Paula Modersohn-Becker is an expressionist, so she does not paint reality but memory. Her paintings are little slices of domestic life, a cast-iron pan frying eggs sunny-side up, red-orange yolks that jiggle in chalky white and catch flecks of pale yellow from the daybreak sun. The proportions are off and the colors too bright, but it's the idea of the moment that I love, those dreamy, coffee-scented mornings when one wakes up well rested and content simply because their house is warm and full of food.Marie Darrieussecq opened her 2016 biography of Paula, Being Here Is Everything, with the line, “She was here. On Earth and in her house.” It is a perfect summation of a woman who lived with vivid awareness of her own being.I first discovered Paula through Self Portrait With Irises. I was working a digital media job in a drab, gray office in Los Angeles and tasked with writing a piece about female painters throughout history. I was struck by Paula. In the painting, she wears a moss-green cardigan and a string of black pearls, her rust-colored hair parted down the middle and pulled back into a neat bun. The peak of her nose makes her angled features, flesh far too sharp to be real, apparent, but this clearly painted face conveys genuine emotion. Paula is wide-eyed, calm and content. The left corner of her mouth curls upward like she is about to smile or maybe repressing a smile.Elizabeth Bishop once compared memory to “a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful, [that] goes through the diaphragm.” She said it was like spotting the dorsal fin of a large fish cutting through still water. Not a frightening fish, like a shark, but something benign, like a snailfish. This is what I felt looking at Paula's paintings. An odd quiver, a sudden reverence for what was.Paula depicts the commonplace: a young girl holding a cat, her pal Rilke napping, mothers feeding infants. Darrieussecq speaks highly of Paula's depictions of motherhood. In Paula's time, paintings of mothers were mostly Madonnas sitting straight upright nursing fat little cherubs, breaking the fourth wall by gazing directly at the viewer. Paula's mothers feed their babies while sprawled out on their sides like a sow feeds piglets. Paula's mothers, Darrieussecq says, are not coquettish nor exotic nor distraught; they just are, and they feed their babies because their babies are hungry. Paula painted them because they were here, on Earth and in their homes or gardens, lying on cool white sheets or crouched before potted plants with shriveled oranges at their feet.Paula died at 31 from complications due to childbirth. I cannot think of this fact without tearing up. This is not because her death was tragic, although it was, but because anyone who captured the earth with such detail must have loved it dearly.Her last words were, “What a pity.”When I found Paula, I had just turned 29. On my birthday, I wished on a cookie cake for my father to find new lungs. I was seated on the patio of an Italian restaurant, strings of fairy lights dangling overhead, and wearing a floral-patterned sundress and pink ballerina flats. I remember thinking as I blew out the candle that this childish scene, like a little girl's birthday party, made the gesture feel even more infantile, pathetic even, but my father got the call the next day. For a while, I joked that I saved his life, a joke that felt increasingly hollow with time. A lung transplant is not a cure so much as swapping one terminal condition for another, slightly less terminal one. Medications that protect one organ overtax the others, necessitating subsequent transplants that render the ingenuity of medical science a zero-sum game. By March 2020, my father's lungs had only been inside him for two years and his sole functioning kidney had only been inside him for a month. He was lumped into the “high-risk” category, a classification used to deflect concern. No need to worry, officials assured us, most fatalities are among “high-risk populations.” I heard friends repeat this phrase often, wielding the plight of others as a talisman against the plague.In quarantine, my older brother called me often, usually drunk and always contemplative. He regaled me with old family stories, tales spouted in quick succession, a code for me to decipher. One night, he told me about our Grandpa Andrew walking through the woods behind his own father. Five years old at the time, Andrew saw how his father's boots left prints in the snow. He hopped from one print to another so his own tiny feet fell into the crevasses made by his father's weight. When his dad looked back and smiled, my grandfather realized for the first time that his father loved him.“It's telling,” my brother said, “that the only time Grandpa thought his dad loved him was when he was literally following in his footsteps.”“Is this story real?” I asked.