John: I’d been much interested in what your mural looks like. In mine, I would definitely include not only the sea blackened house in MMMD that has gone under the waves like the Pequod but also visual references to other great Ruined Houses in the Imagination’s history, including Bleak House, the House of Atreus, the House of Usher and so on and on. And on. What else seest though in the dark backward and abysm of time? -MS
I read MMMD twice in a row in 2024-2025, and then put aside thinking about it beyond following along with your thoughts. What you ask is a hard task. I feel like I read it in a kind of fever dream, and now I can only summon random impressions of my reading it: joy and frustration; wanting something, anything!, to happen, while simultaneously realizing that everything was happening; the sheer beauty and poetic construction of almost every damn sentence. It's a remarkable book that I will return to in a few years with love and trepidation.
I love your thoughts, here, Sam. I couldn’t agree more that Young’s writing is exquisite! And what you say about wanting something to happen while realizing that EVERYTHING is happening really resonates with me! Lori
Sam: Your letter deserves a response just as honest and concise and pungent as it is. To encapsulate MMMD as a “fever dream” is inspired. Anais Nin, the famous (at the time) French writer who was instrumental in getting MMMD out to a wider public, boiled the novel down to a “dream” in the tradition of Calderon. James Elkins, a brilliant writer, mused (somewhat disparagingly) if MMMD was a “novel or a dream.” Neither of these descriptions hit the mark. Yours did. If it is a dream, it is less in the tradition of the famous Midsummer Night’s one, but a “fever dream.” Something provoked by illness but necessary if the dreamer is to recover. Or, as TS Eliot phrased it in “East Coker”: Our only health is the disease /If we obey the dying nurse /Whose constant care is not to please /But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,/And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” And, to understand that when we return to the book for a third reading we do it not just in love but “trepidation.”
After reading it the first time there was one big question: why?! why Esther?! I cried at the "all our loves" last sentence and after re-readings I feel I have my answer. After reading the last sentence I thought this was the greatest book ever written but would have been hard pressed to answer why I thought so. I still can't tell you why the last line of the book hooked me although now I think it is the final reversal with Esther where she tells these stories and writes letters but she is illiterate. After all these years reading this book I now know this book is my reason for ever learning to read. My lifelong reading adventure has come to an end but it is also my beginning. 😅
To All My Darlings: Vera tells us at the very beginning of Chapter 82 that Esther was not interested in Vera’s confessions that her mother was dead and that the sea blackened house had been swept into the sea along with all the other ruined houses from literary history because Esther would have replied “so what? What difference does that make? Everyone has lost something.So why did I care?” This might seem callous to some readers, but this novel is telling us that Esther, being illiterate, might possess a deeper wisdom that that available to Vera, and most likely, to us, the literate class, able to read this book. We would not be able to appreciate that wisdom, however, if Vera did not tell Esther’s story. Vera’s job, as a literate (a supremely literate!) narrator is to communicate that wisdom through Esther’s verbal confessions, translating them into terms readers could understand. Vera is celebrating her marriage to the stone deaf man and would “invite everybody to our wedding.” Including the “moon and stars and the old mule.And, of course, Esther herself, for she was all our love, all our loves, and she was the mother of the stillborn clapping their hands in clouds.” And, Vera continues, “she loved us all and all things hurt or silent or broken or dead or living, and we were all so much like her little children that we might have been the children of her dreams.” Simply put, Esther could not have written about her life because she needed an amanuensis, Vera, to be her scribe, but not only a scribe, but a midwife, bringing to birth that which would not be possible without the source, Esther! All this makes the book’s final words as profound as exists in the world of literature—-Esther’s illiterate note on the restaurant window, “Owt to luntsch. Bee bak in a whale.” As close as literature gets to showing, not telling, about how the illiterate intuits….everything, that we’ll be back in a whale, even if we have not read Moby Dick or the Book of Jonah. Why Esther?! Because Vera, and we, the readers, would be nothing without her. —-Michael
If I HAD to “summarize” Miss MacIntosh, it’d be: a mural of ontological beauty
I love that description!
