The building has decided it is August, and everyone in it has agreed to move differently.
Senhora Amália on the second floor now waters her plants at seven, which is an hour earlier than she did in June, and she does it in a housecoat rather than the good blue cardigan. The boy from the ground floor has stopped taking the stairs two at a time. Even the door to the courtyard, which sticks in winter, has swollen into a shape that opens without complaint. Nobody discussed any of this. The month arrived and the building reorganised itself around the heat the way a body turns over in sleep.
I have been trying to write about attention for most of this year and getting nowhere, and I think this is why: attention is not a thing you do to the world, it’s a thing the world does to you when you slow down enough to let it. All my drafts have me as the subject — I noticed, I observed, I saw — and they are all unbearable. The honest sentence is that the building told me it was August and I finally heard it.
What I did instead of writing
For three weeks in July I kept a list on the back of an envelope of things that had changed without announcement. Some of them:
- The bakery started closing at one instead of two, without a sign.
- The pigeons moved from the south ledge to the north ledge.
- My upstairs neighbour began playing the same four bars of something on the piano, every evening, never getting to the fifth.
- The tram bell sounds different, and I cannot tell whether that is the tram or the air.
None of these is worth anything on its own. Together they are a month. I don’t think I could have arrived at August by reasoning about the calendar.
The problem with the good sentence
When I was editing, we had a phrase for a sentence that was too pleased with itself: it’s wearing a hat. You could always tell. The writer had found something clever and had stopped looking at the thing in order to admire the finding. My job was to take the hat off, and about half the time the sentence underneath was better and the other half there was nothing underneath at all.
I catch myself wearing hats constantly now that nobody is editing me. The line about the body turning over in sleep, four paragraphs up — that is a hat. I’ve left it because I’ve read this piece eleven times and I still can’t tell whether the thing underneath survives without it. That is the actual condition of writing alone: not loneliness, but the loss of the second reader who could tell you, in four seconds, that you were showing off.
A copy editor is a person who has read the sentence for the first time on purpose. You cannot do it to your own work. You can only wait long enough that you have forgotten, and I have never once waited long enough.
So the fourth floor, in August. The heat comes up the stairwell rather than in through the windows, which I did not know was possible until I lived somewhere with a stairwell that faces south. By eleven the flat is a held breath. I write until then and stop, not from discipline but because after eleven the sentences go soft.
This is the whole essay, and I’m aware it isn’t about anything. I’ve decided that’s all right. Not every month has an argument in it.