Likes by Sarah Bynum (electronic book reader txt) 📕

there was a pedestal in the corner of the sitting room, and on the pedestal sat a large guest book that held the names of past visitors, a book I had already leafed through many times, trying to kill the afternoon. Most of the names meant little to me, but once in a while a name would leap out from the page and spread its light over the room—a moment both exhilarating and deeply shameful for me as I was reminded that I had no business being there. The guest book adhered to a formula, full name followed by discipline and date of residency, and one of the earlier entries stopped me, because instead of putting down architect or composer or essayist, the visitor had written, in slim capital letters, HOMEMAKER. But she was a poet, I knew—a poet of such importance that even I, who almost never read poetry, perked up at the sight of her name. She had written this in 1976, long enough ago that it was hard for me to interpret her use of the word. Was it a political act to write that, a reclamation? A gesture of defiance? Or could it be modesty. Self-doubt. A wry critique of taxonomy and titles? Maybe, more simply, she felt it the most apt description of how she spent her days. I couldn’t tell; though the writing itself looked black and fresh, her intent remained distant and unreadable to me. Nevertheless this entry in the guest book made me happy. In the years since she wrote it, her genius as a poet had been named and rewarded, and I liked how the word she chose early for herself now had the glamour of genius attached to it; how HOMEMAKER reached forward through time and lightly claimed that.

The orange cat shifted peaceably on the newspaper. I considered fixing myself another piece of toast, or finding a guest room and lying down to rest for a few minutes. My body was still tired and weird from all the running, and when I stood up from my chair, my knees buckled and I nearly lost my balance. I laid my palm on the knotted surface of the table. Through the wide kitchen windows I could see the rainbow horse waiting in the garden, and beyond that, the crooked apple tree. A fringe of young trees grew along the property line, weakly shielding the back lawn from the shaggier woods that rose up behind them, and while I was staring at the saplings, trying to figure out what kind they were, I saw a large body emerge from the forest and start lumbering toward the house. It took me a second to realize that the body belonged to a man. It was so pale and slow and enormous, and wearing such a short and colorful bathrobe, I thought unfairly at first that I must be seeing a woman, a morbidly obese woman in a swimming cap. But what I mistook for a swimming cap was actually a bald head. And as the man drew closer, I understood more and more clearly the size of him. He moved laboriously, shuffling more than walking, halting every few steps to catch his breath. His head shone and his shoulders heaved. The hem of his bathrobe fluttered above legs that looked at once curdled and bloated, swollen to the point of bursting. His leg flesh drooped over his knees.

I knew but did not accept that this man approaching the house was Jerry Roth. He made his slow, huffing way across the lawn in the unconscious manner of someone who had done so a thousand times before. Upon noticing something in the grass, he kicked at it briefly, but didn’t, probably couldn’t, bend over to pick it up. It seemed impossible that the man responsible for this house was the same as the huge, repellent person kicking at his lawn.

Jerry Roth then lifted his eyes and blindly took in the whole of his house, or at least the back view of it, a view I had never seen, and I must have forgotten that I was as fully apparent to him as he was to me, because I continued to gaze at my ease from the kitchen, and felt truly shocked when his blank stare narrowed into a hard look, pointed in my direction like a gun. He stopped short and raised a heavy arm to block the sun’s glare from his eyes. I could see now that his bright bathrobe was covered in flocks of flying cranes, wings and necks outstretched. Suddenly he dropped his arm and began moving toward me at a pace I didn’t think possible for him.

In that moment I thought meaningfully, for the first time in several weeks, about William James; in this case, about William James and his bear. To explain, James published an influential paper in 1884, a paper titled “What Is an Emotion?,” and in this paper James put forth the theory that standard emotions such as sadness or rage or fear are not antecedent to the physiological responses we associate with them, but rather the product of these bodily changes. This was a radical notion at the time, a reversal of the usual way of seeing things. Common sense, according to James, tells us that when we lose our fortune, we are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. Yet this order of sequence is incorrect, James asserted: The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry; angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. Coming between the stimulus (bear) and the feeling (fear) is the body: quickened heartbeat, shallow breathing, trembling lips, weakened limbs. And that collection of responses is what lets you know that you’re afraid.

My own research had very little to do with his theory of emotion, and I confess to feeling somewhat irritated when the bear would