Small pieces are gathered to form a cohesive whole. But if those pieces are rearranged and changed slightly, would a new whole emerge?

With a deep exhale into carefully chosen words, Durga Chew-Bose (born in 1986) triumphantly declares in Too Much and Not the Mood about all her small pieces: "I am all of this. Rearrange at will; I will still be all of this."

How many versions of happiness involve a smile? Are determined by feeling fulfilled? How many versions of happiness require acquisition? My version swears by distraction. By curling up inside the bends of parentheses. I digress, but not idiomatically. I digress intentionally.

Too Much and Not the Mood is the debut collection of essays from this Canadian-born, New York-based author. An author who navigates a constant state of extended feeling deploys gentle but penetrative observation, and is the kind of person Henry James would call "someone on whom nothing is lost."

Illustration by Maira Kalman for The Principles of Uncertainty.

The most minute detail of her twenty-eight years on Earth is drawn into Chew-Bose's tough and tender brain and spindled into gold. Ruminations of life, culture, identity, love, writing, and other shiny objects that light our souls.

Though if I'm honest, the thought of splitting a sandwich suddenly makes me enormously sad. How long has it been since I've enjoyed the company of someone else enjoying his food? The way he'd toss chips in his mouth and savor the crunch, and then wipe his hands on his jeans, and smile—not at me specifically but at this wonderfully unspectacular event: the sandwich, the chips, the crunch, our appetites.

Like many twenty-somethings, Chew-Bose throws her essence and reflection against the wizened world, and the world scuttles by complacent. Or the world misspeaks her name. Her name essay is exceptional.   "My name is one of the smallest kernels of who I am."  
Chew-Bose considers her name deeply, as befits one bearing a name from a Satyajit Ray character. I think of Ray's The Apu Trilogy of which film critic Roger Ebert wrote  
"That great, sad, gentle sweep of the Apu Trilogy remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be."  
   
What uplift. I wish Ebert and Chew-Bose could have met. Film is a critical consistency for the young author, she writes: "A nook person can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once." What a conversation she and Ebert would have had!

To be first-generation means acquiescing to a lasting state of restlessness. It's as if you've inherited not just your family's knotted DNA but also the DNA acquired from their move, from veritable mileage, from the energy it took your parents to reestablish their lives. I learned early […] that my parents were not from here, but from there: Kolkata.

In Letters to a Young Artist, Anna Deavere Smith wrote beautifully about the tension of name: we want our name to be known, but if it becomes too well-known, it becomes a persona that occludes our true self. Classics scholar Robin Lane Fox urged learning names because it deepens distinction and allows us to notice the individual.   When he was a child, physicist Richard Feynman was introduced by his father to the concept of inertia without knowing it was called inertia.  
"The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard."  
The anecdote underscores the essence of names; that while a name matters, knowing something/someone matters a lot more.

Sea glass. My collection. Each is remarkably individual. "There is a kind of person who collects sand..." wrote Italo Calvino in his essays on human invention.

Names are critical to that we are and can introduce conversation on who we are. "My name is a nation," wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates. But as Chew-Bose and many others know, it is also a constant reminder that one is "not from here."

As for personal definitions, besides being a writer,   On being a writer, Chew-Bose notes:  
   
"Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more. Hanging on despite the nausea of producing nothing good by noon, despite the Sisyphean task of arriving at a conclusion that pleases. That spiteful blink of my cursor."  
George Orwell agreed "Writing a book is horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness..."  
For more on not writing while writing, look at Dani Shapiro's wonderful memoir on the perils of the writing life or Dorothea Brande's thoughtful advice to writers who simply cannot write. Chew-Bose delightfully calls herself a "nook" person who seeks uninterrupted silence and the contained warmth of corners.

I don't require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what's close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.

"Slabworks" 2019, Anthony Gormley. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Oliver Sacks wrote in his memoirs (he had many) that "he sat at the intersection of biography, biology, person and personhood" (and he spent his life expanding the concept of personhood). To those who grieve at young people writing memoirs, I say pish-posh. Person and personhood are not something we arrive at it; it is something we explore over time, throughout life.

I'm thankful that a person of Chew-Bose's insight and sensitivity was generous enough to write while young. Because it will be delightful to see how she continues to impose her wanderings.