Seaside novels are not a single type; nor are they necessarily beach reading. What they share is an understanding of the sea and shore as a place of flux. Where land dissolves into sea, where romantic scenery is the consequence of landslips and cataclysm, the seaside is a space between, a place of transformation and transcendence — especially of human reality in the face of nature’s great unaccountability. Here the mind responds to limitless views of sea and sky, intimating new beginnings or something darker: dissolution and death. Either way, as the term “sea change” suggests, the effect is powerful and mysterious.
A few months ago, as I struggled to carve out time in my crowded days for writing, a colleague suggested I read a book about the daily rituals of great artists. But instead of offering me the inspiration I’d hoped for, what struck me most about these creative geniuses – mostly men – was not their schedules and daily routines, but those of the women in their lives.
Their wives protected them from interruptions; their housekeepers and maids brought them breakfast and coffee at odd hours; their nannies kept their children out of their hair. Martha Freud not only laid out Sigmund’s clothes every morning, she even put the toothpaste on his toothbrush. Marcel Proust’s housekeeper, Celeste, not only brought him his daily coffee, croissants, newspapers and mail on a silver tray, but was always on hand whenever he wanted to chat, sometimes for hours. Some women are mentioned only for what they put up with, like Karl Marx’s wife – unnamed in the book – who lived in squalor with the surviving three of their six children while he spent his days writing at the British Museum.
Philosophers can argue whether beauty is the property of an object or lies in our perceptions of it; Hardy would have it both ways. The best mathematics is eternal, he maintained, and like the best literature, it will “continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years.” Recent research in neuroscience has lent support to this idea of “emotional satisfaction.” A few years ago, a neurobiologist in London, Semir Zeki, performed fMRI scans of mathematicians while they contemplated equations they’d rated as beautiful, and a region of their brains lit up which has been associated in other studies with perceptions of visual and musical beauty. (Contemplating equations they found less inspiring, on the other hand, did not activate that part of the mathematicians’ brains.) In the brain, a mathematician’s affective response to math is similar to, or maybe the same as, the way in which we respond to beauty in the arts.
And there’s another sense in which math could be considered beautiful. In addition to the aesthetic appeal of a particular equation or a proof, there’s a kind of cumulative marvelousness to math, to its landscape of ideas. Here is an elaborate model world, in which the more you explore, the more fantastic it gets. “’Imaginary’ universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed ‘real’ one,” Hardy wrote.
Meaning and purpose overlap, but they are not the same things. One’s purpose is what one feels she or he is here to do. For the religious this may include fulfilling the wishes of a god. For all people, religious or not, it likely includes numerous secular goals such as being a successful worker, a loving and loyal family member of various stripes, a good friend, and proficient at one or more hobbies. There are many more life purposes I could list, but in short, it’s The Doing. Or rather, how we interpret and prioritize all that we do and don’t do. What we believe we need to do, ought to do, and want to do. For most of us, self-survival and the protection of deeply loved ones are at or near the top, while the things we must do despite loathing them rank near the bottom, with a panoply of purposeful life acts between them.
Life’s meaning, however, is far more esoteric than life’s purpose. Purpose might help shape meaning, but purpose is not the same as meaning. Meaning is less about the actual doing and more about Why we do and don’t do. Life’s meaning is the superstructure framing the otherwise entropic string of days and nights unfolding before us. If life’s purpose is a tactical arrangement of actions, then life’s meaning is the strategic philosophy that makes senses of it all.
Lying between Australia and Hawaii, the island of Nauru is as far from Europe as any place on earth. It wasn’t until November 8, 1798, when a British ship called the Snow Hunter was passing en route to the China Seas, did any European record seeing the island. Hundreds of Nauruans canoed out to greet the sailors. The captain of the Snow Hunter, John Fearn, did not permit his men to disembark. Nor did any Nauruans venture aboard. Still, the welcome charmed Captain Fearn, as did the warm winds, the island’s green central plateau, the swaying palms, and the white-sand beaches — so much that he named it Pleasant Island.
The sight (and wafting stench) of the Snow Hunter’s motley crew must have come as quite a shock to the Nauruans. At the time, life on the small island was mostly peaceful and predictable. Tensions among Nauru’s 12 clans did run deep, and now and then disputes did turn deadly. Any year with light rainfall would cause great suffering too, as the island’s only surface water is a brackish and shallow lagoon. Still, for thousands of years, Nauruans had managed to live largely in balance with nature, isolated but self-sufficient, with societal acrimony more or less kept in check. Captain Fearn’s naming of the island for the English-speaking world did not upset this stability. But it was an omen of dark times ahead.
I grew up knowing the Chicagoland suburb of Northbrook for a few things: its pee-wee hockey team, bar mitzvahs, and the pizza at Barnaby’s. When I recently found myself in the neighborhood at 5:30 on a Friday night, hungry and without dinner plans, I decided to stop into the popular local restaurant on my way back to the city. Not taking into account it was the start of the weekend, I drove around the small parking lot for ten minutes before a spot opened up. When I finally sat down among the birthday parties and family dinners, and my pizza made it to my table, I did what many of us tend to do these days: I Instagrammed my meal. A few minutes later I checked my comments and saw a response posted from a friend in Brooklyn: “Is that the way Chicago pizza is sliced? That is insanity.”
I could have been offended, but I wasn’t. Instead, I took it as a small win for the Chicagoland area’s underappreciated contribution to the American pizza map: A circular pie with really thin crust, all cut into tiny squares. Some call it “party cut,” others say it’s “tavern style,” but to locals, it’s just “pizza.” Ask around, and most Chicagoans will tell you that the city’s greatest pies aren’t made in deep pans drowning in layers of cheese and meat at tourist traps like Uno and Lou Malnati’s. Yet, for some reason, people outside the city hardly seem to know the style even exists.
Nina Stibbe’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful” is so dense with amusing detail that I thought about holding the book upside down to see if any extra funny bits might spill from the creases between the page. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a novel that opens with a British dental surgeon named JP Wintergreen injecting himself with lignocaine and attempting to pull his own teeth.