Review

Books

Culture

Wildness

25 October 2024

6 min read

My open letter to Sally Rooney: dilatasti cor meum

You enlarge my heart.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A book cover depicts a yellow and white chessboard with pieces casting shadows of people.

This is silly, I realize. You’ll never see this. But I’ve just finished Intermezzo and I’m not sure what else to do with the bright sadness upon finishing it.

I can’t imagine I am your anticipated reader. I have children your age, for heaven’s sake. You write from, and about, worlds that are, in some ways, a foreign country for me. Sometimes I read your novels like Lévi-Strauss’s field notes from his years with the Nambikwara, describing the practices and rituals and mores of some foreign tribe—except that tribe includes my own children and the students I encounter everyday. Sometimes this makes me feel very old, and tired, and a little bit sad. Not in a judgmental way. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be 23 years old today. I feel badly about the world we’ve bequeathed to the twenty- and thirtysomethings that populate your novels. Your novels give me a glimpse into how they experience it. Which is what I love about the best fiction—the way it is a technology of mindreading, teleporting us into another’s perspective.

I don’t know, maybe it’s weird and kinda creepy that an old man like me gobbles up a novel like Intermezzo. Like a kind of voyeurism. I hope not. Because, in the end, what you achieve is at once the construction and revelation of a human world. And as Terence said, nothing human is alien to me.

This will sound crazy, but from the very first pages of Intermezzo I found myself reading with a strange sort of ache in my heart. Not a pain as much as a held-breath sense of ekstasis, of being stretched and pulled out of myself. I think now I’d say I was responding to what I can only describe as the tenderness you show your characters. I don’t mean for a second that you shrink from portraying their brokenness, even their brutality at times. But only that as you track their mystery and monstrosity you situate all of it in their ineradicable humanity. And in contemporary fiction, that is rarer than some might think. It speaks to me of a fullness that characterizes the matrix of your imagination, from which these characters were born. You don’t let them escape judgment; but that judgment comes from their own social worlds, not the caustic condescension of you as the narrator. This is where your mastery of free indirect speech is so uncanny: you stay near your characters, you listen closely, but somehow in the alchemy of your prose even their own harsh self-judgment is portrayed with tenderness and understanding.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the mystical tradition portrays God, that Creator of all creators, the Narrator who is in love with every feeble creature, every loathable antihero, which is to say every single one of us, protagonists in dramas we don’t realize. There’s this marvelous line in The Cloud of Unknowing where the medieval sage says, “It is not who you are or what you’ve been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.” This will make you cringe, but your narration echoes that. You see what Peter and Ivan want to be. And in so doing, you help me look at all the human beings around me with the same sort of eyes. Or at least I want to be that person.

OK, this is, like, crazy word association, but as I was reading Intermezzo a line of prayer kept coming to mind. You might know it. It’s from the Psalms. It’s part of Prime, the first hour of the Divine Office. St. Teresa of Ávila talks about it a lot. Dilatasti cor meum. You enlarge my heart. You dilate my heart. You widen the scope of what my heart can take in and absorb. This, in the end, is what Intermezzo does. For me, at least.

It’s funny, you know. I finished the second half of the novel while I was attending the annual conference of the Hegel Society. (I thought you’d get a chuckle out of that.) So in the margins of Intermezzo I have scribbled notes like: Recognition! Master/slave dialectic!3 But it’s really not so crazy, is it, because, like Hegel, you seem to intuit how much we long to be seen, to be recognized, and why that means passing through the crucible of forgiveness to achieve reconciliation. This is why I think you are attuned to a below-the-surface rumbling in your generation that, against all the forces of capital and Distraction, Inc. and just the bullshit of consumer nihilism, can’t quite shake a yearning, or at least a wondering, if there’s something more—something like “meaning” or significance we could feel pulled into. I love it that, in Intermezzo, this culminates in a vision of community. (I’m trying not to spoil anything here, since, ahem, my wife hasn’t been able to finish the book yet.) Being known, being seen, being forgiven, being loved. Belonging.

My aforementioned (long suffering, forgiving) wife loves a song by the Highwomen called “Crowded Table.” She plays it full blast in our kitchen when she’s preparing for dinners when she gathers beloveds near. “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.” I thought of the bridge of the song at the end of Intermezzo.

Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs.

I finished your book on a packed train from Boston to Philadelphia and decided not to be embarrassed that I was weeping. The older I get, the more paternal I become, I’m realizing. I don’t think that’s an expression of control or “paternalism” in the negative sense. At least I hope not. It’s more that the older our kids get, more of the world is filled with people who look like the children I love. I don’t mean that I infantilize them, either. I treasure the adults they’ve become.

I’m not describing this very well. What I’m trying to say is, I am just an inveterate dad. I can’t help it. So as much as I read your novel as a scholar or a philosopher or a fellow human, I couldn’t help reading it as a dad. And when I spent time with Peter and Ivan and Sylvia and Naomi, I just wanted for them what I want for my own children and their spouses—for them to know they are loved and held dear and for them to find their people. It’s silly and sappy, but I wanted to talk to Ivan and Peter and tell them: It’s possible. There is still love in the world. Even more incredibly: there is forgiveness. Intermezzo has the audacity to not only hope this but to portray it. I know it costs you something to do so in a literary world that prizes cynicism and distance.

Maybe I wept at the end of Intermezzo because it was as much a mirror as an icon. Despite the generational gap, you gave me occasion to see my own life reflected back to me. In the mirror is an us (“The I that is we and the we that is I,” as Hegel put it). I look in the mirror of longing & hope that is your novel, and looking back I see my wife, Deanna, who has been forgiving me for over 35 years, letting me know I am beloved. And we’re surrounded by our children, the overflowing of our own love, these children who have become such dear friends, who have forgiven me more times than I can count. And in that mirror their spouses are alongside them, our dream come true—the beloveds they have found who forgive them and welcome them home over and over again. It’s a crowded table. And there’s always more room. Everybody’s a little broken, and everybody belongs.

I guess what I want to say is: I admire your courage to write a novel that tells the truth—that love gets the last word because it is the first word that speaks us all into being, the origin of the world.

Gratefully,

A reader

This article first appeared as a post on James K.A. Smith's Quid Amo Substack. Reproduced by kind permission.

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Comment

Community

Sustainability

Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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