“Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. Once released from Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something, anything—“The House of Mirth,” “Daniel Deronda”—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

But then, in Week Five, for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense.”

– Jeffrey Eugenides, “Extreme Solitude”

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE for workshop in the fall. Whenever I read this the first time–freshman year, I think–I didn’t appreciate it. I was frustrated by how impeded the forward movement of the story was by all the narration of the characters’ interior lives. It’s still impeded, but I suppose that my appetite for frustrating experiences has increased with age.

At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone. Hence the workers were at first unaware of their mother’s death. Her quietude said nothing, and the odors of her life, still rising from her, signalled, I remain among you. She smelled alive.

Usually I have to skim through a story or poem to find the best line for a teaser, but not this time. This is the first paragraph of E.O. Wilson’s short story “Trailhead” in the New Yorker, taken from his novel, Anthill, which comes out later this year.

A friend gave me WAR AND PEACE in July, and I’m still not finished. Last night, unable to sleep, and cheered by my recent success in plowing through MOBY-DICK, I picked it up again, and found a scrunchie inserted at page 349. Picked up where I left off: just in time for Pierre to join the Masons! This book is so full of events.

Yes, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor’s hall all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is as deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of weekdays hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous — a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.

– Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener”

I first read this short story in high school, and have not reread it since then. There are worse things to read on Christmas, if you don’t celebrate Christmas. The myth of Christ is intertwined with the story of Bartleby, and yet the entire thing is pleasantly subsumed in irony and nihilism. It’s a good way to think about what this omnipresent holiday means and has meant to our and other cultures, without actually engaging in it.