mornings. Whenever my mother asks me if I found a church in Canada, I nod and laugh. She doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. The closest I came to finding a Canadian church was a brief pause in front of an Anglican church, on my way to a dentist appointment, as I struggled to remember whether a gay priest I followed on Twitter ministered there.
(My mother wouldn’t approve of that church.
I didn’t approve of the idea of church.
I don’t begrudge anyone their faith—I just surrendered mine.)
During the New Year’s Eve mass, I struggled to follow the rituals involved in a Catholic mass. The priest conducted the mass in Kiswahili, which added a layer of unfamiliarity since I had largely attended masses held in English. Even though I knew the words and phrases people were saying, taken together they seemed to constitute an unfathomable absurdity. How could I possibly participate in such a thing? I spent the whole mass off-kilter: getting up a beat after everyone else, losing the crisp 200 shilling note for the offering, walking away when I was supposed to stay and receive a blessing from the priest.
Still, my fumblings surprised me. Even after I stopped believing in God, generally, and Catholicism, specifically, years of worship were embedded in my being. My body knew the rhythms of the liturgy—my knees knew when to bend and when to stand, my lips knew the songs, my hands knew when to make the sign of the cross or stretch to receive the Eucharist—so my mind could wander while my body worshipped. I had never considered that I could forget how to pretend to be Catholic.
Between the ages of eleven and thirteen my faith leaked out of me with the gradual drip, drip, drip, of a perennially leaky faucet. I can’t index a specific time and say, I lost my faith on this day, this hour, this second. The boundary between before—nurturing faith, needing God—and after, the complete negation of faith and hope, is fuzzy. In the before, I attended a Catholic primary school for a year that harmed me in ways I only seriously began to unravel in 2022. (“Harm” is purposefully, perhaps deceptively, vague; I haven’t found a better term that reconciles my intense negative feelings with the (presumed) good intentions of the people who “harmed” me.) God was my protector, someone I could appeal to as things worsened and I splintered. But my God was also the nuns’ God, and the nuns’ God was my enemy, a weapon of control forged against sinful children—and all children were sinful. (Perhaps I’m exaggerating. Former pupils of this school, of numerous Catholic schools across Kenya, seem fine.
Perhaps I also seem fine to others.) In the after, mass facilitated a different kind of religious experience. I felt intensely creative during the New Year’s Eve mass. This piece sprung out of me, unbidden, and it took all my effort to resist taking out my phone to start writing. So instead I sketched the essay in my mind in a state of near-rapture. Words and sentences and ideas jostled against and flowed into one another—in church, every musing was permissible, every doubt negligible. Perhaps this is the only way I can experience God: as a filter, a vanquisher of distractions and self-doubt.
First I realized there was no place for the Catholic Church within me. As I stumbled through mass on New Year’s Eve, I began to suspect there was no place for me within the Catholic Church.
(This isn’t an essay about my ambivalence towards Catholicism.)
I call 42 an essay because “essay” means “to attempt, try.” I’m attempting, following the whims of my mind, mining religious rapture, hoping something emerges from randomness. (I’m not excusing incoherence, only explaining it. Life is incoherent.)
In 2022 I essayed like never before. I spent the winter semester writing “My Imaginary Friends; or, the Metonymy of Desire” for a class on lyric essays. (I learned about metonymy—and Lacan—recently. I intend to abuse the delectable term—and the delectable psychoanalyst—prodigiously in my work going forward.) In the fall semester, I wrote “Freedom Cry; or, Dreaming in Three Vernaculars” for a class on editing. The content of these lyric essays doesn’t matter as much as finding out, as I wrote, that I might someday finely calibrate an essay, gingerly take myself apart on the page, withhold just enough to make room for collaborative meaning-making…
But it’s my birthday, so instead I’m indulging my writerly id to include: unruly, breathless sentences; overreliance on passive voice and “to be” (and “not to be”); fervent under-explaining that nurtures context collapse; every idle thought exalted within endless parentheses, interrupting and buttressing and undermining the rest of the text; (Curiously, my current age is a multiple of 42.); vibes-based punctuation; and rambles towards nowhere that are somehow too long and too short.
For once I deny myself nothing.
This essay is coarsely calibrated and yet its structure strikes me as inherently logical. (Yet I acknowledge the co-existence of overlapping, competing logics.) Maybe I’ve essayed enough that my good habits mitigate my indulgence. It’s not (im)possible.
Maybe somewhere in 42 lies beauty.
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy provides a cheekily compelling origin of the Earth. I’ve only read the novels, although Adams’ franchise exists in various versions across multiple mediums—the adaptations often contradict each other—as a comedy radio play, several stage shows, a TV series, comic books, a movie, and a text-based adventure game. The second novel in Adams’ five-part trilogy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, summarizes why the Earth was:
For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet - especially by the strange ape-like beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.
(This isn’t an essay about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although perhaps it should be.)
I logged 42 books as read on The Storygraph in 2022. 2020 marked the beginning of a pandemic slump in my reading:
2020: 28 books and 9,680 pages.
2021: 38 books and 13,003 pages.
2019: 174 books and 54,762 pages.
2018: I only have the numbers from July to December, 40 books and 13,099 pages.
Pre-2018: the librarian at my high school hadn’t told me about Goodreads yet, so I wasn’t craving reading metrics. (I switched from Goodreads to The Storygraph in late 2021 because the latter provides more data, and also fuck Amazon.)
Including books I logged as read without indicating a year, and re-reads, The Storygraph shows an all-time total of 770 books with 228,630 pages. (I suspect the actual number of lifetime reads is closer to 1,000—but I’ve already forgotten so much of my early reading that it’s hard to properly estimate.) Perhaps the gulf arose from the way I read.
