Things I can’t live without: books, notebooks, fountain pens, my dog, my husband, more books, striped breton shirts, decent underwear (duh), eyeliner, coffee, a good pair of runners.

I could live without: these awful leather sofas and peeling wallpaper, the clothes I don't like but wear anyways, the lack of privacy that comes with living above a pub; what I live with anyways.

What I sometimes long for: baths, city-wandering, a balcony where it is warm and sunny and I have an interesting view of a city or the sea.

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I could do without the constant calls on my attention, on the space in which I might form a sense of a reflective self. But even when I have that space, it is often cold and empty. I seldom think of anything.

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When I was younger, I was much interested in sociopolitical issues, but that inquisitiveness has been eroded by small town life. In cities there was enough distance between myself and my neighbour to look at reality with a more critical eye. Now, if I ever think of the political or the social, it is when I am reading, as when I read Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel Winter In Sokcho, set in a small town near the DMZ between South and North Korea. The state of war leaches into everyday life, even into the relationship between the narrator and the French graphic novelist she desires, making romance impossible; desire, unrequited.

I feel more alive in those times of reading, more aware of the tensions in reality which made life more interesting, because I was finally paying more attention, not only to the world in Dusapin’s novel, but also to my own reality.

Moreover, I think the novels that attract me, which excite me to such thinking, are those novels that also have nested in them another novel, a utopian one. The novel itself makes the political and the social apparent to its readers, whether through setting or characters or actions; it reveals just how certain choices are perhaps inevitably taken because of political and social circumstances. The shadow novel, the utopian novel, is discernible only in the blank spaces, the silences, of the actual novel, in which escape, transcendence, or a working through and away from such circumstances is imaginable. Utopia is not the perfect world; it is that impossible place that invites the imagination to envision alternative ways of being.

So maybe, along with notebooks, eyeliner, decent underwear, the things that give me shape, I cannot live without utopia, even as it is the most elusive thing in the world.

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