THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 39BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, BY ADRIAN TOMINElie beyond the realm of reality.” I differ
from Ginzburg in that I have never
been able to look for (or find) any joys,
great or small, beyond the realm of re-
ality, whatever that means (I am read-
ing her, after all, in translation). Or, at
least, I haven’t yet. But her sense of an-
cient and immutable law seems to me
spot on, and, in certain circumstances,
a great relief.
I don’t mean to imply that there
aren’t ten thousand reasons that we
shouldn’t be where we are today, or that
no one is responsible for the suffering
at hand and to come. People are re-
sponsible, and we know their names.
People were also responsible for the
murder of Ginzburg’s husband, who
went from writing at that oval table
surrounded by his children’s toys to
dying of cardiac arrest and acute chole-
cystitis in prison (the latter being a gall-
bladder infection likely brought on by
torture). I only mean to say that, for
those steeped in the belief that great
calamity should not, cannot, be our
lot—or that, if we work hard enough
or try hard enough or hope hard enough
or are good or inventive enough, we
might be able to outfox it—it can be a
relief to admit our folly and rejoin the
species, which is defined, as are all forms
of life, by a terrible and precious pre-
carity, to which some bodies need no
reintroduction.
I think I reached for “Winter in the
Abruzzi” because I needed this reminder,
I needed its stern and tender fellow-
ship, which it delivered to me today
across seventy-six years and 6,331 miles
(much farther than six feet away). That
the essay brought me to tears was not
new. But this time, rather than weep
for Ginzburg alone, I wept for us all, as
we, too, bought oranges at Girò’s, and
went walking in the snow.
—Maggie Nelson
1
THENURSE’SOFFICES
o sue me: I sometimes find Presi-
dent Trump’s voice reassuring. Not
what he says. Not the actual words (al-
though once in a while one of his “in-
credibles” reaches inside my chest cav-
ity and magically calms the tachycardia).
Trump’s primitive syntax, imperfectly
designed for the young foreign womanhe married, always dismays. But during
a coronavirus-task-force press confer-
ence, when one hears him on the radio,
from another room, his voice has music.
Sorry. It does. A singer’s timbre; it is
easy on the ear. Trump’s is a voice you
use to calm down people you yourself
have made furious. (His foremost mim-
ics—Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert—
have not captured its pitch, its air, its
softness, which they substitute with
dopiness, which is also there.) For the
first ten minutes, before his composure
slackens and he becomes boastful and
irritable, he actually just wants to be
Santa Claus in his own Christmas movie,
and the quality of his voice is that of a
pet owner calming a pet. I hear it!
And for those ten minutes the ani-
mal part of me is soothed. The part of
me that understands only seven En-
glish words and wants a biscuit in the
shape of a bone wags its tail.
The first time the stock market heard
him speak soothingly, at a press con-
ference in March, it shot up happily.
Exactly like a happy dog. The second
time, the market was not so fooled. The
third time, it was tired and seemed to