Slow Notes 08

January 2026 in review—and a few recommendations and prompts for you.

Jan 31, 2026

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👋 Notes on January

Relentless. One word to describe one world enduring relentless violence, cruelty, apathy. It’s all-consuming until you remember compassion still exists just beyond the corners of our screens. But this month always seems to be a test of endurance. In fact, I was just saying to someone that I can’t remember a January untouched by total chaos. If we think about time in the linear sense, then we’re stuck in a cycle where the year’s beginnings are immediately frayed at the edges. The day starts and we wake up with sobering clarity—and uncertainty: What is it now? Has anything changed? Will it ever?

These questions call to mind my ongoing experience with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. It’s November 18th when we meet our heroine Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller who’s traveled to Paris to source objects for her business, T.&T. Selter. After visiting her friend Philip (and his girlfriend Marie) at his shop, Tara returns to her hotel—only to wake up to the same day the next morning. She eventually goes home, yet time doesn’t go with her. She explains the situation to her partner and husband, Thomas, repeating the process again and again. Together, they search for a way out of November 18th, but these efforts can only last so long. After a year, Tara comes to terms with her present reality (or unreality), ultimately leaving Thomas behind to return to the source of her transformation.

The second book in this captivating, seven-part story plunges us into movement: Back to Paris and then on to Denmark, Sweden, Germany and more, Tara travels in search of seasons—forward trajectory. “If I am to have a future I must have years, and if I am to have years, I must have seasons,” Tara tells us. “Without seasons, no time. If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself.”

A woman may be stuck in time, but no person is an island. For Tara, building that future begins in connection: a heartbroken girl on a train establishes a sense of intimacy; a meteorologist maps weather patterns so Tara can experience the sensorial pleasures she desperately craves; a car accident with another acquaintance reinforces the fragility of Tara’s situation, and also of life itself. All the while, snow falls and Tara is “searching for the heart of winter, consummate winter, concentrated winter.”

In one of these interactions, Tara visits her parents for “Christmas.” They acknowledge her unexplainable circumstances, hopeful she’ll find her way back into the fold. “I was sure there would be an answer,” she reiterates. “Out there somewhere there would be a solution. And I would find it. I would keep traveling, I would keep my eyes open, I would listen to people’s conversations. … The world is full of good advice if you listen.” Her mother isn’t so sure what can be learned from eavesdropping on strangers, but Tara continues on: “I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything. And if you couldn’t find it in people’s conversations you could try listening to birdsong. Or the sound of the wind. You will always find your way to something.”

Off the page, I listen to people much smarter than me organizing, activating, creating. I listen for winter’s call, embracing the season with the respect it deserves. I know the stakes are higher than ever. It’s cold out there. Chilling. The ice isn’t melting fast enough. It’s gathering in shards with unchecked, brute force. My beloved winter is overrun with ugliness. Time feels like an accumulation of losses. This season already asks for so much and provides little room for comfort—unless we accept the hard work of humanity. The hard work of living among hate and, more importantly, living to spite it.

It makes sense to me that Tara finds comfort and agency in “building seasons,” though it’s no easy feat. Along the way, she navigates material interventions, too: She hurts her ankle and grieves the theft of a bag containing her cherished seasons notebook. Internet history is erased and gifts disappear at the start of yet another November 18th. A Roman coin from Philip’s shop serves as an “emblem of the past” and an unlikely companion while she claws her way towards an uncertain future.

Despite her line of work, Tara admits she wasn’t always interested in history. Rather she’s interested in “everything dropped outside of history.” But the sestertius coin invites deeper inquiry. She begins studying the Romans, discovering parallels between the empire they built and the life she’s constructing within her current limitations. “Maybe they didn’t want to go on,” Tara suggests. “They stopped and built a wall. Because they didn’t want to go any further. Maybe they simply wanted to live in a container with a view of the sky and clouds. But I will not be halted, now I want to move on.”

Tara contends that the Roman Empire has “become her mirror.” That “time is a container.” That like the coin, the Romans, she is fixed. Stopped. In a similar vein, if the American Empire is our mirror, what do we see? Simultaneous destruction and the construction of a sinister container being painted red in every way possible.

But, like Tara, I keep my eyes open. I try to see backward and look forward. “I wake up and roam around history. I feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.”

Though her story is still unfolding, it has become my mirror, offering incisive observations and beautiful sentences that help me overcome my own paralysis: I will not be halted. I want to move on. I want all people to move safely and freely (a conviction that stretches long before and long after this current moment). I want to see children walking hand in hand to school with their parents. I want parents to feel at home in their bodies and minds. I want us to learn from the stories we keep telling each other—I want to keep telling myself that we will.

By the end of book two, Tara reveals she’s not alone in her unending November 18th. There is someone else who might understand the singular pain and nuance of being frozen in a particular time with no control and seemingly no way forward. At this point, readers haven’t officially met this character, and I haven’t started the third volume, so I can’t say I know where the story is heading next. Still, it helps to sit with Tara before crossing another threshold. It helps to read fiction that shines a light on the fact that it’s Groundhog Day, relentless, unending, whatever you want to call it. Yet for as isolated as we may feel, we are bound together by history—a collective understanding that what we share is now. And now is not the time to look away.