“Yes,” he answered. “Uncle Danny told me.”I wondered what our uncle actually said, and what actually happened. My brother is an attorney, a literal-minded sort, but it takes tremendous imagination to make myths from anecdotes. Maybe all that happened was that our grandpa felt loved, I suggested, but the story got passed down until it evolved into infallible evidence of the plague of toxic masculinity pulsing through our family tree. My brother rejected the idea, insisted that no one would remember had it been that simple.I have memories like this, stories I link to a larger legend of myself, but when I found myself stuck inside contemplating the universe, what came to me instead was a string of the indiscriminate. Hovering over my infant brother, a wrinkled baby stuffed in an oversized bunting, and shouting, “He loves me. He loves me!” into the reddish face peeking out from the hood, beady eyes blackened by shadows cast from the gray-blue folds. Or taking the hand of my elementary school crossing guard in mid October, being delighted at how soft and squishy her wrinkled fingers felt pressed against my palm. Or me and my cousin in the rain, dressed in matching windbreakers as we knelt before the long, thin puddle outside my neighbor's driveway. The furious precipitation had produced unusually frothy bubbles like the kind you find in spit and, for reasons long forgotten, we spent the afternoon watching them drift downhill before cascading into the storm drain.Elizabeth Bishop recorded these kinds of memories in her prose. Esteemed as a poet, she never gained much traction as an essayist. A professor once told me every essay has an occasion, like the climax of a novel, but more cerebral. Essays meander into epiphany, but Elizabeth's essays read more like diary entries. She mentions her father is dead and her mother in a sanatorium, but these are blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments, necessary only for context. What matters is Elizabeth falling in love with the number eight in grade school and tracing its curves in the calendar and in the clock. Or that her grandmother dressed in gray silk, neat and tight and fitted, and never said exclamations stronger than “pshaw” and “drat.” Or that her friend Marianne brought stale brown bread to the circus because she heard elephants love stale bread. It is telling, Elizabeth thinks, that Marianne brought brown bread over white, as this meant she must have been thinking of the elephants’ health.This observation is one of the only moments where Elizabeth ascribes meaning to memory. Like Paula, she captures without commentary and offers no explanation for what she observes, which is maybe itself a sly argument. The moment stands alone because the moment has inherent value. By defying our expectation for metaphor, Paula and Elizabeth make us question that desire. Why demand that life make its case to be preserved?During the pandemic, my memories came to me with remarkable clarity, but not just in terms of physical senses: rain water soaking through my blue jeans, or the scent of car fumes and rotting leaves. I also felt the sentiment itself, got a very particular sense of being a child at that very particular moment. I felt that strange shudder, part pain and part pleasure, as the snailfish cut through me.I told a friend, six months into the pandemic, that I liked Paula's paintings because they were apolitical, a series of tiny, understated moments that helped me escape the present. Later, I realized this was not quite right. What is and is not recorded is itself a political act, but there is also the fact that Paula's art was considered political in its time. She painted female nudes, pregnant female nudes, and what seems toothless today was ballsy at the dawn of the 20th century. But Paula's work barely got a chance to rest its laurels in the realm of inoffensive. Less than 40 years after she passed, her paintings became subversive again.Being Here Is Everything is as much a warning as it is a biography. Darrieussecq writes that Paula was born in a bubble between centuries and died when Germany was still innocent. Her prose is littered with ominous flash forwards. When she mentions Paula's affection for Knut Hamsun, she reminds us Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize to Goebbels as a token of admiration. When she details Heinrich Vogeler's letters to Paula, she states that Vogeler fought against the Nazis in World War II. In one passage, Darrieussecq writes of the day Paula lost her bag while visiting Saint-Cloud with Rilke. Rilke writes to her, “I am sad that the memory of our afternoon is now imbued with such loss. I am especially sad that irreplaceable things were in that little bag.” Darrieussecq reminds us that Germany would face far more losses in the years to come, and that irreplaceable things would be destroyed with intent.The Nazi party called Paula's Self Portrait with Camellia Branch an insult to German women, vulgar and lacking in femininity. In 1907, Paula painted herself naked and pregnant, which some credit as the first nude self-portrait in history. It was incinerated in an air raid in 1943. All we have left is a black and white photograph, but we are lucky to have that much, are lucky to have Paula at all given the magnitude of art destroyed under Nazi occupation. Had Paula not died at 31, she might have lived to see all this happen. It does not take long for this to happen, anywhere, and at any time.What Paula preserved is so exquisitely human, but humanization