time is the most precious thing.

Last year, when I was in conversation with the teacher/artist/creator/author Debbie Millman on her podcast, Design Matters, we talked briefly at the end of the show about an artist whose work means so much to me that words often fail: Maira Kalman, whose book, The Principles of Uncertainty, lives on my nightstand. Debbie asked me to elaborate.

Because of humanity…Because of her use of color and pathos and humanity. Pathos and humanity go hand in hand.

I was recently reading through my notebook (above) from the Tin House Summer Workshop , which I attended in 2015 and 2016. In the middle of one page, I found these words, boxed and underlined:

The exalting of the mundane. – Maira Kalman

Waste not a moment – Time is the most precious thing.

What is the most forbidden?

Grief. Truth. Life as illusion.

Time.

On the facing page I began my preliminary notes for Treyf, my second book, which starts with the narrator’s act of selling her parent’s wedding silver, subversively releasing herself from the grip of the past, her family’s acrimonious history, and the illusion of perfection. The story of the silver is heavy with deception: the narrator’s father steals it from her mother while in the earliest stages of divorce, but he also tells the narrator that he has stolen it, setting up a triangle in which the narrator, who is a teenager at the time, must lie about it to her mother to protect her beloved father. Complicity and deception, in the name of love. Child as pawn. Still: no one is all good or all bad; we are good and we are not. We are truth-tellers and protectors and we are deceivers. We are keepers of time, and the notebook in the writer’s hands is a record of that time: it freezes it in place, suspends it. 

The story of the silver in Treyf is not extraordinary; every family has its talismans and its secrets, and the pitting of child against one parent by the other. It is an exalting of the mundane, the pedestrian, a threading of past and present. In the writing of Treyf, a memoir about cultural assimilation in the roiling nineteen seventies, thirty-five years after the Holocaust in which the narrator’s great grandmother is murdered simply for being a dirt-poor Jewish beet farmer, the story of the silver was a way into unraveling a narrative wrapped around a core of trauma, history, truth, deception, and time.

Time is the most precious thing, says Maira Kalman.

What does time mean to us as writers and creators? What does it mean now, in the middle of a pandemic, as our definition of it and experience with it changes and morphs? I asked a friend, recently, what day it was: June 421st, he said.

We’re all suspended in time right now. There is no future that I can know for certain, not for her and not for us. We are just here, together, now, wrote Dr Rana Awdish about her COVID patient in ICU, in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. We exist in liminal space, liminal time, and on the threshold between before and after. The Bardo. Time is the most precious thing.

There is the duality of the sorrow of the moment and the joy of the moment, which I see very acutely all through the day, wrote Maira Kalman in a recent interview.

The notebook allows us to examine and parse this liminal time, this duality of sorrow and joy. It is a safe space for the forbidden: the truth-telling, the grief, the love, the illusion of safety. It becomes a record of shadows and pathos and humanity, scrawled in a way that only we, individually, can make sense of in a language only we can understand, even many years hence.