The black box of our lives

The black box of our lives is Ilana Sommo’s metaphor for the shared past she and Alexander Gideon try to examine through letters. It gives their correspondence the shape of an investigation, but the image also records its failure: the past is opened up for scrutiny without yielding understanding, and the attempt can become another way to wound one another.

The Metaphor of Investigation

The image first appears in Ilana’s account of a letter Alexander Gideon wrote, in which he compared their correspondence to the joint analysis of a plane’s black box after a crash. The metaphor casts their exchange as a search for evidence: something has happened between them, and the letters might disclose how. But Ilana immediately rejects the promise of that investigation. They deciphered nothing, she says; instead, they exchanged poisoned arrows. The image therefore holds inquiry and injury together. Their correspondence may look like a shared effort to recover the past, while functioning as a continuation of their conflict.

A Recurring Question in the Letters

Later, Ilana returns to the black-box image while asking why she has written about events long forgotten: perhaps to scratch at old scars, reopen wounds, decipher the black box, hurt Alexander again, arouse his longings, or draw him back into her net. She then pleads guilty to all six possibilities, without claiming extenuating circumstances. The recurrence makes the metaphor less a promise of eventual explanation than a question about what the act of writing does. Looking back may seek knowledge, but it may also renew pain or serve the writer’s desire to regain intimacy and influence.

Meaning and Limits

The expression links private memory to the aftermath of a catastrophe: the couple’s past is treated as a damaged record whose contents might be reconstructed, yet the letters provide no final decoding. Ilana’s later admission that she loved Alexander not despite his cruelty but the dragon itself further complicates any clean separation between understanding and longing. The black box remains an unresolved figure for their shared history: a thing they keep trying to read, even when the correspondence brings them no answer and revives the wounds it was meant to examine.