As this collection goes to press, we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of intense suffering and loss for many, and for all a radical disruption of life as we have known it. In a few months’ time, our situation will have evolved further; we can’t yet know what our world will look like, nor in what ways it may have been irrevocably altered. What is certain is that the breathless hurtling of the past decade has been halted, at least temporarily, and that, as individuals and as a society, we are forced to reassess our priorities, our commitments, and our actions. Shocking disparities are laid bare that exacerbate the suffering of the most vulnerable. In the midst of trauma, there arises the possibility—by no means a likelihood, but wonderfully, the possibility—of positive change. We have the chance to rebalance not only our social but also our personal lives in hopeful ways, to work toward a more optimistic future.
What do I mean? The protagonist of Valeria Luiselli’s recent novel Lost Children Archive observes that “something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed. . . . We feel time differently. . . . Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable.” On first reading this passage, early in 2019, I felt a bleak thrill of recognition; and then the question: Have we truly lost our future?
This overwhelmingness of which Luiselli writes has been a widespread experience of the last five or ten technologically dominated years. It is a terrible fate for human beings, distinguished from other animals precisely by our ability to conceive of the passage of time (as well as by a capacity for laughter, let’s not forget): to lose our sense of a plausible future is to lose our humanity itself. It is to lose that “thing with feathers” called Hope, of course, released from Pandora’s Box, and to be left instead only with the travails and misery that crowded around her. It is to lose our sense of purpose; to be enveloped in futility; to countenance defeat. In planetary terms, we live now, according to scientists, in the epoch of the Anthropocene, when man’s folly has ensured the decline, if not the demise, of our beautiful Earth, and certainly of our way of life upon it. And yet: the COVID crisis has shown how dramatically pollution can be reduced overnight, by a change in human behavior.
In recent years, the dignity of small lives and small gestures has risked being lost: if not intended for an audience of thousands, or millions, communication has been routinely reduced to the abortive nubs of texts and emojis; and if it is for an audience of thousands or millions, communication tends to be visual or aural rather than verbal, because what millions can be bothered with profundity, sophistication, or subtlety? Who has the time to spare to read something that might require a little extra effort? And yet: the COVID crisis has revealed us to be capable of old-fashioned connection, and accounts abound of generous communication between neighbors and friends. Individuals and groups have found ingenious ways to stay connected in spite of social distancing; we have so swiftly remembered what it means to look out for one another.
We have lived in a nation—no, an era; because not only this nation but much of the world has suffered from these ills—crippled by our devotion to capitalism (I teach at an excellent university, from which 40 percent of the graduates go into finance: the shocking waste of fine minds on the pursuit of Mammon), beleaguered by hopelessness (what is the opioid epidemic if not the symptom of a people duped by false dreams, and wholly without faith in their personal futures?), and by rigorous utilitarianism (formed by a late capitalist mind-set, we ask always, What’s in it for me? and eschew the ostensibly purposeless that is, in fact, our source of wisdom and of joy). We have inhabited a time and place in which falsehood and truth are fatally commingled (how many lies does our president utter in a day?); in which our ideals appear shattered and abandoned (leaders like priests and coaches are unmasked as predators, while our politicians prove corrupt and self-interested); and in which any sense of self is daily assaulted and abused by advertisers (whether corporate or individual, because what is an Instagram “influencer” if not a self-advertiser?). . . . In short, recent years have been, through a certain broad lens, a dark maelstrom, a hellscape from Hieronymus Bosch, in which, under the guise of the pursuit of pleasure, individuals are tortured, dehumanized, discarded, destroyed.
This ominous hurtling, the relentless ouroboros that is social media, the destruction of ourselves and our environs—we had come to see it as inevitable, and ourselves as the passive and ineluctable victims of forces beyond our control. Humanity has risked collective despair, than which there is no more certain doom for our planet and ourselves. But even in the past two months, although at the mercy of a ravaging virus, we have discovered that in other ways we aren’t disempowered. Crisis and extremity are by no means to be desired; and their consequences—human and economic both—will be challenging for the foreseeable future. But these extraordinary times have also forced us to slow down, to think collectively, to seek hope, to value the truth, and to celebrate resilience and faith in our fellow human beings.
