Tee Minot, the owner of Christopher’s Books in San Francisco, wrote me a letter not long ago about the joys of owning a bookstore. In the end, she said that if she could recommend one book to me, it would be “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams. I checked the shelves of my own bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville, doubting we’d have a copy of a paperback from 2019, but there it was.
“This Is Happiness” chronicles the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after. “I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away,” the young narrator says of when the man came to sell them fine appliances that could be purchased in advance of electricity’s arrival, “and some blew away right then ….”
I signed up for email in 1995. I remember the efficiency apartment I was living in at the time and the terrible desk from Office Depot I’d put together myself. The server was AOL, and when I wanted to check my account, I unplugged the jack from the back of my landline and plugged it into the modem, waiting for the dial up. For most of my friends, email came after cellphones, but I didn’t have a cellphone.
Cellphones were the worst idea in the world as far as I was concerned. My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up, and when it beeped she had to find a pay phone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was, a bad habit that intensified after cellphones came around.
Cellphones were a means of making a person trackable. I wasn’t falling for that. The few flip phones I’ve had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers. For a while I had a phone the size of a credit card that served as the GPS for my car, but whoever broke into my car took the phone, so that was that. I wish the person luck trying to figure it out.
Email was a different story. Email was mail, and I loved the mail. In my youth, I ran to the box to see if there might be an envelope whose contents would change the course of my life — an acceptance letter, a love letter, a check. What was email but the chance for more friends, more love, more work? I signed up as enthusiastically as the women of Faha signed up for electric stoves, with no idea that my life was about to crack into the hemispheres of before and after.
It’s impossible to talk about the past without sounding like my grandmother Eva Mae Wilkinson, b. 1909, d. 2005. She told me she wasn’t allowed to serve a slice of Cheddar with apple pie when she was a waitress in Kansas because her boss told her it was against the law to serve a slice of Cheddar on apple pie. “When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing,” says Noe, Niall Williams’s narrator. “May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.”
Let me tell you the story of my own now-unimaginable past: I wrote my first novel at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., in the winter that finished off 1990 and began 1991. There was no internet, and none of us had cellphones or televisions. There were so many hours in every day and so few ways to spend them that after trying to figure out how to write a novel all day, I’d drive to Race Point beach to look at the stars.
“As though an infinite store had been discovered, more and more stars kept appearing,” Noe says about the nights in Faha. “The sky grew immense. Although you couldn’t see it, you could smell the sea.”
That’s the way it was in Provincetown, the way it was in Ireland, and I’m sure that’s the way it is now, except that if I were now in Provincetown or Ireland on a clear night, I’d probably be at my computer checking my email. I love email, and I hate email.
Let’s start with the love because the love is in the friendship, be it the three emails a year I exchange with my friend Liz, or the three emails a day I exchange with my friend Kate. The connection it provides here in Tennessee, where I live, far away from many of the people I feel closest to, stands in place of conversation: Good morning. Have you read? Did you know? What news of your mother, your travels, your childhood friend? Send pictures. I have a novel in my head. How’s your novel going? As the dialogue sails back and forth through the day, we create a ghost proximity.
But then my dog wants to go outside and I see my real neighbors with their real dogs, living beings, snuffling and wagging while we talk about the house down the street that’s being gutted and the owl we all heard the night before at dusk. I love my neighbors, and sometimes I wonder what friendship I’ve missed with them by communicating so extravagantly with so many people who are far away. I can have both, of course, I do have both, but the balance is skewed toward the people I tap out my feelings for rather than the ones in front of me.
Email is also great for work. I love what shows up unexpectedly, the requests to write things I would never have thought to write. Take this email for example: “We’re inviting a dozen writers to reflect on how a single regret has influenced their life.” I walked around for days puzzling over that one, Regret? Regret? What do I actually regret? Not sticking with French? Not playing the piano? Does childhood sloth really constitute regret? And then just as I was ready to decline the offer, it came to me: I regret email. If it wasn’t for email, I might never have put that together.
Because I do regret email. Even though I’ve turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.
Aside from being a black hole where time goes, email is all about reading and writing, and reading and writing are the two things I do for a living. It’s impossible not to translate the time I’ve spent in the past nearly 30 years reading emails and writing them (and in some cases actually composing them, giving great thought to what it is I mean to say) into books that could have been written and read, all those words spilled over the keyboard that amounted to nothing.
Could I manage without it? People with smartphones look at me as if I’m the last of the carrier pigeons. “Faha knew it was not only behind the times,” Noe says of his tiny village before electricity, “but much further back than that, it was outside the times altogether, And what of it?”
I live so much of my life outside of these times. Cellphone aside, I have no accounts on social media (though my bookstore does). I don’t watch television (though my husband is watching a football game now). I own an independent bookstore, for heaven’s sake. I read in bed with a flashlight.
There are things I’ve done to ease my problem. I have two email accounts, one for any transaction that involves money and one for everything else. The account I use to order tennis shoes and make charitable contributions is a festival of spam I empty out like my refrigerator, on a quarterly basis. The other one I attend to with an overblown sense of obligation. The solution would be to close both accounts, but I’m not sure I could find my way out. It’s one thing to decline electricity, as Noe’s grandparents eventually choose to do; it’s another to shut the lights off after they’ve been burning so brightly for half your life. For better or worse, email has become one of the primary ways in which I communicate, and when I think of pulling the plug I think of Kate, writing first thing every day to say good morning. Pretty much just that: Good morning. I love you.
I’m a fairly disciplined person. Most novelists are. I’ve turned my email off for certain hours of the day. I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.
And even knowing this, that the warmth of husband and dog should in every case supersede the contracts to be DocuSigned, I can’t go to sleep with them sitting there. The very fact of how it all piles up weighs on me. I sit down to answer because, despite everything I know, I can never stop believing that answering email is a task that can be completed, instead of a river that will forever be raging forward, which brings me back to full-on regret.
“Seriously?” my sister asked when I told her I was going to write this essay. “You regret email?”
“I do,” I said.
“You’re going to look like an idiot if you write about that.”
I love my sister. We love each other. We talk this way. “Lots of people regret email,” I said.
“Lots of people regret affairs,” she said. “They regret significant acts of unkindness, things they didn’t do or say. They don’t regret email.” She shook her head, by which she means Who has a life so lovely that she would think to regret email? Her point is not lost on me.
“You can’t correct the mistakes of a lifetime,” Niall Williams writes in his novel. “You are your own past. These things happened, you did them, you have to accommodate them inside your skin and go forward. Even if you could — and you couldn’t, can’t — there was no going back.”
If I can’t correct my mistake, at least I found a novel in which to take comfort. “Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light.” I know what he means, and I miss that darkness, the feeling of a wide expanse of empty time in which to wander, and so for a moment I close my computer, close my eyes and do my best to remember the world that came before.
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