How do you know if you will love Sense and Sensibility? What if it doesn’t happen to you? First-time readers of Austen’s fiction, knowing its reputation for literary greatness, may approach this novel with Marianne-like expectations. You want to be bowled over, to find charms in every sentence, or to discover that all the novel’s beauties are entirely shared on a first reading. It could happen to you. There are certainly those who love the book in ways that might seem imprudent or excessive.
Readers who love Sense and Sensibility in its original form are rarely describing their first encounters with the book. Instead, they’re describing what it means to read and reread it or to revisit it through film, television, and stage. These devoted readers have developed, rather than discovered, a Marianne-like inability to love the novel by halves while internalizing Elinor’s more measured approach to its prose. To love Sense and Sensibility—if you seek to—it’s crucial to enter its pages with gusto, as well as with deliberative care.
You probably “know” that Eskimos have over fifty words for snow. And you probably also know that this is somehow wrong.
You might not know why you know this, or remember when you first heard it, or if it’s exactly fifty, or a hundred, a dozen, or just “a lot.” I bet you aren’t very confident in this knowledge; what do you know about “Eskimo” languages? Probably nothing! You probably also know that you know nothing. But if you’ve heard that “Eskimo” is an offensive term—and it’s the kind of old colloquialism that’s so common and American that it must be racist, right?—you might struggle to explain why.
This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.
It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.
There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.
“The guidebook says there’re two road trips we could do, The Golden Circle or The Ring Road. The Golden Circle covers most of the big tourist spots like the Blue Lagoon, but that route only covers the south-west. I want to drive the Ring Road, which circles the whole country. I want to see all of Iceland.”
I paused.
“Obviously it’s a bit of a trek, but I don’t mind driving. We’ll have to keep a tight pace since we’ve only got a week, but we can do it. I was thinking to save time and money, we’ll just sleep in the car and pull over if we see anything cool. There’re a few spots I marked in the Lonely Planet that I want to check out, but we can improvise as we go. Oh, also, the book says we should go clockwise but I want to do it counter-clockwise. Just because.”
Still, in an age of algorithmic “based on your viewing history” recommendation engines, it offers — with all the serendipity, and redundancy, this entails — the gleanings of an idiosyncratic, omnivorous human mind: a destination unto itself but also a gateway to the work of others.
It is possible to read particular instances of current affairs or recent history into The Freedom Artist, but this is not a book that is so easily pinned down. It’s savagely political, disturbing and fiercely optimistic, the deeply felt work of a writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions.
When the power couple broke up, they squabbled over who would get to keep which powers. He wanted invisibility; his lawyer made a good case that he’d been invisible for much of the marriage. She wanted superhuman strength, since it’s what she’d been using to endure the last five years. They negotiated a split of time travel: he got the past, and she got the future. They’d never have to be present for each other again.