"Funny and cutting, sarcastic and biting, and warm and fuzzy all at once" -Peter L

Making Time

I have spent a lot of time at the Merton house over the years, as I began going there with some frequency when I was about seven years old (I am now 37). I have consequently amassed many memories of Vanessa and the goings on in her house, but when I began thinking about her recently one image in particular emerged. It sprang from a memory of going over to Darrow’s house at around one or two in the morning and finding Vanessa awake. My guess is this would have happened at some point in college - perhaps when I was at City College and Darrow was at Columbia - though it was not unusual in any way to find her up at that time. At any rate, Vanessa was seated in her usual spot at the kitchen table. She was located at the epicenter of an enormous seashell sweep of newspapers fanning out to cover the entire surface of the table and her laptop was open in front of her where she sat underneath a jagged, yawning hole in the sheetrock above. That hole had steadily become yet another characteristic of the Merton house, remnant of an earlier ceiling collapse that fortunately injured no one, and still had years to go before it would have opportunity to heal.

I can’t remember what Vanessa and I spoke about then, but I’m sure I was happy to find her there because I’ve always had so much fun talking to her. She is somehow funny and cutting, sarcastic and biting, and warm and fuzzy all at once. She likes to chide me, though somehow I can sense the positive regard and playfulness behind her eyes. She is one of the few people who doesn’t make me feel self-conscious about my impulsive tendency to herald ideas that occur randomly to me and are, I imagine, of dubious quality. She is always busy, always in the middle of something, and always ready to dive into something with me anyway. I am grateful to her for this. I imagine a rhetorically skilled, Harvard-trained lawyer who spends all her time fighting for immigrants and prodding local politicians into action might easily justify ignoring an insignificant bag of air such as myself at two in the morning, and yet she has not done so.

On this occasion, as on many others, she did not ignore me but rather initiated a conversation. In classic form, she continued all the while to type away, pausing occasionally to squint down her nose at her laptop before letting out another burst of keystrokes. Vanessa typed with the sporadic cadence of popcorn beginning to burst in the microwave. After our conversation had petered out, I watched with wonder, as she had, it appeared to me, mastered the ultimate feat of multitasking(1): She had managed to interweave her furious typing with an odd, head-lilting slumber. The image of this remains vivid in my memory - a cycle of heavy staccato typing followed by silence during which her fingers remained frozen over the keyboard and her head drooped forwards lending the impression of a gravity powered roller coaster inching slowly over a hump so it might be pulled down the next slope. At the end of each sleepy nod, her head accelerated towards the keys only to jolt upright again, averting collision with the table and resulting in a sharpening of her eyes on the screen followed by yet another burst of typing.

I believe this vision of work interspersed with sleep seeded an idea that ended up appearing in my graduate school dissertation. Specifically, it occurred to me then that there was a great and consequential perceptual rift between the observer and the observed, as represented, for example, by the subjective versus the objective sense of the passage of time. In her mind’s eye, I imagined, she typed both furiously and continuously. She would report if asked, I believed, a work-filled night with no sleep, yet I knew different. I pictured her internal reel playing next to mine, the first- and third-person accounts representing a version of Rashomon updated for TikTok, and I laughed to myself. It made sense that someone of Vanessa’s greatness would have figured out how to sleep and work at the same time. It seemed both natural and important that she might be able to provide herself with the illusion of constant motion - there is always so much to be done after all. It seemed unhealthy certainly, but also like an act of genius. Perhaps a bit ridiculous too, like Einstein’s hair.

In my mind’s eye - undoubtedly full of delusions and half-truths - I attached this snippet of a scene as the moment during which I decided to study perception and subjectivity by looking more into dissociative phenomena. This in itself is irrelevant, as I have no great finding or scientific contribution to show for myself; however, regardless of the veracity of my memory of this particular event or any direct consequence of what I observed, I believe there is meaning in the placement of this scene in the reel of my memory. True or not, in my mind’s eye Vanessa served an essential function in inspiring me to pursue a graduate degree which has served me well thus far. She occupies a central role in my trajectory and has been a frequent touchstone. I have been able to rely on her to be in that spot in the kitchen when I come through, as long as I do so at around two in the morning. Her utter dependability has been so important to me.

I have not had much opportunity to chat with Vanessa lately - not since I moved to Texas - but I carry her around in my head with a few other key figures in my life (e.g. my parents). She will sometimes speak to me out of the recesses of my brain advising me earnestly not to act like a moron. Occasionally I have the good fortune of hearing her actual voice over the phone, as I did recently when I called Darrow after I found an unfired bullet sitting in a parking lot. He patched her in, and she (and Steve, who chimed in as well) helped me figure out what to do. She said, more or less immediately, “I assume you weren’t stupid enough to touch it.” Even though I had to admit I had, she set aside my foolishness with a chuckle and gave me some pragmatic action steps anyway.

Peter L


(1)As an aside, I am in awe of the Merton multitasking ability. Darrow has it too. In high school, under threat of a catastrophic multi-course failure during senior year, I remember him writing at least one make-up essay on a laptop while playing a computer game on an adjacent desktop, all the while somehow attending to the TV which blared somewhere in the background.