Claire Messud - Kants Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write

The Burning Girl

The Woman Upstairs

The Emperors Children

The Hunters

The Last Life

When the World Was Steady

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN ESSAYS

CLAIRE MESSUD

FRONTISPIECE: My father, Franois-Michel Messud, looking out to sea from the balcony of the family apartment. Algiers, November 1942.

The names and identifying characteristics of certain characters in this book have been changed.

Copyright 2020 by Claire Messud

All rights reserved

First Edition

Excerpt from October from Poems 19622012 by Louise Glck. Copyright 2012 by Louise Glck. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Messud, Claire, 1966 author.

Title: Kant's little Prussian head and other reasons why I write : an autobiography in essays / Claire Messud.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018802 | ISBN 9781324006756 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781324006763 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Messud, Claire, 1966 | Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. | Novelists, American21st centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC PS3563.E8134 Z46 2020 | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018802

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For FMM, MRM & DM, whove gone before;
for ECM; and, as ever, for JW

you are not alone ,

the poem said

in the dark tunnel.

LOUISE GLCK, OCTOBER

A s this collection goes to press, we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of intense suffering and loss for many, and for all a radical disruption of life as we have known it. In a few months time, our situation will have evolved further; we cant yet know what our world will look like, nor in what ways it may have been irrevocably altered. What is certain is that the breathless hurtling of the past decade has been halted, at least temporarily, and that, as individuals and as a society, we are forced to reassess our priorities, our commitments, and our actions. Shocking disparities are laid bare that exacerbate the suffering of the most vulnerable. In the midst of trauma, there arises the possibilityby no means a likelihood, but wonderfully, the possibilityof positive change. We have the chance to rebalance not only our social but also our personal lives in hopeful ways, to work toward a more optimistic future.

What do I mean? The protagonist of Valeria Luisellis recent novel Lost Children Archive observes that something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed.... We feel time differently.... Perhaps its just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. On first reading this passage, early in 2019, I felt a bleak thrill of recognition; and then the question: Have we truly lost our future?

This overwhelmingness of which Luiselli writes has been a widespread experience of the last five or ten technologically dominated years. It is a terrible fate for human beings, distinguished from other animals precisely by our ability to conceive of the passage of time (as well as by a capacity for laughter, lets not forget): to lose our sense of a plausible future is to lose our humanity itself. It is to lose that thing with feathers called Hope, of course, released from Pandoras Box, and to be left instead only with the travails and misery that crowded around her. It is to lose our sense of purpose; to be enveloped in futility; to countenance defeat. In planetary terms, we live now, according to scientists, in the epoch of the Anthropocene, when mans folly has ensured the decline, if not the demise, of our beautiful Earth, and certainly of our way of life upon it. And yet: the COVID crisis has shown how dramatically pollution can be reduced overnight, by a change in human behavior.

In recent years, the dignity of small lives and small gestures has risked being lost: if not intended for an audience of thousands, or millions, communication has been routinely reduced to the abortive nubs of texts and emojis; and if it is for an audience of thousands or millions, communication tends to be visual or aural rather than verbal, because what millions can be bothered with profundity, sophistication, or subtlety? Who has the time to spare to read something that might require a little extra effort? And yet: the COVID crisis has revealed us to be capable of old-fashioned connection, and accounts abound of generous communication between neighbors and friends. Individuals and groups have found ingenious ways to stay connected in spite of social distancing; we have so swiftly remembered what it means to look out for one another.

We have lived in a nationno, an era; because not only this nation but much of the world has suffered from these illscrippled by our devotion to capitalism (I teach at an excellent university, from which 40 percent of the graduates go into finance: the shocking waste of fine minds on the pursuit of Mammon), beleaguered by hopelessness (what is the opioid epidemic if not the symptom of a people duped by false dreams, and wholly without faith in their personal futures?), and by rigorous utilitarianism (formed by a late capitalist mind-set, we ask always, Whats in it for me? and eschew the ostensibly purposeless that is, in fact, our source of wisdom and of joy). We have inhabited a time and place in which falsehood and truth are fatally commingled (how many lies does our president utter in a day?); in which our ideals appear shattered and abandoned (leaders like priests and coaches are unmasked as predators, while our politicians prove corrupt and self-interested); and in which any sense of self is daily assaulted and abused by advertisers (whether corporate or individual, because what is an Instagram influencer if not a self-advertiser?).... In short, recent years have been, through a certain broad lens, a dark maelstrom, a hellscape from Hieronymus Bosch, in which, under the guise of the pursuit of pleasure, individuals are tortured, dehumanized, discarded, destroyed.

This ominous hurtling, the relentless ouroboros that is social media, the destruction of ourselves and our environswe had come to see it as inevitable, and ourselves as the passive and ineluctable victims of forces beyond our control. Humanity has risked collective despair, than which there is no more certain doom for our planet and ourselves. But even in the past two months, although at the mercy of a ravaging virus, we have discovered that in other ways we arent disempowered. Crisis and extremity are by no means to be desired; and their consequenceshuman and economic bothwill be challenging for the foreseeable future. But these extraordinary times have also forced us to slow down, to think collectively, to seek hope, to value the truth, and to celebrate resilience and faith in our fellow human beings.