It is fitting that Schulz survives in the world of books, which license the kind of paradoxes that riddle his writing. It’s only in fiction, after all, that the pressures and limits of the material world can be transcended—that a life as short as Schulz’s can also last forever.
"My entire life is in ruins."
The first line in Sarah Parcak's new book might come off a bit bleak, but the archaeologist means this literally, not figuratively. In fact, she's found studying thousands of years of human history has actually given her hope, or at least some hope. "Humans are very resilient," she says. "And in spite of all the terrible things that we have done to each other, I think we're 51% good. So I try to hold onto that, especially being the parent of a young child."
Mandarin was the only common tongue we had between us, but unlike for the Han Chinese, it was the first language for neither of us. We spoke slangy Singlish; the Uighurs spoke Turkic Uighur. When the Uighur girls began singing a traditional folk song to a clapped beat, it was clearly a cultural performance rather than a social invitation, but I took my chances. I’d never once used Mandarin this way as I walked up to the girl with the palest, longest, thinnest fingers I’d ever seen and said, “Want to dance?”
She laughed shyly, pushing me toward their captain.
It can sometimes feel like a poetic cliché to even look at the Moon. It seems almost too easy a way to summon cyclicality, illumination, mystery, and even romanticism. The Moon is always shifting through its cycles yet always present and the same; it serves us as a source of light but is actually reflecting that light from somewhere else; every once in a while, an eclipse renders it strange; meanwhile, it has a side that always stays hidden, with an air of mystery almost always categorized as feminine. Italo Calvino, however, uses the moon and other celestial bodies playfully in his short story collection Cosmicomics.
And yet the novel is about more than just adolescent angst, a young girl’s longing to be somewhere else, someone else. Its universality lies in its generosity — its empathy for every character within it, regardless of his or her decisions, no matter how flawed. There is compassion for questionable actions rooted in longing. Reduced to those longings, are any of us so dissimilar?
I don’t feel the rotation of the Earth,
not even when I see
the cities moving backward
through the train’s window,
one by one.