To find these resources, we may look to the past—to history and to literature—to the vast compendium of recorded human experience, from which we draw wisdom, solace, or, at the least, a sense of recognition. In the matter of broad social movements of recent years, we can look to the 1930s and shudder at the similarity between our political and even intellectual patterns, and those of that perilous period; we can read of it, strikingly, in a 1936 essay by Paul Valéry “Le bilan de l’intelligence,” or in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny or The Road to Unfreedom. On a more personal level, when our abiding principles have seemed upended, I’ve remembered an Enid Blyton story I loved as a child, about a little girl who loves lying, until she gets trapped in the Land of Lies, where untruths are praised and the truth disregarded. On the matter of our foolish utilitarianism, I’ve channeled the sardonic fury of Dostoyevsky’s narrator of Notes from the Underground. Considering the opioid epidemic, I recall Odysseus and his men in the land of the lotus eaters, or Tennyson’s poem of the same name: “What pleasure can we have / To war with evil? Is there any peace / In ever climbing up the climbing wave?” When it has seemed that we risk being the victims of our own race to replace ourselves with technological advances, I remember that Zeno foresaw this apocalyptic fate for humanity in the dark conclusion of Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience. Meanwhile, our political fiascos call to mind lines from King Lear: “Handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” or “A dog’s obeyed in office.”
It’s all already happened, somewhere, in some way. It’s all there to be retrieved. Each generation is unique, to be sure, as is each individual; and our concatenation of challenges is new in its particular configuration and in its intensity. But if we pause and listen to history and literature, we’ll find, as Louise Glück puts it in “October”, “you are not alone, / the poem said / in the dark tunnel.”
Language makes this possible: language, and the written word. More astonishing an invention than the smartphone, than the internet, than computers: language, the filter that enables us to order our thoughts and experiences and to communicate them, albeit imperfectly. That enables us not only to ask for a glass of milk, or to say that we feel sick, but to speak of our sorrows and ecstasies, of our philosophical musings and our memories. I am daily amazed at this extraordinary medium—created by our distant ancestors out of nothing, still constantly evolving. A series of sounds came, at some point, to signify. A series of squiggles on papyrus, then parchment, then paper, came to signify across time and space. The written or printed word enables the transmission of thoughts and experiences across centuries and cultures. The English language, with its enormous and elastic vocabulary, enables precision and the deployment of connotation as well as denotation. Our human passion for storytelling—not simply for sharing information, but for giving meaning and shape to events—has motivated individuals and armies. From Homer onward, stories have held up a mirror and taught us who we are and what we believe. The dissemination of the written word, from the time of Gutenberg, has enabled us to tell stories of great depth and complexity, and to share our analyses of these stories. I don’t just mean literature: history, too, is the analysis of human stories; as are psychology, anthropology, law, and even philosophy itself. The dramatic prevalence of the image over the written word in our present moment is akin to a return to the caves at Lascaux: immediacy has its advantages, but nuance isn’t one of them.
As a writer, I have staked my life on the possibility of the original expression of authentic experience; which is to say, I firmly reject the idea that everything has already been said, that we are merely echoes or “samplers” of the cacophony around us. I have always agreed with Nabokov, in believing that part of the magic of the written is that the writer and the reader climb the mountain from opposite sides to meet at the top: the reader creates her own experience of each text, influenced by connotation and allusion, by her life and literary histories. Each individual reader’s version of a text is unique; even as the experience is largely miraculously shared. Literary language is a kind of spell, a performative utterance: words conjure worlds out of air, and fictional characters from Oedipus to Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield can have more substantial and abiding reality than people of flesh and bone.
Philip Larkin raises an ironic smile—“Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not you use it, it goes”—but only the most melancholy and pessimistic take his wisdom for the whole truth. We retain agency; we need not be bored. Just as we are pressingly called to be active custodians of our planet, we must also be custodians of human knowledge and of our own minds. We need not be alone in our experiences, nor passive: the riches of all human thought and imagination are available to us. If we were to ensure, as a society, that people’s basic needs were met, then we might recognize that a truly richer life doesn’t require money, or access, or things: each of us can be nourished by the richer life of the mind. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, and yet when we read his writings, we encounter a mind profoundly free, a mind able to articulate itself in language both urgent and lucid, that serves as a reminder that power over language is power tout court.
