During his final months, as he was dying of cancer in 2015, Oliver Sacks gave Lawrence Weschler a spectacular gift that may also have been a terrible curse. Three decades earlier, as a young staff writer at The New Yorker, Weschler had spent several awe-struck years at Sacks’s side. He planned to write a profile, to be followed by a full-fledged biography of the idiosyncratic, visionary and literary neurologist. Sacks wasn’t yet famous, but his second book, “Awakenings” — about a set of patients, lifelong victims of a neural malady that left them entombed within immobilized bodies, incapable of communicating, but mentally vibrant — had been lauded by the likes of W. H . Auden and Frank Kermode. Then, just as Weschler finished organizing his nearly endless notes and transcripts — with an index that ran more than 250 pages — and was set to begin writing, Sacks forbade any mention of his homosexuality, though he had told his would-be biographer about his closeted yearnings and crippled attempts at love.
The floppy disk where Petina Gappah saved early drafts of her historical-fiction novel “Out of Darkness, Shining Light” now serves as a lucky charm, 21 years after she began.
It took that long because the story she wanted to tell was a complex one: that of the arduous, nine-month journey in 1873 of 69 workers as they transported the body of the explorer David Livingstone from the interior of Africa to the coast of Zanzibar, where he was carried to Britain for burial. It took so much research that Gappah, 48, finished and published three other books over the time she worked on it, while navigating a career as an international trade lawyer in Geneva.
What Star Wars went through in this period is actually common.
Nearly every major franchise in science fiction has experienced some kind of wilderness period: a time when the main source of the franchise, whether it be a film or television series or even books, no longer produced content, allowing licensed media to continue narratives left unfinished or explore the edges of a complicated fictional world.
In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’
More than 30 years later, his opinion hadn’t changed, as he recounted in a letter to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso: ‘In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater. I read him with Konrad Habicht and Solovine in Bern.’ We know that Einstein studied Hume’s Treatise (1738-40) in a reading circle with the mathematician Conrad Habicht and the philosophy student Maurice Solovine around 1902-03. This was in the process of devising the special theory of relativity, which Einstein eventually published in 1905. It is not clear, however, what it was in Hume’s philosophy that Einstein found useful to his physics. We should therefore take a closer look.
On the cover of his 1961 album Blue Hawaii, Elvis Presley can’t help but look impossibly cool. It’s not just the bouffant or half-smirk, or the plumeria lei draped ever-so-effortlessly around his neck, or the ukelele dwarfed in his large hands. No, it’s the shirt—a red zinger of a Hawaiian shirt, also known as an aloha shirt, with white tendriled flowers scattered over a woodblock print.
The chillest shirt style in the world has a murky, hotly contested provenance. No one can agree who invented the aloha shirt, according to Dale Hope, the owner of the Kahala shirt company (“The Original Aloha Shirt since 1936”) and author of The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. But many have tried to own the shirt as a claim to fame.
Give us a chocolate-chip cookie, even one made with our favorite chocolate, and we’d tear it apart. Too crisp. Too chewy. Too sweet. We were impossible. And if we were hard on other people’s cookies, we were brutal on our own. I’d make something I thought was good, and Joshua might not agree. When he didn’t love the cookie, I cried. It’s a miracle we still like each other — or cookies.
These days I’m a pretty ecumenical cookie lover, although I find myself turning most often to sablés, which I use as building blocks, making cookie sandwiches with them and often flavoring them with herbs, spices, tea or toasted nuts. The more I make them, the more I appreciate their elegance and their cunning: They’re plain Janes with a sybarite’s soul.
A work of fiction that sets itself such stringent boundaries and problems of internal logic (if the inhabitants of the island have their concepts of items entirely wiped from their sensibilities, how are they able to name them? How does a milliner know what he once was when hats have disappeared?) must eventually reach a reckoning. Ogawa brings hers about in a deeply unsettling fashion, plunging her imaginary world into entropy and post-apocalyptic decay. There are obviously parallels between the society she describes and those similarly intolerant of collective memory and will, but her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche.
I don't know whether a fluency with McCulloch's "new rules" of writing gives you a leg up when it comes to mastering the old ones. But if it makes you reflective about the way you use written words, it's a good place to start.