can repulse as much as it consoles. Once, a friend texted me a news story: Protesters were preventing Grubhub drivers from reaching the front door of a police officer who'd murdered a Black man. I was supposed to delight in his suffering, to respond with an enthusiastic “Fuck yeah!”, but my primary emotion was disgust. The idea of this man ordering dinner, such a quaint, conventional thing to do, turned my stomach. It was the same brand of repulsion I felt when learning Idi Amin loved Tom and Jerry cartoons.I do not want these people preserved. I do not want to know their tiny, understated moments. What I want is everything they took, and everything they are still taking. In modern times, preservation alone feels like a radical act.The first time I saw my father post-transplant, he was sitting upright in an electric blue reclining chair, his face concealed by a breathing device that made me recall Hannibal Lector being wheeled into the courthouse in Silence of the Lambs. I could see only a few inches of the vertical red scar running down his chest. It was cut off by the cuff of a pale green hospital gown. He pressed a bright pink lung-shaped pillow against his body, which helped alleviate postsurgical pain. It was embroidered with thick-lined drawings of bronchial tubes that dipped into each lung and unfurled like tree roots. It all looked so pathetic: my shrunken, shriveled father wearing a nightgown, curled into a half-assed fetal position, his arms wrapped around this girlish pillow.Two years later, when he contracted COVID-19, I remembered that image constantly. It flickered on and off for months in response to sobering headlines or the sound of coughing, but sometimes rose without any warning at all, a shark's fin rupturing my rare calm waters. I often wanted to say I felt traumatized or triggered, but the words caught in my throat. They felt trite, even though I knew they were not. People need a way to name the miasma of modern fear. We share a collective pain so acute it must be elevated to a clinical status, while at the same time we hurt in our own private ways. Trauma and triggered hit a sweet spot, are both ubiquitous and particular, and yet I felt jilted at having lost my specificity.When my father first got sick, I navigated the world armored with the notion of myself as a strong, gritty woman with a tragic backstory. I was a tough little cookie holding herself together despite overwhelming odds who would emerge from the underworld, as heroes do, wielding wisdom mined from the meat of her suffering. Being uniquely hurt allowed me to embrace the role of the rugged antihero, to force my experiences to culminate into epiphany. Trauma was my badge of honor, my shield, but now we're all traumatized and triggered, so much so that I am hesitant to complain at all. As my father would say, “You ain't the lone ranger, pal.”I no longer want this story. I no longer want a story at all, have no desire to wring out our present circumstances for insight. There can be no morals to gratuitously cruel narratives. Instead, I want stillness. I want to remain on Earth and in my house, anchored in the brief security of the immediate for as long as I possibly can.In our busy era, stimulation of all variety available on demand, art like Paula's and Elizabeth's may seem unappealing, dated even, but I can think of its modern equivalents.In 2009, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation started airing what it called “slow TV.” It began with a seven-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo, the camera pointed out the front window as the train sliced through lush green countryside interspersed with box-shaped cottages. A fifth of Denmark's population tuned in. This inspired similar programming: five days of a coastal ship traveling up the fjords, a 12-hour knitting marathon. Web-based slow TV goes back even further. Since 2005, the program Watching Grass Grow has televised a live feed of a front lawn.Norwegian slow TV has been compared to phenomena in the United States like video game streams, unboxing videos, three-minute TikToks of “What I Eat in a Day.” Such media are often cited as emblematic of our country's rising narcissism, but I think the appeal is far less cynical. One could argue that the fact people post is insidious and attention seeking, a bid for brand endorsements, but I am far more interested in why people watch. There is an audience for this kind of content. Paul Auster ends his memoir The Invention of Solitude with a line that serves as a justification for the book's existence, and maybe for the existence of memoirs as a whole: “It was. It will never be again. Remember.” The more frightened I become, the more comfort I glean from observing the behavior of others, not as an anthropologist, but as a quiet, curious spectator. I do not want to dissect this content and debate its cultural impact, make a case for its preservation. I just like knowing it exists at all. Seeing our being documented, no matter how trivial, feels increasingly precious, reverent even. A celebration. A thank-you. A goodbye.My own forgetfulness horrifies me.One day, I try to tell my fiancé about the shadowbox in my