How Converging Inspirations Inspired My Debut Book
A little under four years ago, I couldn’t help but feel constricted. I loved many aspects of my life in Chicago, a city that my wife and I, both British educators with incorrigible accents, had come to call home. However, amid fruitless job applications (an issue being that my spousal visa effectively limited my search radius) and the Midwest’s notoriously long, frigid winters, I was beginning to question why we had swapped a cottage in the English moors for a one-bedroom apartment by a former industrial site. Then, COVID-19 arrived. It no longer mattered that we lived close to our respective places of work: Zoom became our classroom, and our commutes, moments we cherished to stretch our legs and clear our minds, were gone.
Like everyone else, we had to adapt—and quickly. In an inverse of the co-working dream, we agreed to divide our open-plan apartment into separate classroom-offices. Most of the time, this system satisfied our needs, one of us managing to hide from the other’s webcam whenever they were teaching. Never being particularly adept at hide-and-seek, on one occasion my turned back was caught by a young student, who, concerned for my wife’s safety, asked her whether she knew there was a man in her apartment. However, in the main, we knew the boundaries of each other’s work space, and succeeded in creating individual compartments without having to mark them visually using string or tape.
The problem was that sound respects no such boundaries, and as a music teacher with forte projection, my wife’s classes could be noisy. With the loosening of lockdown measures, I decided to take a walk during a particularly spirited class on ‘The Rite of Spring,’ and, being bored, opted for a route unfamiliar to me. It would be rather glib to say that this 30-minute stroll changed my life, but in heightening my dulled senses, it certainly did alter the trajectory of my career to date. Whereas previously my focus might have been on other pedestrians, trying to avoid those awkward moments when you can’t work out which way to pass by, or endeavoring to skip past the yappiest dogs while their owner’s eyes are on their phone, now the streets were nearly empty.
Instead of worrying about passersby as I walked away from downtown, I began to notice all sorts of subtle features of the city’s landscape: the point at which Chicago’s iconic skyscraper-laden skyline is replaced by low-rises; the sudden tendency for advertisements to be written in Spanish rather than English; the way in which the logo of the Chicago White Sox began to supplant that of the Chicago Cubs on house and car windows alike. A sign in a small park insisted that visitors refrain from playing ball games; a different sign outside a factory was so insistent that would-be visitors avoid coming any closer, a barrier was unnecessary. All the while, I made sure to imagine and respect the six-foot social distancing rule mandated by the city and state governments, and saw that others were doing the same.
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Returning to my apartment, I felt rejuvenated. More than just enjoying some fresh air, I realized that my short walk had involved various kinds of dividing lines, none physical, yet all perceptible. My walk also raised some questions. As part of my route, I crossed a main road that in the past, others had advised me against doing, lest I encounter muggers or gangsters whose existence was apparently inconceivable on the ‘right’ side of the street. Notwithstanding the diminished presence of people due to COVID, I had seen no reason to fear this area of the city, compelling me to ask how such stigmatizing hearsay is able to circulate for generations.
Further, I noticed that the management company in charge of my apartment building had produced posters entreating residents to wear a face mask in communal spaces, yet although this rule was being enforced in the lobby, it did not seem to extend to the mail room or corridors. Like with the city’s land use, its inhabitants’ primary languages, their favorite sports teams, the rules directing where an activity acceptable in one place is forbidden in another, and the common belief that some areas are ‘safe’ whereas others are not, I wondered where the boundary was to be found.
In researching material, first for my classes, and later for fun, I encountered further examples of how humans have long carved up the world in ways beyond more formal borders. Redlining in the past and zoning in the present continue to explain most US cities’ distinctive separation of activities and opportunities. In the United States, people also speak authoritatively of a ‘Bible Belt,’ just as Australians describe an ‘Outback,’ even though the precise boundaries of these regions are abstract, subjective, and fluid. More broadly, it is conventional to speak of ‘the Western world,’ but who gets to define where its eastern frontier is located? Some of the invisible boundaries I came across are natural, such as that dividing ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ fauna between Indonesia’s islands. Others were created for a purpose, but have had unanticipated consequences, such as China’s historic policy of providing district heating systems only in the colder north, resulting in much higher levels of air pollution there.
As I reflected on my own upbringing—on classic English debates about where the North-South divide is to be found, on why in my hometown, there is an abrupt break between residential neighborhoods and countryside, on why I call the second day of the week ‘Chooz-day’ but my wife phrases it ‘Tooz-di’—I realized that our lives on Earth are profoundly shaped by our engagement with unseen boundaries. In fact, by keeping to distinct sections of our apartment, my wife and I had been drawing invisible lines of our own.
A project that started out as a way of coping with COVID-related boredom quickly became a passion. Being accustomed to producing academic works, I relished the excuse to write in a more conversational style, testing out my creativity to fashion something more permanent than sourdough or home brew, even if I did briefly dabble in the latter as well. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to produce a book that I would want to read, one that not only prompts people to view the world in a new way, but that also provides little nuggets of information, interesting factoids, perfect for the insatiably curious.
Although job hunting is always bound to bring frustrations and the winter will inevitably bring some annoyance, I no longer feel restricted. Instead, through writing, I have come to respect how intricately our planet is divided by subtle boundaries, the Invisible Lines that give my debut book its name.
Check out Maxim Samson’s Invisible Lines here:
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