I read these a long while ago, but recently was reminded of them during a call with a friend newly moved to Seattle. This short short story and poem go together quite well, I think. I would recommend first the story, then the poem.

The short story is called “The Overcoat”, by Gina Berriault. It’s some amount of a riff on the original “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol (which is definitely worth reading, and said by Dostoyevsky and others to have been incredibly foundational!), though quite different in setting and spirit.

Anyhow, I love this story, and by the end of it I find myself shivering. I could not find a pdf of it anywhere, so I’ve attached images of the pages here from a huge short story anthology (Ann Charters). I particularly love the opening paragraph, cataclysmic rains, cold as an execution dawn. These words in particular stick with me. Reproduced here without permission but with the purest of intents.

And then, the corresponding poem, by Franz Wright: “To Myself”. I quite like the final stanza, and the sort of comedic but not at all facetious bent to it, still sweet: it won’t always be like this, I am going to buy you a sandwich, … Which, perhaps I am so drawn to because I have (largely subconsciously) spent a lot of time and energy attempting to comfort myself.

More generally, I think grad school thus far has been a huge identity crisis for me. Tapping into my literary side feels comforting in a way I had forgotten, and in a way that is much less incentivized and supported by my social millieu these days. For the same reasons, it’s seeming likely that I’ll pick up Infinite Jest once again.