grandmother's bathroom. There was a snippet of white lace and a pearl necklace strung between two thumbtacks pressed into the velvet backboard, this I know, but I also vaguely recall other mementos: a black-and-white photograph of a moon-faced woman and a tiny envelope stained with a kiss of soft pink lipstick. But I am uncertain whether these items are inside the shadow box or somewhere else in the house, and I have spent more time at grandmother's than anywhere else in the world.At work, I find myself forgetting the precise term I need while drafting e-mail copy. I often catch myself using a similar-sounding word in place of the right one. Commiseration instead of consolation. Network instead of expert. Bits of poetry and prose come to me throughout the day, but I am rarely able to place them. One morning, while running, I become euphoric over the sight of steam-gray buildings against the overcast sky, feathers of clouds dulling their edges to leave them soft and blurred like a painting. I think, “This lovely world, these precious days.” This endorphins-induced joy fades, however, when I realize I do not know this sentence's source. It comes from something intimately important to me, but the origin is lost.I bend over and sob into my mask. I am breaking, I think. I am broken.My therapist tells me our minds will be fragmented for the foreseeable future, that brain fog often accompanies trauma, but she assures me I am not alone in my ineptitude, that many are experiencing this same thing. What is meant as comfort leaves me horrified at the sheer magnitude of loss. It was, it will never be again, and we apparently won't even remember. I fear we are standing on the precipice of even greater destruction, that far more irreplaceable things will vanish in the years to come.Later, while doing dishes, it comes to me. Charlotte's Web, my favorite childhood book, the passage where Charlotte bids farewell to Wilbur and tells him to enjoy what she'll miss: the changing seasons and the sights and sounds and smells that come with them. These lovely worlds. These precious days. I feel them slipping from me like water from cupped palms.After her father died, people would say to mother, “I am so sorry, but he was sick a long time, wasn't he?” Each time, she fought the urge to reply, “Yes, but he was also alive.”When COVID-19 collapsed my father's lung, I thought back to a day, just after his transplant, when doctors could not get his heart rate to stabilize. I was the only one in the room when it happened, my mother and brother out to lunch, and I watched as the doctor pressed defibrillators against his chest three times in a row to coax the beating of his heart back down to an acceptable pace. I expected lurching, writhing, and the bleating of machinery, but the whole thing was remarkably calm. My father closed his eyes, braced for impact, and absorbed each jolt with a few small quivers. At first, I mistook this lack of reaction for stoicism. I thought he was choosing to weather the storm with minimal complaint, but in reality his present condition did not grant him the dexterity required to air grievances with much vigor. I realized as much when he asked the doctor, words pushed out between labored breaths, “Is this associated with death?”He was afraid and I was shocked by his fear.I thought my father had come to terms with death, that he maybe even wanted to die. His days were marred by the now irrefutable knowledge that he was fighting a losing battle, a level of apprehension I assumed to be a living Hell. But he wanted to stay. He wanted to grow old in his coffee-scented house that was warm and full of food and enjoy the company of his wife and his little orange cat. I was wrong. The transplant had never been a zero-sum game and I had done what I would later come to revile. I had lost my reverence, had judged high-risk lives as less than.I had forgotten it was not a pity that Paula was 31. It was a pity she left us at all.Darrieussecq says Paula's relationship to the sun reflects her depictions of girlhood. Paula's sun just is, Darrieussecq writes, and it offers no notable shadows or effects. It illuminates the scene, as the sun does, and by casting her beams so broadly, Paula makes it impossible to draw conclusions based on where they fall. Paula paints her girls the same way. Her girls are separated from any possible interpretation. They are girls removed from the male gaze, girls removed from any gaze, girls Darrieussecq says would shout “Leave us alone!” at anyone projecting off-based analyses of what girlhood entails onto their images.Her girls make me think of me and my cousin in the rain, our windbreakers shuddering in the breeze as the drops harden into hail and it is time to go inside. Now, floods cover half her city and fires circle mine. Back in Michigan, my father gets his blood drawn in the hospital parking lot, afraid of microscopic threats lurking inside. None of this feels atypical, not anymore, and when I cannot bear the thought any longer, I picture Paula. I imagine her in her studio, sealed in her bubble between centuries, painting her eggs and her goldfish and her irises.Each brushstroke is a protest against destruction.