WHAT PROMPTS YOU to make decisions when you’re utterly alone? That’s a question I read recently in “I Who Have Never Known Men,” by Jacqueline Harpman, about the last surviving woman in a dead world, trekking the desolate landscape.
The disquieting book asks a lot of questions like these that continue to haunt me. What can the mind make happen in the misery of infinite aloneness? Well, hopefully we won’t ever have to find out—but we can still imagine what we might need to keep ourselves alive in an increasingly absurd world, marching through our “eternal procession of despair.”
The book tells the story of a group of forty women who find themselves imprisoned underground but don't quite remember why or how they got there. In a moment of fate, the women escape and set off to search for civilization as they trek across a stark landscape for decades, finding nothing but the same bunkers from which they escaped, full of corpses and abandoned supplies. The youngest in this group, the narrator of the story, finds herself the last remaining woman on the planet, as far as she knows, as the other women eventually die.
The “child” talks a lot in one passage about the lies we tell ourselves in order to live—being the last remaining human at the end of the world, she finds it surprising that even with no one else with whom to lie, she finds she can still lie to herself. And it made me think about how the path to peace is to tell the truth and watch ourselves fold back into alignment with god, though god does not make an appearance in the child’s world. And I don’t mean to sound like a new-age-wonder woman, I have no idea sometimes how to align outer with inner selves. Feeling finds form in delayed waves of awareness, for me at least!
But adding just one new question to the growing layers of many others we ask in a lifetime is its own kind of happiness, the child discovers. Thinking is a game we play with ourselves and anyone else willing to play along in the connecting of dots. When I’m utterly alone—as in not tied to the whims and preferences of any other—I tend to move much slower and with more self-talk to spend the hours. I tend to reach for pens and sheets of blank paper, to hear my words talk back to me. I tend not to follow my own itinerary, if I’ve made one, preferring to wander and feel lost (a feeling most people work hard to avoid).
I am not alone, however, and I’m grateful. Unless I take a solo trip or walk in the woods, I am not alone, and even if I’m alone, I know I’m connected to an invisible web of regards—hopefully all of them, kind. That’s how we sign off on a letter sometimes, “kind regards, “warm regards, “and I hope that with each of my strands of connections, there is someone on the other end regarding me with kindness and warmth as I make my way alone through the woods (or wherever).
This book locked me into that apocalyptic gaze toward the future and I’d rather return to the cozy chaos of the present tense than the horror of a world with zero hope. Yet, these kinds of stories tend to have an inoculating effect—to guard against despair by describing it in the fullest, most foul detail. I’m living my days with a more gentle intention, treading more lightly around the hard edges, and hoping to keep moving along with some kind of joy in tow.
The book reminds me of a painting I saw once at an exhibit in Copenhagen, titled "Desert" by Ukrainian artist Polina Kuznetsova, who created it in direct response to the ongoing horrors of war in Ukraine. The images in the painting remind me of the “bunkers” and “cabins” that dot the landscape in Harpman's story. The woman who wanders continues to discover these abandoned places filled with corpses and supplies that she pillages and plunders for her own survival. The emptiness is overflowing.
PLEASURE—EXPECTATION—DECISION: they’re all predicated on freedom, some sense of personal authority, the fact of one’s capacity to change. The woman in this story declares that she's “better off dead than desperate."
It matters to me knowing that the author Jacqueline Harpman was a Jewish woman whose family fled from Nazi terror during World War II, how all the images of bunkers full of dead corpses and unused supplies are echoes of the cruelty of confinement enacted by the Hitler regime. It matters to me because I am Jewish and I am a woman and I am watching the world fall sick again with the fever of hatred toward Jews and it’s nearly impossible to look away.
Perhaps at this very moment, as I type these thoughts about a book that holds such philosophical weight, another human is reading it for different reasons and feeling quite the opposite about its purpose. I won’t know. But what’s beautiful to me are the writer’s thoughts on the power of the imagination in such desolate circumstances—its potential as the last uncolonized place—to survive the current moment.
“What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?” That question and so many others in this book unnerved me. If she wasn’t dead, the woman would still be walking, she said, and time is a question of being human—without the other to measure it against conversational exchange and the turning of the season, time vanishes.
“I shall leave the door open and my story on the table,” the woman writes, never mentioning god or faith until the very end, when she admits to speaking to the sky and expecting a response, but never getting one. She may not find god, but she discovers her capacity to read, write, and shape her story, and that comes close.
God is an act of the imagination and the imagination is a skill we practice and if we forget to imagine, we forget god (one possible equation). At the very least we must want to still have the capacity to imagine our own deaths! Though in the age of AI, perhaps we’ll outsource every minute detail to the robots, who knows?
And who are we without our imaginations?
If there’s futility in wandering, there’s also futility in settling, and either adventure requires hope. When one decides to stop searching and settle into routines is a matter of mind-body-spirit, the convergence of will to want to keep trying—to want to know what’s just beyond the hill and go toward it, regardless of how exhausting or futile it may seem in the moment.