We have seen around us and in ourselves, too, the dissatisfactions of a life based on a constant need for the new. Now more than ever, it’s within our grasp to live differently, to remember that we’re animals, embodied, sensual creatures, and that what we feed our minds will shape us as surely as what we feed our bodies.
When you read fiction, or encounter a work of art, you aren’t directed like a sheep in a maze (even with an interactive video game, you’re playing only with the options put into the computer by someone else); you are invited into an open-ended conversation. You’re also engaged in an experience that is simultaneously wholly private and universal: your encounter with a work of fiction is yours alone. And yet in words, our encounters can be shared; our experiences thereby expanded and deepened. Even, or perhaps especially, reading opinions that differ from our own, we are challenged to articulate our own experience and its effects; and simply in the articulation, we live more deeply, more engagedly. The hurtling slows.
I advocate moreover for the actual, irreducible, and irreplaceable animal record—outside the age of mechanical reproduction, if you will. The movement of the hand that holds the pen; the imprint of the ink upon the paper; the dignity and intimacy of the individual letter, written for a particular addressee (and hence so different from a blog or post), without thought of other readers. The loss of what that represents philosophically is enormous: my grandparents, my parents, even my friends and I myself in youth, spent hours writing letters about what we were doing and thinking, where we were going and what we noticed, as a gesture of intimate communication. It signified that each of us mattered, that the person to whom I wrote mattered, and that our communication was important—often precisely because it wasn’t widely shared. Privacy, intimacy, dignity, and with them, depth and richness of thought—all were a readily available part of daily life, for even the most modest among us.
The review and the essay remain a more public, yet ideally still intimate, version of the epistolary. Not a place to share one’s private details, to be sure, but certainly to try to communicate, as precisely and with as much complexity as possible, one’s experience of a work of art, or the evolution of one’s thought. In the case of art reviews, it’s a matter of translating one medium (visual) into another (linguistic); in the case of literary reviews, it’s about distilling the greater experience of reading a book, endeavoring to render communicable something that in its totality will remain uncommunicated.
My paternal grandfather spent the better part of a decade in his retirement writing a fifteen-hundred-page family memoir for my sister and me. He did not expect anyone else to read it. He titled it “Everything That We Believed In.” His undertaking was a gesture of faith in himself, in us, in language and the transmissibility of experience. The result is an extraordinary and life-changing document; nobody else need think so, but for me and for my sister, it is. My father, on the other hand, of more melancholic temperament, while a businessman during the day, spent his evenings, weekends, and holidays as a lifelong scholar and thinker who, like Bernhard’s account of Wittgenstein’s nephew, remained a philosopher only in his head, and committed nothing to paper. My abiding memory of him in age is of a man in his library, in his leather chair, in a pool of light surrounded by darkness, wearing his half-moon glasses, with a book open on his lap and a scotch on the table beside him. He had nobody to talk to, with whom to share his considerable erudition; he lived in the splendid and terrible isolation of one who, while still retaining faith in the life of the mind and the power of books to speak to him, had renounced the possibility of being understood, the value of passing on his knowledge. Both figures have their Beckettian absurdity—my grandfather toiling at his desk (for what?), my father, reading voraciously alone (for what?)—but both also represent hope of a kind, and both inspire me to persist in my calling.
The literary and artistic works of the past twenty years, as much as those of the past several centuries, have shaped my understanding of the possible and of the world around me. From Italo Svevo and Albert Camus to Magda Szabó, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; from Alice Neel to Marlene Dumas—these are but a few of the artists whose voices resonate as I try to make sense of our human experience. Each is distinct in vision and approach; all share a rigor and intensity in their mission to illuminate what it means to be alive in their time. Memory and loss are recurring themes; honesty and precision also. Each of these artists galvanizes me differently, as do the examples of my father and grandfather.
The essays and reviews assembled here represent only a small portion of the literary, artistic, and intellectual conversations with which I’ve been preoccupied over the past twenty years. So many stories remain yet untold; so much that we have to learn, and to experience, is as yet largely hidden from the world. To attend to them is to slow the hurtling, to calm the chaos, to return to the essentials that make us human. It is to find the past and the present restored, and with them, the possibility of the future. We can’t go on, we must go on: in this period of trial and transition, those of us for whom the power of the word is paramount must keep the flame alive, in the heartfelt conviction that nothing matters more.
—Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 14, 2020