In a world beset with populist demagoguery and misinformation, memory is a responsibility for writers everywhere. We cannot forget what has happened in the past when tribalism, nationalism, isolationism, fanaticism and jingoism managed to get the better of humanity.
The novel matters because stories continue to connect us across borders, and help us to see beyond the artificial categories of race, gender, class. The world is frighteningly messy today, but a world that has lost its empathy, cognitive flexibility and imagination will surely be a darker place.
On a Fourth of July trip to my friend’s house in Nantucket, I fell in love with a bookshelf. It took up one entire wall of the cavernous living room and was stuffed with books whose well-worn covers coordinated with the faded blue and white decor. The beach and gently swaying seagrass outside the window receded into the distance as I ran my fingertips over the faded spines, my mind humming with possibilities. I only had a few days; I would need to choose wisely.
This is how it goes whenever I go on vacation: one moment I’m dropping my luggage at the front door, the next I’m examining the contents of a stranger’s book collection as if pulled by an invisible thread. Vacation home bookshelves appeal to me the same way used bookstores do. I love my own well-curated stacks at home, but I always know what I’m going to find among them. An unfamiliar shelf, on the other hand, brings an element of surprise: There’s a thrill that comes from scanning the titles not knowing what my eyes will land on next. Relying on chance adds serendipitous magic to the vacation reading experience. Nothing beats the sudden rush of blood to the head that comes from spotting a book I’ve been meaning to read forever on the shelf, like the feeling of spotting an old friend among the waiting crowd on a subway platform.
But the show is also, by network standards, quite radical. It attempts a clever gambit. The American sitcom, since its inception, has struggled with a fundamental tension at its core. Let’s call it “jester vs. guru.” We expect half-hour comedies to pull off an impossible double duty: to both inject jokes into the national bloodstream and to enlighten us with high-minded moral instruction. We want not only zany catchphrases but wise life lessons. The history of the form has been a constant tug of war between these two contradictory demands. Early sitcoms tended toward Very Special Episodes — morality plays in which we learned to honor our parents, say no to drugs and rat out even our most charming friends. The sitcoms that followed rebelled against such ham-fisted piety, replacing it with ironic cynicism. “Seinfeld” famously rejected the moral duties of the sitcom altogether; “30 Rock” was a pure fire hose of laughs. The control knob turned, further and further, from wisdom toward jokes.
“The Good Place” tries, improbably, to fulfill both functions at once. It wants to sit at both ends of the control knob simultaneously. Like any good modern comedy, the show is a direct IV of laughs, but the trick is that all of those laughs are explicitly about morality.
Astronomical images have a way of putting terrestrial concerns in perspective. Headlines may portend the collapse of Western civilization, but the black hole doesn’t care. It has been there for most of cosmic history; it will witness the death of the universe. In a time of lies, a picture of our own private black hole would be something true. The effort to get that picture speaks well of our species: a bunch of people around the world defying international discord and general ascendant stupidity in unified pursuit of a gloriously esoteric goal. And in these dark days, it’s only fitting that the object of this pursuit is the darkest thing imaginable.
Avery Broderick, a theoretical astrophysicist who works with the Event Horizon Telescope, said in 2014 that the first picture of a black hole could be just as important as “Pale Blue Dot,” the 1990 photo of Earth that the space probe Voyager took from the rings of Saturn, in which our planet is an insignificant speck in a vast vacuum. A new picture, Avery thought, of one of nature’s purest embodiments of chaos and existential unease would have a different message: It would say, There are monsters out there.
People have been disappearing on glaciers for as long as people have been walking on glaciers. And for most of human history, they were simply gone, vanished, entombed in a hopelessly deep, dense river of ice, carried away by a slow, grinding current. How many, no one knows, because that number is lost to time. For a benchmark, though: Since 1925 (when records first began to be kept), almost 300 people have disappeared in Valais alone, though not all, of course, on a glacier.
And maybe none of them would have ever been seen again. Except then the world got hotter, and the glaciers got smaller, thinning and retreating, and now, after decades, centuries, millennia, they're slowly surrendering the dead. This is not peculiar to Les Diablerets, obviously. Glaciers all over the planet are receding at alarming rates, some more than others. The thaw is catastrophic, and global.
In many ways, silence is intricately linked to pacing in this work, as the speed with which we transition does not afford time or space for exposition. It is the breathlessness of each poem, their restless movements and their dense, complex music, that allows silence to inhabit them so fully.
What, Patrick Ness asked himself, if Moby-Dick was told by the whale? In Ness’s version, the cetaceans go a lot further than Captain Ahab’s nemesis in Melville’s epic. They fight back on a major scale, with ships and harpoons of their own. Their view of the world is the opposite of ours, hence the title – the ocean depths are their sky, and “below” them is the “Abyss” of air and land.
Okada’s style is hyperrealistic, punctuated with “likes” and “whatevers,” and structured, like everyday speech, around rambling sentences that often go nowhere. He has spoken of the difficulties of translating his work into other languages, because of its “super-real” style.. But this translation by Sam Malissa has a strange rhythm all its own. That “End of the Moment” was once a play comes through in its shifting perspective, which moves swiftly, drone-like, among characters. It’s the more successful of the two narratives — compact, ruthless, governed by a persuasive sense of dread. In that sense, Okada captures the ennui that has paralyzed a generation.