However you arrived here, welcome. I’m Emily, and I write letters about trying to make sense of a changing world and our place in it—by reading, walking, documenting.
Increasingly, since I’ve made Berlin’s acquaintance in the summer-august of 2019, I’ve found myself more attuned to the everyday details of city life and how cities work, how its particular features determine its symbiotic relations with its human and animal inhabitants. I think it has something to do with how W.C. and I met, walking the city from dusk till dawn those first two weeks, and his appreciation of details as a artist that even I, a writer and obsessive (but patchy) documentarian, would miss. The onslaught of the pandemic soon after, with its lockdowns and proscriptions, also made me more appreciative of the world outside, of how walking allows for more spontaneous discovery and encounters, even in familiar urban settings.
On a trip to Hanoi last year, I made a list of notes on the various things I noticed. I’ve started doing that in Berlin too, though my broken foot hasn’t regained its full mobility yet. This has also made me think more about how our bodies—a vehicle, too—carry us through spaces, how that’s something we really can’t take for granted.
Sometimes I write these diaristic things (I’m not trying to sell you something or teach you something or influence you into something) and I wonder if people would want to read them—if, though written for myself, others would get something out of them too. The answer is, I’m sure, yes, in the same way I get something out of reading other people’s ‘diaries’ too, especially as it relates to their surroundings, how life is different where they are, how that shapes them in different ways. Still, I think that’s why I haven’t been emailing out recent letters, preferring to just publish them here, and whoever finds them, finds them. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling question: “But what are you offering your newsletter subscribers?!” Even if I know better.
In all honesty, I write first for myself, just to get things out of my head so I can move on. I’m not speaking metaphorically here: it feels like writing things down actually clears my head, makes space for the possibility of new observations and memories. It also makes me feel more… material, somehow, as if bit by bit, by writing things, arranging them, organising them, making sense of them, I’m writing myself more and more into being. But that’s not all. Writing for me, for anyone, is also a way of expressing, in bits and pieces, what amounts to a sort of worldview—led by a curiosity, I suppose, to see how one’s worldview bumps up against those of others, as a way of learning more about the world: Have I missed anything? Am I mistaken? Etc etc. And so: the continued existence of this newsletter, or blog when I’m not sending it out. Thank you for continuing to read.
I arrived back in Berlin in late February, when sidewalks and street corners were still covered in snowfall from a few days’ prior. The weather was slightly warmer, sunnier, than I had expected. I hadn’t been back for more than a year, and I was curious to be here at the tail end of winter, since we usually visit W.C.’s country in the thick of the season, in time for Christmas. We returned to our building with its dilapidated facade, patchy where plaster had torn off, scrawled with graffiti, bricks chipped off windowsills. It was already dark when the taxi dropped us off, and entering the inner courtyard all I saw looking up were rectangles of yellow light, alternately sickly and warm.