Cover photo: Hannah Murray portraying Cassie Ainsworth
I recently finished Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. It’s a marvellous little book in a heavy, dark way (not for the faint of heart). There’s this line about hunger, though. That loneliness is like not realising how hungry you are until you start eating. Now, as any good angsty bibliophile, I’ve always loved quotes like this because they’re disarming and vivid and deep. But I’m writing about this one in particular because it’s part of a latticework I’m discovering in my life that would delight the likes of Dostoevsky.
“What do you want from me?” He asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More.1
I have always been hungry. Sometimes I get this desperate feeling that I need something that I don’t know how to articulate; a craving that can’t be answered. Sometimes I am filled with a crazed restlessness in body and in spirit, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Because I always want more. I want more from myself, my ferrets, my hobbies—and, most of all, from people.
A dear friend recently talked to me about stepping away from faith but still carrying a sense of “optimism” that there’s some sort of benevolent deity up there. And I was appalled. Not because of the lack of belief in the Reformed God I try to love, but because of the lack of wanting more. How can one be merely optimistic about the meaning of life, of all the things that V.E. Schwab so extraneously extrapolated upon in The Secret Life of Addie Larue? A person is optimistic about snagging a parking spot or garnering a professor’s approval in class, not about their souls and lives and the world at large. Whether it’s Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or any other religion, a person needs something more than just optimism. I cannot comprehend God, but neither can I comprehend not believing in something.
She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 2
There’s someone close to my heart who’s been gone for a long time. He’s got his own little life now. The kind of life I expected from everyone else I went to school with. Instructions on the box of a ready-made life followed to a tee: go to a local school, get a business degree, get married, make a respectable family so that the scion can walk the same worn track, and die surrounded by the same small world. He’s getting married soon and I want to be happy for him, but I’m also sad. When I knew him, he was so much more—he could’ve been so much more—but now he’s not and I mourn what he could’ve been; what I wished he would’ve been. He didn’t have to be this way. Maybe he just wasn’t hungry enough. Maybe I am too hungry.
“The religious hunger that drives Jordan Peterson’s fandom” by Tara Isabella Burton for Vox.
If I am ever a mother (which I most likely definitely won’t be, given the fucking insane state of women’s reproductive rights), I will never be one of those who tries to tell their child the “there are two wolves inside you, you feed one or the other, blah blah blah” trope. Even my father tried using that line on me, once, and I tried not to laugh. Not because I didn’t believe his earnestness—far from it—but because I had begun to suspect that we were the wolves and there was nothing metaphorical about it.
There are little [hungry] fires caterpillars everywhere. And I’m hungry to be on the top of that writhing mass, to look up at the stars while I lie in the gutter.
This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.3
1quote via Tumblr; original source unknown despite Google
2Matthew 15:27, ESV
3Upstream, Mary Oliver