The Anthropologists

It was a shock to be reminded of my youth, which I had recently abandoned. It seemed to belong to another time, when the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.

And what we wanted above all, what we wanted to find in the city, were people with whom we could abandon the rules even as we were establishing them, those people who could become our family.

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn’t quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn’t want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

This was one reason for Manu’s calm optimism, because he was constantly immersed in narratives of creation and collapse, centuries condensed to the span of forty-five minutes, from which he emerged, taking off his headphones, a little transformed, back in the present world, which was no more or less strange than the one he’d just traveled to.

For now, I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life, and to praise its unremarkable grace.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.

I cannot say that we felt familiar, only that we wanted to become familiar, and so we accepted the city’s ways. Besides, we’d always known that wherever we lived would require us to change. There was no place where we could feel at ease, no language that, after so many years, we could sink into like a deep sleep.

This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something of them—a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product.

My grandmother had a way of confusing perspectives during conversations, the small and the big, the faraway and close by. She might not know the new developments in our lives—that I had received a grant, that we were looking for an apartment to buy—but she would ask what we’d made for dinner the previous day or whether I had taken down my winter cl