on yiyun li's meditations

#scurf214: her essays have a way of pausing time

Not that I am particularly afraid of flying, but somehow I always end up craving the comfort of the familiar written word while suspended up there, in nether. Like the rest of us, I fly for work, but also for personal reasons. And it's those in-flight hours that I have come to look forward to, to cut off and completely immerse myself in reading an essay or two. Coincidentally enough these essays, over the last year, have all been by one writer — Yiyun Li.

Many of us readers might recognise Yiyun from her (extensive) writing on the themes of mourning, grief and loss. But on the sidelines of it, she has to offer more, a kind of rekindling of hope, an affection for starting something and also for carrying on.

a portrait of Yiyun from a 2022 NYT Mag profile: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/magazine/yiyun-li.html

My habit of reading while traveling happened perchance, consecutively over five, even six, distinct journeys, which immediately made me ponder on the pith of her non-fiction writing and its correlation with the comfort the ever so tired, desperate and wandering mind of a flyer craves.

Li's essays range in their topics from language, to Montaigne, to gardening. Through them she does not merely meditate on these topics, but also brings out peculiar personal predispositions, tics and preferences. She takes the reader on this journey with an elegance and lightness which is perhaps so utterly missing in the post-pandemic flying experience.

Not only is her writing immersive but also subversive, giving the readers a chance to hop out of their minds and into the various worlds Yiyun weaves through her essays. Reading her non-fiction feels like a kind of a pilgrimage to my own heart and soul, enabling an ongoing creative conversation within.

For me, Li's writing inspires emotional comfort and also a sense of belongingness, especially when flying as an unmoored person in today’s world. Being with her as she explores nature, the transposition of grief onto the physical landscape around and the literal and metaphorical power of writing in a language that is not her mother tongue, feels like being in the company of a long lost friend.

It’s difficult to say this without implying an off-kilter, woolly sort of hippyness, but I find Li's essayistic writing consistently moving. In her work, the transience of existence is consoled and moderated by quotidian, rooted and earthly rituals. Her essays are the kind of paganistic-adjacent perspective that could easily come off as a little hackneyed, even contrived, in lesser hands. But they are entirely convincing and reaffirming when served by her abundant intelligence and measured calm. It feels like she has done what perhaps she set out to do with them, calm the nerves of a mourning self and, by extension, a mourning world. Here’s a list of her essays that I’ve loved reading and the re-reading from old print outs:

1. Writing about Understanding - The Paris Review

2. First Sentence - Granta

3. The Ability to Cry - The New Yorker

4. How to Raise a ‘Warrior Queen’ - NYT

5. In the Before Time - The New Yorker

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