John: I’d been much interested in what your mural looks like. In mine, I would definitely include not only the sea blackened house in MMMD that has gone under the waves like the Pequod but also visual references to other great Ruined Houses in the Imagination’s history, including Bleak House, the House of Atreus, the House of Usher and so on and on. And on. What else seest though in the dark backward and abysm of time? -MS
I read MMMD twice in a row in 2024-2025, and then put aside thinking about it beyond following along with your thoughts. What you ask is a hard task. I feel like I read it in a kind of fever dream, and now I can only summon random impressions of my reading it: joy and frustration; wanting something, anything!, to happen, while simultaneously realizing that everything was happening; the sheer beauty and poetic construction of almost every damn sentence. It's a remarkable book that I will return to in a few years with love and trepidation.
I love your thoughts, here, Sam. I couldn’t agree more that Young’s writing is exquisite! And what you say about wanting something to happen while realizing that EVERYTHING is happening really resonates with me! Lori
Sam: Your letter deserves a response just as honest and concise and pungent as it is. To encapsulate MMMD as a “fever dream” is inspired. Anais Nin, the famous (at the time) French writer who was instrumental in getting MMMD out to a wider public, boiled the novel down to a “dream” in the tradition of Calderon. James Elkins, a brilliant writer, mused (somewhat disparagingly) if MMMD was a “novel or a dream.” Neither of these descriptions hit the mark. Yours did. If it is a dream, it is less in the tradition of the famous Midsummer Night’s one, but a “fever dream.” Something provoked by illness but necessary if the dreamer is to recover. Or, as TS Eliot phrased it in “East Coker”: Our only health is the disease /If we obey the dying nurse /Whose constant care is not to please /But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,/And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” And, to understand that when we return to the book for a third reading we do it not just in love but “trepidation.”
You got it!—-Michael Sexson
After reading it the first time there was one big question: why?! why Esther?! I cried at the "all our loves" last sentence and after re-readings I feel I have my answer. After reading the last sentence I thought this was the greatest book ever written but would have been hard pressed to answer why I thought so. I still can't tell you why the last line of the book hooked me although now I think it is the final reversal with Esther where she tells these stories and writes letters but she is illiterate. After all these years reading this book I now know this book is my reason for ever learning to read. My lifelong reading adventure has come to an end but it is also my beginning. 😅
To All My Darlings: Vera tells us at the very beginning of Chapter 82 that Esther was not interested in Vera’s confessions that her mother was dead and that the sea blackened house had been swept into the sea along with all the other ruined houses from literary history because Esther would have replied “so what? What difference does that make? Everyone has lost something.So why did I care?” This might seem callous to some readers, but this novel is telling us that Esther, being illiterate, might possess a deeper wisdom that that available to Vera, and most likely, to us, the literate class, able to read this book. We would not be able to appreciate that wisdom, however, if Vera did not tell Esther’s story. Vera’s job, as a literate (a supremely literate!) narrator is to communicate that wisdom through Esther’s verbal confessions, translating them into terms readers could understand. Vera is celebrating her marriage to the stone deaf man and would “invite everybody to our wedding.” Including the “moon and stars and the old mule.And, of course, Esther herself, for she was all our love, all our loves, and she was the mother of the stillborn clapping their hands in clouds.” And, Vera continues, “she loved us all and all things hurt or silent or broken or dead or living, and we were all so much like her little children that we might have been the children of her dreams.” Simply put, Esther could not have written about her life because she needed an amanuensis, Vera, to be her scribe, but not only a scribe, but a midwife, bringing to birth that which would not be possible without the source, Esther! All this makes the book’s final words as profound as exists in the world of literature—-Esther’s illiterate note on the restaurant window, “Owt to luntsch. Bee bak in a whale.” As close as literature gets to showing, not telling, about how the illiterate intuits….everything, that we’ll be back in a whale, even if we have not read Moby Dick or the Book of Jonah. Why Esther?! Because Vera, and we, the readers, would be nothing without her. —-Michael