This place I've reached

All around him, the apartment filled with light.

My favorite line from my favorite book isn’t even from the book itself.

It’s borrowed from the Odyssey and placed in the hands of Willem, who whispers it to himself halfway through Hanya Yanagihara’s devastating masterpiece.

‘He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away—“And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all around him, the apartment filled with light.’

I fell in love with A Little Life at twenty-four, on my friend Allison’s advice, which is a strange way to end up what is notoriously not an easy recommendation. When it came out in 2015, the Los Angeles Times reviewer called it “the only novel I’ve read as an adult that’s left me sobbing,” while the New Yorker said “it can drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life.”

It leaves most people undone, and rightly so. It’s heartbreaking in its examination of suffering, endurance, and how much a person can bear before something essential gives way.

I still don’t have the language for why it remains the best book I’ve ever read, but I know it has something to do with chances, and how we keep getting them even when we don’t believe we will.

Perhaps seven years on, I’m finally beginning to understand the question Willem was really asking.

I’m boxing up most of my things and going through my belongings one by one. My copy of A Little Life is worn and yellowed and slightly wine-stained (?) and dog-eared in all the right places. I pick it up from the top shelf above my desk and re-read it front to back in less than three days, a marathon of tears and something like enchantment.

My grandmother is in the hospital as I write this, just months shy of turning 90, and today she managed to eat one of the cream-filled beignets I brought her. An entire one, with a big satisfied smile under the sad fluorescent lights.

Do any of us ever really get to Ithaca?

Is arrival even the right word for what happens when we reach the end of something?

In Italian, A Little Life becomes Una Vita Come Tante. A life like any other. Both the original and the translation hold the same unbearable truth: that every life is both common and catastrophic, unremarkable and completely irreplaceable.

I’m closer now than I’ve ever been to whatever Ithaca looks like for me —my work, my writing, my values, my boundaries, my people, an embodied understanding of who I am and what I’m here to do— and yet I no longer see it as a place.

Odysseus wasn’t searching for an island, but rather for the feeling of standing on that island and knowing, without question, that the searching was over. That he could stop now. That this —this— was what home felt like.

We keep arriving, over and over, and each time we have to ask again: Is this it? Can I stop now?

The answer is always yes and also no and also what did you expect and also this is more than you imagined and also this is all there is.

Just a little more light, a little more life, just a while longer.