the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt five)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 037

I could never understand why my father would use the word phenomenological incorrectly. But I didn’t have the heart to correct him. We were eating lunch. It might not be interesting to you. He said: “Humans will always have need of three things: food, transport, and funerals.” And so I became a funeral director, and now it’s my job to dispose of terminated workers and, in a few instances, bodies left over after sickness or reuploading. We’ve developed our own little ritual here, given that cremation is the only option and the bereaved have nowhere to go. Or perhaps bereaved isn’t the right word. I don’t know if you grieve over a coworker, but we perform the ritual anyway, out of respect, and you can’t exactly rule out relations occurring between members of the crew. But maybe that’s not what you’re here to investigate? I’m almost invisible to the others. No one wants to talk to me. Of course, there are quite a number of the crew who aren’t ever going to die, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess at how it affects them psychologically. If you can even talk about psychology in such cases. But maybe that’s what you’re here to investigate? At any rate, psychology or no, there’s still the physical matter to be taken care of, and that’s my job. I don’t find it unpleasant or repugnant. I’ve got nothing against death. Nothing against rotting away. What frightens me is what doesn’t die and never changes form. That’s why I’m proud of being a human, and I carry the certainty of my future death with honor. It’s what sets me apart from certain others here. But what is it you want me to talk about? The first thing I did when I came here was to get rid of my dialect. The next thing I did was to make sure the incinerator and the ventilation systems were working properly. I can report that they were, and very efficiently too. Sadly, I don’t get to use the incinerator as often as I’d like. There aren’t that many of us, to be honest. You want to know why I like the incinerator? It’s the smell of burnt matter, it reminds me of mealtimes at home. The smell of meat and soil and blood. It smells of the birth of my daughter. It smells of planet Earth. It’s not that I’m not happy here. My job here means everything to me. I was the best in my year, that’s why I’m here today. My father’s been dead for years now. I’m not sure why he came to mind. He belongs to another world.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt four)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 033

I put on my yellow headgear. Once I’m wearing it, the person I am recedes into the background and I become the first officer. I throw the golden ball high into the air and catch it when it falls. I’m 10 years old, I’m 34 years old, I’m 50 years old. I pass through the corridor in my suit, the fragrance showers down on me, and I am cleansed. When I enter the room containing the objects, I am, in every respect, the ship’s pilot, every remnant of the private person is gone. I am the first officer. I pass from object to object and greet them in turn. I’m in no hurry. When the ritual is completed, I’m ready to begin the passage. I fly most of the routes, but since I’m not always able to wear the yellow headgear, others have been first officer too, and have performed the ritual in the same way. As long as you’re in the suit and pass through the corridor to be cleansed, you’re the first officer. All of us who have performed the ritual share that status; each of us is there, in a way, whenever the headgear is held up to be worn, whenever, after cleansing, one of us enters the room containing the objects and greets them in turn. As representatives we have to be as one. Otherwise the objects won’t recognize us.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt three)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 026

The fragrance in the room has will and intention. It’s the smell of something old and decomposing, something musty. It’s as if the smell wishes to initiate the same process in me: that I become a branch to break off, rot, and be gone.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt two)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 027

My research has led me to the conclusion that the best way of establishing contact with the objects is through smell. So I chew bay leaves when I’m in there with them. I’ve made several scientific advances by means of this technique, which has encouraged several of the objects to respond to my approaches by emitting a smell in return. Each object has a distinctive, and dare I say, personal smell at its center, and the object guards it the way a hand might clutch a pearl.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt one)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 011

The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that’s why I’m drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber. A brown scent. Pungent and abiding. It can remain on the skin, in the nostrils, for up to a week. I know the smell of oakmoss, because you’ve planted it inside me, just as you’ve planted the idea that I should love one man only, be loyal to one man only, and that I should allow myself to be courted. All of us here are condemned to a dream of romantic love, even though no one I know loves in that way, or lives that kind of a life. Yet these are the dreams you’ve given us. I know the smell of oakmoss, but I don’t know what it feels like to the touch. Still, my hand bears the faint perception of me standing at the edge of a wood and staring out at the sea as my palm smooths this moss on the trunk of the oak. Tell me, did you plant this perception in me? Is it a part of the program? Or did the image come up from inside me, of its own accord?

