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August 7, 2026
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from Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
“Her garden is not metaphor, metonymy, or symbol.”
After the suicide of her second son, James, which echoed in several ways the suicide of her first son, Yiyun Li wrote the memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. To honor James’ life as an autistic young man with savant abilities and out of respect for his choices, she thought her way through the book with Euclid as her guide, expressing as little emotion as possible, and Hanon, the piano finger exercises, for solace. As our Paragraph of the Week illustrates, the most powerful emotions are those that defy expression.
The Paragraph of the Week
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Playing the Hanon exercises is a way of marking time, and so are all my other activities: working through Euclid's geometry books; going to piano lessons; taking a midday walk with my husband (in cold February rain, in a fragrant April breeze, in an unrelenting June heat); reading, writing, baking soda bread or yogurt coffee cake; pruning and feeding the roses, planting new seedlings, going outside to yell at the newborn bunnies that are feasting on my garden and then giving up when the bunnies cannot be stopped; weeding, weeding, weeding and then one day giving up because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow.
—Yiyun Li
Commentary
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In the Hanon exercises, the beginning piano student repeats a pattern of notes with both hands going up and down the keyboard as a way to improve finger strength, dexterity, and control. They are, as in all music and in all that lives and grows, a way of “marking time.” Mechanical and repetitious, their beauty is their movement with subtle variations in pitch through time. This metronomic beat, Yiyun Li writes, is the way of the natural world. Her garden is not metaphor, metonymy, or symbol; it does not express an emotion or stand for an idea because it is part of nature and “things in nature merely grow,” unlike the dead who, and here lies the unspoken heartbreak, “are not going anywhere, do not need to mark time,” and “don’t necessarily help us mark time either.” This gap defines the inexpressible abyss that Yiyun Li cannot cross, but her book invites us to enter. “Words may fall short,” she writes, “but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.”
—THE
This Visible Speaking
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Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
