“Trees that develop without setbacks stand straight and proud. At first their branches grow upwards, then sideways, and finally a little downwards, so they can bend with the rain and snow. Most adult trees, however, have gone through something in their lives: another tree falling against them; branches broken by the weight of snow or ice; fungus; holes in their trunks made by woodpeckers or beetles. All these have changed their form and they’ve acquired scars” (Meijer 37-38).

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I can’t remember if it was The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells or Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser that we were discussing. In either case, the professor for the Great American Novel seminar asked the class whether or not our character, our own as living people, are the accumulation of material accomplishments or the outgrowth of an innate set of traits we are destined to wrestle with. I argued for the latter in a paper about one novel or the other. Over a decade later, my thinking has evolved, as all thinking should, but reading Eva Meijer’s The Limits of My Language last month provided a solid counterbalance to the idea that who we are is innately fixed.

Subtitled Meditations on Depression, Meijer takes an essayist’s approach to a clinical experience that can only be expressed through language, which she states in the title is limited at best. Among the metaphors she uses to inspect her own depression, what struck me the most was that of a tree. She doesn’t go with the obvious route and describe tree rings that accumulate layers of weather and smoke and toxins and bark beetles. Instead, she describes the exterior of a tree, the way its branches twist and wend and warp, the shape it is in a constant state of taking. A tree has an innate direction to follow, but grows around the damage done to it. To access tree rings, after all, the tree must first be cut down.

What I remember about Sister Carrie is that the protagonist navigates continual limitations on her agency. Environmental factors play a role in shaping her decisions, from the length of a table between her and a powerful man to the layout of the city where the novel is set. What I remember of The Rise of Silas Lapham is a hulking all-American rags-to-riches figure who has attained excessive wealth but not the cultural capital that should, in his mind, accompany it. The novel opens with Silas giving an interview, uncomfortable with his circumstances. Silas has his wealth, but not his peers’ respect. Sister Carrie, on the other hand, gradually attains fame but is faced in the end with the same sense of emptiness with her success.

What exactly makes personal growth meaningful is still very much the appeal of literature today. It’s not surprising that the runaway horror movies of the summer, Sinners and Weapons, devote the bulk of their scripts to developing a wide cast of complicated characters, keeping their respective villains relatively in the background. It’s no surprise that one of the most popular fiction genres today, the romance novel, is predicated on the fact that people are bound to change when met with new circumstances. Trajectories like friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers, and so on, all attest to a recognition that character is far from static.

When he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, John Steinbeck said that “a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature,” meaning, I believe, that fatalism is incompatible with the craft of literature.

Essays like Meijer’s, on the other hand, are more confronting than fiction. In memoir, we’re not following a rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags plot, we’re not growing to more effectively confront vampires and witches, but taking our own growth (or lack thereof) and putting it under a microscope.

I find more comfort in Meijer’s tree metaphor because a healthy tree is measured by what other species it helps to foster. Like every organism in every ecosystem, nothing lives in isolation. A tree provides nutrients to fungus, shade to mammals, shelter to bugs and birds. These are all outcomes that a healthy tree is bound to provide by virtue of what a tree is: the transformation of sunlight and minerals and water into sugars and nuts and foliage. The shape of a tree is irrelevant; gnarled, twisted, straight, even, split—what matters is the processes that a tree recycles, the absorption of carbon dioxide, the excretion of oxygen and nutrients, the miraculous flow of care that its roots and branches provide to the rest of the forest.

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Meijer, Eva. The Limits of My Language. Pushkin Press, 2021.