The disquieting book asks a lot of questions like these that continue to haunt me. What can the mind make happen in the misery of infinite aloneness? Well, hopefully we won’t ever have to find out—but we can still imagine what we might need to keep ourselves alive in an increasingly absurd world, marching through our “eternal procession of despair.”
The book tells the story of a group of forty women who find themselves imprisoned underground but don't quite remember why or how they got there. In a moment of fate, the women escape and set off to search for civilization as they trek across a stark landscape for decades, finding nothing but the same bunkers from which they escaped, full of corpses and abandoned supplies. The youngest in this group, the narrator of the story, finds herself the last remaining woman on the planet, as far as she knows, as the other women eventually die.
The “child” talks a lot in one passage about the lies we tell ourselves in order to live—being the last remaining human at the end of the world, she finds it surprising that even with no one else with whom to lie, she finds she can still lie to herself. And it made me think about how the path to peace is to tell the truth and watch ourselves fold back into alignment with god, though god does not make an appearance in the child’s world. And I don’t mean to sound like a new-age-wonder woman, I have no idea sometimes how to align outer with inner selves. Feeling finds form in delayed waves of awareness, for me at least!
But adding just one new question to the growing layers of many others we ask in a lifetime is its own kind of happiness, the child discovers. Thinking is a game we play with ourselves and anyone else willing to play along in the connecting of dots. When I’m utterly alone—as in not tied to the whims and preferences of any other—I tend to move much slower and with more self-talk to spend the hours. I tend to reach for pens and sheets of blank paper, to hear my words talk back to me. I tend not to follow my own itinerary, if I’ve made one, preferring to wander and feel lost (a feeling most people work hard to avoid).
I am not alone, however, and I’m grateful. Unless I take a solo trip or walk in the woods, I am not alone, and even if I’m alone, I know I’m connected to an invisible web of regards—hopefully all of them, kind. That’s how we sign off on a letter sometimes, “kind regards, “warm regards, “and I hope that with each of my strands of connections, there is someone on the other end regarding me with kindness and warmth as I make my way alone through the woods (or wherever).
This book locked me into that apocalyptic gaze toward the future and I’d rather return to the cozy chaos of the present tense than the horror of a world with zero hope. Yet, these kinds of stories tend to have an inoculating effect—to guard against despair by describing it in the fullest, most foul detail. I’m living my days with a more gentle intention, treading more lightly around the hard edges, and hoping to keep moving along with some kind of joy in tow.
The book reminds me of a painting I saw once at an exhibit in Copenhagen, titled "Desert" by Ukrainian artist Polina Kuznetsova, who created it in direct response to the ongoing horrors of war in Ukraine. The images in the painting remind me of the “bunkers” and “cabins” that dot the landscape in Harpman's story. The woman who wanders continues to discover these abandoned places filled with corpses and supplies that she pillages and plunders for her own survival. The emptiness is overflowing.
PLEASURE—EXPECTATION—DECISION: they’re all predicated on freedom, some sense of personal authority, the fact of one’s capacity to change. The woman in this story declares that she's “better off dead than desperate."
It matters to me knowing that the author Jacqueline Harpman was a Jewish woman whose family fled from Nazi terror during World War II, how all the images of bunkers full of dead corpses and unused supplies are echoes of the cruelty of confinement enacted by the Hitler regime. It matters to me because I am Jewish and I am a woman and I am watching the world fall sick again with the fever of hatred toward Jews and it’s nearly impossible to look away.
Perhaps at this very moment, as I type these thoughts about a book that holds such philosophical weight, another human is reading it for different reasons and feeling quite the opposite about its purpose. I won’t know. But what’s beautiful to me are the writer’s thoughts on the power of the imagination in such desolate circumstances—its potential as the last uncolonized place—to survive the current moment.
“What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?” That question and so many others in this book unnerved me. If she wasn’t dead, the woman would still be walking, she said, and time is a question of being human—without the other to measure it against conversational exchange and the turning of the season, time vanishes.
“I shall leave the door open and my story on the table,” the woman writes, never mentioning god or faith until the very end, when she admits to speaking to the sky and expecting a response, but never getting one. She may not find god, but she discovers her capacity to read, write, and shape her story, and that comes close.
God is an act of the imagination and the imagination is a skill we practice and if we forget to imagine, we forget god (one possible equation). At the very least we must want to still have the capacity to imagine our own deaths! Though in the age of AI, perhaps we’ll outsource every minute detail to the robots, who knows?
And who are we without our imaginations?
If there’s futility in wandering, there’s also futility in settling, and either adventure requires hope. When one decides to stop searching and settle into routines is a matter of mind-body-spirit, the convergence of will to want to keep trying—to want to know what’s just beyond the hill and go toward it, regardless of how exhausting or futile it may seem in the moment.
