Over the summer, while watching apocalyptic scenes of Australia burning, I did what I was beginning to think I might never actually do—submit my PhD thesis. A week later I started a sessional teaching job, which three weeks after that migrated online due to an apocalyptic global pandemic. One of the subjects I’m teaching is on Decadent literature, which considers not only Decadence, but also a host of related ‘isms’ (aestheticism, symbolism, naturalism, etc.) of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. As a result, for the past nine weeks I have inhabited, in my reading and non-reading lives, two distinct and incongruous temporalities.

On the syllabus for Decadent literature last week was a book by one of my favourite authors: Henry James (the lecturer also happens to be a brilliant James scholar; she and I have been anticipating ‘James week’ all semester). Decadence, a term that resists definition as a generic and aesthetic category, involves the indulgence of perverse pleasures. A perverse pleasure of reading James is his prose, which on a good day you might call mildly frustrating. His trio of late works in particular are both notorious and celebrated for their dense and difficult style. I’m a fast reader, but these novels each took months to finish, on account of having to read many passages many times over to understand what was happening (sometimes, after the fifth or fiftieth re-reading, I would just give up and move on).