Pre-2020, I was overreading, in that I “read too much, or obsessively.” To be clear I don’t think it’s possible to truly read “too much”—how would I even quantify “too much” reading?—but there was something obsessive, a hint of sickly dependence, in the way I ploughed through hundreds of books a year. I read while eating, while walking, before sleeping, while I was supposed to sleeping, while I was supposed to be waking up. Starting 2020, I am overreading, in that I “read too in-depth, overinterpret, overanalyze.” Every word placement, every quirk in form, seems ripe with meaning. I also read more to write. While before I subconsciously absorbed and replicated other people’s writing, I’m currently working towards intentionality while reverse-engineering the work of others, diligently tracing the literary genealogies made manifest in my writing.
I’m not necessarily a better reader now, just a different one. (I never disavow my past selves, or lionize my present self: thusly I avoid hubris.) I love the greater depth I can now achieve with overreading, the ability to engage with books on different registers, but I miss the breadth of my previous overreading—the flush of pride from knowing that I could try and “read everything.”
I also joined university in 2020, hence the contraction in my free time, but I like the overreading explanation better.
(This isn’t an essay about overreading.)
The dominant moods that describe my 2022 reading—based on The Storygraph’s aggregated user ratings of a book’s vibe—are “reflective” (32 books), “emotional” (21 books) and “challenging” (15 books). The Storygraph provides no definitive meanings of these moods.
Reflective
Chuma Nwokolo’s darkly comedic novel Diaries of A Dead African is “reflective.” Technically calling the novel “reflective” is correct at the level of both form (the diary) and content (characters reflect and litigate their choices). Yet I don’t agree that the “mood” of the novel is “reflective” as in “thoughtful, deliberative”: although Nwokolo displays impressive craft and intentionality, teasing out reverberations across the three diaries, particularly in the first half the novel moves in frenetic bursts of energy—the “mood” of the novel is not quite “deliberative” in these moments, whatever such words can be said to mean.
Another “reflective” book I read in 2022 is Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. I bought and read Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions trilogy as part of a reading period I called “The Summer of African Literature.” In May I began to despair of ever reading everything I want to read—and I want to read everything, to inscribe and reproduce and cannibalize every piece of art in existence—so I arranged my year into flexible reading periods correlating to the the school year: the fall, the winter, and the summer. That way I could hack away at a body of (loosely) interrelated literature and gain some depth in my reading. Designating a reading period, for instance “The Summer of African Literature,” didn’t restrict my choices to the period’s theme: a theme is simply the narrow answer to the question, desperately posed, “What can I possibly read now?”
I started reading the last book in the Nervous Conditions trilogy, This Mournable Body, in July. I finished it on New Year’s Eve. I’d read and loved the book before in 2020, when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so I savoured it the second time around, reading a few pages at a time.
Emotional
My reading period for Fall 2022 was slightly tumultuous. Initially I planned to read about ‘‘The History and Philosophy of Science’’ based on a short list of core texts a former TA familiar with the field had kindly put together for me. The first book on the list was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. My method of overreading—intense focus on details, using the micro to illuminate the macro, layers of interpretation—wasn’t effective for deeply understanding and rebutting a dense nonfiction text. I have to learn a different way to read such texts; but I couldn’t be bothered, so I put the theme aside for Summer 2023, when hopefully I can be bothered.
I spent the rest of the fall reading books for classes. I also pulled from my TBR list using a random number generator, until 6th October 2022. On 6th October 2022, Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.’’ Unfamiliar with her work, I bought the slim volume Happening, a memoir, as a random entry point. At 96 pages, Happening’s mood is ‘‘emotional’’—an understatement of the explosive power and clarity of the narrative. No one writes like Ernaux. No one could write like Ernaux until Ernaux wrote her style, her essence, into existence. She writes in Happening: ‘‘Above all I shall endeavour to revisit every image until I feel that I have physically bonded with it, until a few words spring forth, of which I can say, ‘yes, that’s it.’’’
I’m currently reading her in translation—in December I zipped through her memoirs A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, Shame, and Simple Passions, (all translated by Tanya Leslie) and her novel Do What They Say or Else (transll. Christopher Beach and Carrie Noland)—and I can only imagine the incandescence of her work in its original French.
Challenging
Another book I read in translation from French, during ‘‘The Summer of African Literature,’’ was David Diop’s electrifying At Night All Blood is Black (transl. Anna Moschovakis). At Night All Blood is Black is ‘‘challenging’’ and would be the best book I read all year, if I wasn’t chronically indecisive and ideologically opposed to ranking books: I don’t think it’s useful—or even honest—for me to declare ‘‘this the best book…’’ as if it is possible to meaningfully substantiate such a claim. Nonetheless, At Night All Blood is Black lingers in the recesses of my mind. The novel cuts.
My TBR list is currently 3,620 books long. If I tap into my previous overreading—holding at the 2019 high of 174 books per year—I will only need 20.8 years to finish all those books. If my current pace holds—if I linger at 42 books per year—I only need 86.2 years to clear the TBR list.
I wonder what the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is.
Cheers, 2022.
I LOVE THIS!! Delving into the fathoms of your brain is always awe-inspiring, the bottom never in sight. Your reflections are so keenly felt (and with gorgeous prose); I think you have your finger on the pulse of life's confusion. Happy birthday!!!
You blew me away with this post, as I'll be saying shortly on https://innerlifecollaborative.substack.com. ~Mary P.S. Check you email for the invite from our settings.