Letter Thirty-two | 12/21 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ (and all our guest contributors!),

I despise beginnings. I refuse to rewatch the first episodes of TV series; the first entries in trilogies are so often the worst. When I was a kid, I didn’t ever reread the first books in The Boxcar Children or The Hardy Boys. It’s difficult to explain, but there’s something about everything feeling so nascent, the blurriness of characters and patterns that haven’t yet settled into themselves. It’s a little uncanny: these things are familiar, but not quite.

Usually endings don’t cause the same kinds of problems. Here, though, I don’t really know what to do. That uncanniness is here, hovering. The World Cup is over, and it feels like it never really happened. If this was the first properly postmodern World Cup, hyperreal and electrified, its aftermath is less the end of a narrative than a sudden absence, a jump cut that suggests something has happened but refuses to disclose what it was. The final, that stays with me, but it sits disconnected from everything that (apparently) came before it. Time is distended; did the US play Iran at some point? I guess.

And the project, too, has slipped away before it began, before it registered. We’ve written thirteen letters or so, which really isn’t many: if a letter runs, what, a thousand words, then over the last month we’ve each written a very long short story or the kind of longform essay that no longer gets published anywhere. But at the same time the project has lingered—I’ve always gotten up in the morning to edit a letter, this is how it’s always been, there was no before-time.

We’ve done this twice, now. The letters from the first iteration apparently don’t exist anywhere now, which for my part is probably for the best. That’s the strange things, one of them, about a four-year cycle (this is a point made again and again, it’s hardly novel): enough time passes that you find yourself a wholly different person, but not so much time passes that you cannot feel a link or a strange kind of affinity to the person you used to be. In the summer of 2018, everything was different, or so it seems. I wrote the first thing I ever really published around then, even if I cannot revisit it now. I didn’t know I’d end up here—I didn’t know I’d end up anywhere. (Discomfiting, how closely that line scans like something from Dr. Seuss.) In four more years, the Cup will be here (meaning the US), and I will probably still be here (meaning Berkeley). Other than that, who knows? These letters, though, we’ll keep.

It took me a long time to learn how to give shape to things. I’m still not great at it. What I mean is that I’ve only ever been able to arrange the phenomena of life into a comprehensible pattern with effort, and likewise for years I wrote and wrote like I was unrolling some long spool, rather than attending to how the form of the thing matched (or failed to match, more likely) whatever the thing wanted to be. And I think I’m reliving that problem now. At one scale, I’m not sure what the form of this last letter should be; it’s become, de facto, much talking about myself. At another, how should the experience of the Cup be given conceptual shape, fitted into experiential categories? What does any of this mean?

I have a real horror of cliché, which often serves me poorly. It makes me go well out of my compositional way, perform syntactical gymnastics, to avoid phrases or arrangements that seem to carry even the shadow of the pat, trite, or expected. Sometimes we refer to writing that does this too intensely as strained, and there is, in fact, a sense of straining or grasping at play: the idea is to claim, to set down, some experience or emotion or structure of feeling that’s just out of discursive reach. Another historical problem that feels contemporary, how to fit experience into language: Sally Rooney’s characters (hey, there’s the callback, there’s the setup and payoff) often just give up on trying.

If nothing else, we’ve tried, and at times maybe we’ve succeeded, although I’m not sure at what, exactly. Our guests were far more successful—I hope you all will reappear, rejoin us, when we do this in the summer for the Women’s World Cup. And then in 2026: we can write out letters as we take a hyperlooped Tesla down to the stadium in Santa Clara. And so the monkey’s paw curls; the lathe of heaven begins to spin again.

I feel so old. I mean that, unironically. But things have gotten better: I have a better relationship with the writing on the page than I did four years ago. I love the game we’ve spent so much time writing about in more interesting ways now. I think, maybe, I’m a little better at loving, generally—let’s hope this is the truth. A cliché might make use of love, but love is never a cliché. It’s an event, right? Or a calling to an event, an invitation to respond in kind. I’m glad to take up this invitation every four years.

All my love,

Ryan