A Mind Distilled, A We
If I were to teach Carolyn Forché
[NOTE: I first met the remarkable Carolyn Forché in Prague. I tell that story here, in Literary Hub. I had the opportunity to help Carolyn launch her first memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, at the Free Library of Philadelphia. That conversation is here.]
If I were to teach the Carolyn Forché essay “The World Without Us: A Meditation” (Creative Nonfiction, Issue 38), I would ask, at the start, for a moment of silence. The subtitle demands it.
Now read the piece again, I’d say. Now map it. Follow its terrain.
The beginning is narrative: The author has “unthinkingly” gone to a clinic for additional ultrasounds of her right breast and has emerged with the news of “two black marbles floating in the snow and fog.”
The ensuing paragraphs are the mind at work, transitioned into by a single-sentence paragraph: “As I cannot write anything else, I will write about how I feel, hour by hour.”
“Israel is bombing Lebanon again…”
“America is unbearably, stiflingly hot at this moment…”
“Unpacking our library…I notice certain titles…”
Now a return to the immediate hour of the immediate self: “Nothing has changed since yesterday, except the fear that I am running out of time.”