But, as in TRIP, the journey is always interior, first and foremost. For Li, the leaving could be understood as physical-leaving New York for the less familiar landscape of Taiwan, leaving Taiwan for the less familiar landscape of Hawaii. We can keep to the society that we find ourselves in, or we can find-create-something new. It also reveals itself as a choice: one can stay, or one can leave. Enough to make me want to leave society.Īnd yet, particularly by the end of the book, as Li and Kay deepened their relationship, professed their love, yearned toward “the mystery” together, the phrase “leave society” felt less like an ominous dictum and more like a playful experiment, and moreover a proposal to the reader-to me-to think hard and carefully about the kind of society I was interested in. Enough to make me want to stay in one room forever, alone. A paralyzing idea: that each word, each action, each bite of food or breath of air or dollar spent, could have billions of micro-effects on the people and flora and fauna around us. At points, the degree to which Li would comb through his actions, record them, dwell within the memory of them, felt overwhelming to me-I felt debilitated as Li felt debilitated. Thematically, LEAVE SOCIETY seems invested in the power of humility and painfully acute self-awareness. I felt emotional each time Li emailed his mother to attempt to explain his anger or stress, to apologize for hurting or disappointing her, to invite a fuller and more measured conversation-that is, to achieve peace. For this reason the spirit of the book strikes me as eminently hope-filled: to resist cliché is to embrace life and believe in its progress.ĭespite Li’s crippling bouts of worry, physical pain, and moroseness, there is a very moving resilience that goads him out of each abyss and back into the ring, the ring here being the realm of consciousness that Li continually seeks to know better, to expand, to care for more effectively. For our language to remain alive, our culture must remain alive also-which means it has to change, evolve. Only in this way can language be “living.” A dead language isn’t just a language that is no longer spoken it’s a language that doesn’t exist because that culture it belonged to no longer exists. The number of squiggly red lines that I encountered while reading this draft on my computer made me happy because I thought-yes, we need new words, newer and more refined words to capture the highly specific insights of each person. One way in which the “quest for novelty” is very clear is in your use of language, or more specifically, in your development of new language (“metaphysical microbiome”) to capture new experiences and a renewed consciousness, neologisms such as: brainwardly, metatwinkling, deshoeing, everyone-stabilizing, Yahwehistly, bathroomward-as well as idioms that create a delightful vernacular for Li and his small circle that includes his parents and Kay (YGs, microfireflies, Yoshida Effect, phubbing). There is a kinetic quality to it that comes from its insistence on building new modes of survival, from breathing and eating to caregiving and loving. LEAVE SOCIETY, I think, nudges feeling toward action, actually transmogrifies feeling into action. Somehow it seems to be the opposite of Wordsworth’s view of poetry-“emotion recollected in tranquility”-the poem as a jar for storing feeling. Strange that even with the root of the word right there, it’s so radical (to me): that a novel can “generate novelty”-that it can not only change or deepen thought patterns, but actually create new outcomes. The “point” of the novel, then, is not merely to be an archive of time spent and things learned, an inert past, but rather an active present and a dynamic imagined future in which the energy set forth by the novel gathers momentum and continues writing itself, writing the world. Late in the book, Li makes the following observation: “He could feel his notes and novel pushing him to do things, generate novelty.” I was awestruck by this line because it revealed the entirety of the novel as a kind of organism-a living unit that could enact real change, a member of an ecosystem in which the reader is also a member-and also as a piece of performance art, which novels, generally, aren’t.
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