Existential Need

Vintage coat (similar)
Noul sweater (similar)
Zara jeans (similar)
Rouje boots (similar)
Sezane bag
Mango beret (similar)
Mejuri bracelet (similar)
Mejuri ring (similar)
Location: Winnipeg Art Gallery – Winnipeg, Manitoba

“You have to read this,” I told Ian in a rush, as I thrust an open copy of The New Yorker in his general direction. It was Friday night, and I’d had a few glasses of wine, so he wasn’t inclined to take me particularly seriously. But he indulged me and read the paragraph I’d highlighted, a section of I Catch Sight of the Now by Jorie Graham. And then reread it for good measure. (He is wary of missing the point, having done so often over the years.)

“Okay…?”

The point wasn’t obvious to him, apparently, based on the words of the text alone. “Don’t you ever read something,” I asked, “and realise that it fulfils an existential need you didn’t know you had until you read it?”

(…if you’ve wondered what living with a writer is like, the paragraph above sums it up succinctly. It is worth noting that Ian’s existential needs are vastly different from mine.)

“I guess.”

“But that paragraph wasn’t one of those things?”

“Not for me, no.”

It was for me. I confess that I am rarely impressed by the poems published in The New Yorker, a fact that comes down, largely, to taste. I know what I like, which is the result of years of reading and analysing and reading again. Editors know what their readers like as a collective. I am not a typical reader of the magazine, having subscribed mostly for the free tote bag. (It is a wardrobe essential for any writer, I think.) That isn’t the point. The point is that for the first time in sixteen issues, a poem leapt off the page as I read it, the words immediately tattooed on my consciousness.

It was like the first time I read Rilke – like every time I read Rilke, whose books I keep on my bedside table. He died before I was born, but his words live on, often summing up my own thoughts more elegantly than I will ever manage to.

The thing about good writing is that what makes it good is entirely subjective – what is meaningful for me may leave other readers entirely unimpressed. But for me, the best writing speaks to me with the kind of immediacy that makes me grab a pen to underline words and dash down the hall to show anyone who will listen. And that writing most often speaks, on some level, to an existential need that I was, at most, only cursorily aware.

Whether we realise it or not, our existential needs are greater now than they were a year ago. We are, for the most part, trapped indoors. We are isolated from people we love and deprived of the experiences that once made up our lives. Although we still need to experience life as meaningful, there is so much less to make it meaningful than there once was. No amount of searching for meaning is enough to actually create meaning. We find it, most often, when we forget we are looking. And the surprise in stumbling upon it is part of the wonder of the experience. That’s why all of the online orders don’t help, even though we all go on placing them. (Myself included. Last week I bought a pair of “consoltation earrings.”) Clothes lose their purpose when there is nowhere to wear them but your own living room.

So how do we fulfill our existential needs? Most days, I don’t know for sure. But then, on occasion, I get lucky. The New Yorker, or a good book, comes to my rescue. Reading does help, at least for me. It won’t be a solution for everyone, though – existentialism is funny that way.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve already read the words that spoke to me so strongly on Friday night. But in case you don’t and in case, like me, you’re searching for meaning in an increasingly mundane and meaningless existence, I’ll leave them here.

“…it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the only of this minute, this split minute, in which if I reach now I can feel the years, the fissure in them, these fractions here inside the instant…”
– Jorie Graham

Take care of yourselves. Someday, we won’t be able to feel the years, because we’ll be living them again. Someday soon, I hope.

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