August 11, 2025
Dear Smythe,
Recently I forwarded a Substack post by Kit de Waal to a friend. In the post, called “The Zen of Composting,” de Waal quotes an excerpt from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Goldberg extols the virtues of letting experiences process before writing about them. Writers need time to understand their experiences, she says. “Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through the whole body. I call this ‘composting.’”
I asked my friend, “I wonder if something can compost a bit too much and then it rots — too much time away and the meaning is gone?”
I was trained to write much in the way that Goldberg writes about. My father, a journalist and former law student, amongst other things, believes life is one big schoolroom. When I was a child, he asked me to summarize every book I read. “First tell me what it’s about in one sentence. Then in on paragraph. Then in one page.”
The command was exact and I learned to think exactly. To this day when I write, I struggled to expand upon the topic at hand. What do I think in a sentence? A paragraph? A page?
When the subject is human emotion and experience, distance allows the breathing room to think about it in such clinical terms. In the moment, the mess – the reality – of my feelings does not allow for such precision. It’s all a jumble, a discordant symphony. But this is how life is really lived.
And Paris noted as much in his email reply to me. “There is an importance given to space and clarity which is perfectly valid, but equally valid is writing in the midst of emotion, and the event itself…Does time diminish meaning, or does it simply transform it into a small part of us we carry forever?”
I think writers, in particular Western writers, might place too much emphasis on distance from our feelings. After all, our thinking minds ultimately exist to rationalize our emotions – to find the most logical and irrefutable justification for them. Our sense may be dumb, but they are the root of our experiences. And writing that captures what a feeling is like in the moment it is felt can be done, I think, only at that time. Reflecting on my current Sisyphean battle of getting a visa so I continue my life-saving healthcare…I think that once this is all over (and do I pray that this will one day all be over), I will look back and see how it shaped me, made me who I am, and feel thankful for where it brought me. But right now, it is something else entirely — the truth of my life and my selfhood is wrapped entirely around how I feel and my fight to get through this. And as awful as it has been, I don’t want to forget how it feels. It’s important. It’s raw. It’s what it feels to live my life right now. And a letter about it written a year later would be very different from the one I wrote last week.
This is something I have spent my life fighting against. In fact, one of the great reliefs I have taken through my life’s difficulties has always been that later, one day, the memory will have faded. And like my father, whose writing philosophy is one he also applies to his own life, I have a tendency to shut myself off from a feeling once it begins to overwhelm me. Then eventually, once enough time has passed, when I come back, the emotion has rotted away enough that I can hardly recognize the corpse. This is why the feeling of nostalgia is unfamiliar to me.
Recently, I was forced to question this. My darling cat Pluto fell very ill and for weeks, I lay with him every night, barely sleeping myself, and holding him on my chest so that he could breathe and sleep. Though I knew he was terribly sick, it was a tremendous shock when I found out he had large-cell lymphoma in his nasal cavity. The vet gave him steroids for relief and me a faint hope that he might survive the weekend.
I sat with all of this on Friday afternoon, barely able to hold the despair and heartbreak. My emotions were so extreme I could not manage them. I couldn’t stop crying – at home, at work, in public. I thought I was drowning. I couldn’t bear to be apart from Pluto for more than a minute or two. The Liverpool player and his brother, Diogo Jota and Andre Silva, had just died, and I told my partner, “I’d take the whole team dying just to keep Pluto here.” And the old habit started to creep back – the distancing. I could feel myself trying not to care. But this time, I stopped.
I recognized my love for this little cat was too important to dismiss. I couldn’t ignore it and therefore disrespect him. “You must feel it all, for his sake,” I told myself. “He deserves that from you.”
And feel it I did. I spent the weekend alternating between uncontrollable tears and ecstatic joy that I had a little extra time with my darling before I had to say goodbye. And though I know my decision had nothing to do with it, when we returned to the vet on Monday, she gave us the tremendously good news that he had taken such a turn that he had a chance to survive. I had hope.
I decided that from then on, I would never push a feeling away, good or bad, and that I would feel my life fully for my own sake and for all of those whom I love. And that is the power of love, I suppose. It gives us the strength to feel everything; it bolsters us at the worst of times, and offers us the powerful, gleaming strength of hope at others. Pluto is on week five of chemotherapy now. He is currently struggling with an infection, but his prospects seem good for many more years of life ahead.
I am happy to be writing this in the midst of it all, feeling and living it, rather than a decade down the line, when the memory of it has faded so much that it has lost something. What thing, you ask? Well. The truth of it.
Warmly,
Marguerite