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt ten)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

Her health declined further. Severe tendonitis was forcing her to wear an immobilizing brace on her right hand and arm. Writing had become all but impossible, and dictation of serious work was always out of the question. She’d written to Carrie Miner Sherwood, her childhood friend: “Of course I can’t dictate my own work—I have to see the picture shape itself on the page before me—the sound of my own voice would make me self-conscious. But I dictate all my letters, even those to old and dear friends.” Willa was in decline and knew it; she’d come to see life as a series of unbearable goodbyes, and lived clinched against the next devastating blow. In the Line-a-Day she kept sporadically at this time, “very tired” and “deathly tired” are typical entries. Additional strain resulted from her determination to dictate responses to the soldiers and sailors who’d read her books in the special Armed Forces Editions and written to thank her. While she was inclined in these years to say no to most everything—no to all requests to adapt books for stage or screen or radio, no to Viking’s proposal of a Portable Cather, no to all interviews—she felt an obligation to the men at arms she heard from almost daily and made it a priority to dictate responses to them.

On the other hand, her response to a Professor Carl J. Weber of Colby College was blunt. She begged for no more queries about her sources, meetings, inspirations, and creative process. “After all,” she tersely wrote, “this is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She concluded the letter with a preposterous lie, and slammed the door: “I am leaving for Mexico City within a few days, and this is an opportune time to bring our correspondence to a close.” Whenever Willa wished to fend someone off, she would say she was going to Mexico City, a place she never in her life visited.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt nine)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

In any case, she was about to turn her hand to something everyone would declare a masterpiece among masterpieces, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Stints of writing back in Red Cloud; at the Jaffrey Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire; on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy; at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and of course in her alcove at the apartment on Bank Street brought the book rapidly into being. Never had she labored with more confidence and clarity of purpose. She nimbly thought her way back to nineteenth-century New Mexico; and this first historical novel pleased her sufficiently that she would write two more: Shadows on the Rock, which takes place in late-seventeenth-century Quebec, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, laid in antebellum Virginia. Feeling more and more out of phase with her time, Cather found in historical fiction a consoling refuge and fresh idiom. She would finish the Archbishop in the autumn of 1926 and see it through serialization in The Forum between January and June. Knopf’s handsome edition appeared in September.

Cather had for many years been noting down hints and suggestions for a novel about the Southwest, her adopted landscape. Then it came to her in a flash: It was to center on the nineteenth-century priests who came to New Mexico to restore a Catholicism degraded by priestly concubinage and other outrages to the faith. She took her cue from an obscurely published book by Father William Howlett, Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, D.D. “At last,” writes Cather in her open letter on the Archbishop, printed in the Catholic magazine Commonweal, “I found out what I wanted to know about how the country and the people of New Mexico seemed to those first missionary priests from France. Without these letters in Father Howlett’s book to guide me, I would certainly never have dared to write my book.” Machebeuf becomes her Father Joseph Vaillant, vicar general of the diocese of New Mexico. Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who brought order to Santa Fe, becomes the book’s hero, Archbishop Jean Marie Latour. Richly embroidered with inset tales (in the tradition of Cervantes) and passionate evocations of the uncanny Southwestern landscape, the novel tells of the friendship between these two men, sons of the Auvergne and friends from childhood, devoted to the same professionalism, the same piety. And each the chief event in the other’s life. “To attempt to convey this hardihood of spirit” was her aim, as she says in the Commonweal letter. They are Archbishop and Vicar General, superior and subordinate. Yet the emotion of friendship makes equals of them—as friendship does. Educated Frenchmen, they would know Montaigne’s irreducible and unsurpassable characterization of the beauty of friendship: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Add to this that the two missionaries are probable saints and you have the formula for the book.