Dear Friend,
Thank you for a strange and somewhat unsettling, but also educational, read through Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, last month. We now turn our attention to Seán Hewitt’s memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, which I have been looking forward to reading since its pre-release announcement.
Our November 2024 Reading Selection
I was first introduced to Seán Hewitt through the On Being podcast’s Poetry Unbound companion. I now have two of his poetry collections (Rapture’s Road and Tongues of Fire) and this memoir, and I’m eager to dive in, though I know this one has been described as heartbreaking and emotional. That said, there’s something about November (and February) that feels right for heavy reading. I don’t know if this changing season, the cooling temperatures and nature nodding toward slumber, or if it’s that the nights are darker earlier, and the mornings come late. But the time feels right for this one.
Publisher’s description: When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.
All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.
Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and specters of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.
Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honors the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps. (Penguin Random House)
About the author: SEÁN HEWITT’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times (London) as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Hewitt is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. (Penguin Random House)
Why Contemplative Reading?
Contemplative reading asks us not just what we’re learning about the book in our hands (or ears), but what we’re learning about ourselves through the experience of reading it. The aim is to create deeper awareness of ourselves and understanding of others. It is often described as “holistic,” but also as “heart-knowing.”
Heart-knowing. Doesn’t that sound nice?
The Plan
This book is divided into six parts of 229 pages. I’m going to divide this into four equal parts, posting my responses each Wednesday. There is one week (Nov 13-20 that is a bit longer than the others, but I think that’s convenient for those of us in the U.S who will be celebrating Thanksgiving the week after.)
- Nov. 06: Chapter 1 and 2 (pages 3-46)
- Nov. 13: Chapter 3 (pages 50-97)
- Nov. 20: Chapter 4 and 5 (pages 101-174)
- Nov. 27: Chapters 6 and 7 (pages 177-229)
Reading & Responding
Each set of reading will guide my responses here on the blog and on social media. I will sometimes share the most provocative line or passage, and what it makes me think about. Other times, I’ll ask questions about the reading, things I’m wondering about or confused about. And still further, I might compare what I’m reading to what it reminds me of from other readings or experiences. I don’t want to give too much guidance about how to read, except to say, read attentively, read slowly, and listen to yourself. What thoughts and feelings arise as you’re reading? Write them down and give yourself some moments to reflect on why you’re thinking what you’re thinking, or why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.
I encourage you to join these conversations and leave your thoughts in the blog comments or on your socials. On social media, please use #theCRPblog.
Meditation
“What if it was myself, or that lost version of me, a flicker of the past — would I know his face, and would he know mine? All that time I had been haunted by him, and still I hardly knew what that self was, that version of me that existed before the world had said become, and I had answered in its language.” ― Seán Hewitt,
With loving hope for this new month,
~Adam
Contemplative Reading Project 
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