By the time I finished my editorial work on this year’s edition of The Best American Travel Writing—about five weeks into my state’s mandatory stay-at-home order—I’d had plenty of time to think about the future of the form. During the first few weeks of lockdown, I was invited on to a podcast with several other travel writers to discuss “Coronavirus and Predictions on the Future of Travel Writing.” With gloom and doom, I speculated about magazines suspending publication, compared this to how travel had “irrevocably” changed after 9/11, and declared that this was “the extinction event” for a certain type of travel publishing. To be honest, I had no more idea of what might happen than anyone else, and I still don’t. But I held forth anyway, and I am aware that whatever I write now, in the spring of 2020, may seem naïve, hysterical, or wildly inaccurate by the fall, when the anthology is published, never mind a year or five from now.
Otherwise, I have whiled away the days in isolation thinking a lot about oddly divergent (and convergent) things: Iceland, Robert Byron’s classic travel book The Road to Oxiana, and the pond across from my home in New Jersey, where an alligator, according to local legend, may or may not live.
China is a country of bad memories. In the last century it endured civil war, invasion, famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Its people have been urged to look to the future.
That worked when China was growing and opening up. Now its growth is slowing and its openness is vanishing. Nevertheless, in “The Fat Years” and in real life, people still choose to forget.
Our times have grown almost exhaustingly big and eventful lately; not coincidentally, much of our fiction has either submerged itself in matters of our individual times and places (Rachel Cusk or Knausgaard) or fled from it into world-building fantasy adventures. Hayes, however, provides a welcome alternative — small, reflective novels about the struggles of not entirely fictional human beings. And at a time when our private lives seem to be growing smaller in the face of titanic historical forces, it is probably a good time to be remembering Alfred Hayes.
While most evidence suggests the universe is playing fair, there are also many cosmic wildcards that seem to clash with the cosmological principle. Just within the past few months, for instance, two teams of physicists published completely different observations of anomalies in the universe that hint at potential variations in fundamental laws and forces.
Even weirder, this new research bolsters past studies sketching out a “directionality” to these variations. In other words, they conjure up a possible model of the universe where physical laws shift in certain directions as if they are on a mysterious cosmic gradient. These findings don’t match other tests of isotropy, or the homogeneity of the universe, that suggest that the universe has no preferred direction.
Conflicting results don’t mean we have to throw out the cosmological principle, as it requires an enormous amount of evidence to oust established physics. But the new studies document phenomena, at both “local” and extremely distant scales, that are currently unexplained and that challenge our fundamental expectations about the behavior of the universe.
For much of the last two months, Paris has been empty — its shops and cafes shuttered, its streets deserted, its millions of tourists suddenly evaporated.
Freed of people, the urban landscape has evoked an older Paris. In particular, it has called up the singular Paris of Eugène Atget, an early 20th-century father of modern photography in his unsentimental focus on detail.
Operating in most cases with small profit margins—this month’s customers pay next month’s rent—few restaurants can afford two weeks (much less months) of forced closure. Estimates are that 75 percent of independently owned restaurants may never re-open. Without them, bakeries, specialty farmers, and wine distributors are likely to be in serious trouble as well.
While most authorities in the United States today agreed on restaurants closures as a vital public-health measure, their counterparts during the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic saw things differently. A hundred years ago, it seemed obvious that crowds would form along parade routes, in public parks, at revival or club meetings—but not in restaurants.
Granted, my father was by nature not the most imaginative guy: He was a bookkeeper whose job was to keep numbers lining up tidily. But his embrace of routine was also his way of fighting back against a world that kept spinning out of control. By the time he was in his mid-30s, he had lived through the pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression and two world wars. After he married my mother in the late 1940s, much of his life was spent navigating her schizophrenia, which emerged early in their marriage. There were extended stretches when he had to fill the roles of both parents, and that might have been what sent him over the edge, or at least made him demand that a new hand be dealt. Instead he doubled down on what he knew, and it got our family through some dicey times, while also helping to forge his identity. He was steady Jerry, the man who didn’t bail, who held the fort when so much of everything else around him was collapsing. Routine, so often disparaged as the way of the drone, became for my father practically a badge of honor.
Pitched somewhere between Shirley Jackson’s creepy small-town horror and the seminar-room riddling of JM Coetzee, Catherine Lacey’s powerful new novel unfolds in a sinister US Bible belt community shaken by the arrival of a mute amnesiac vagrant whose age, sex and race aren’t clear. “I’m having trouble lately with remembering,” the narrator tells us on the first page – something of an understatement, it turns out.
I’m not particularly good at crying out loud. Socrates called this “taking things hard,” and it is hard, especially for a philosopher. But in the last year I had some practice, and despite my best attempt to rationalize and mask the grief, I failed. Philosophers aren’t supposed to “take things hard” — a matter of professional pride for them. They are supposed to occupy that preternaturally calm space called “mind,” to hold emotional excess at bay and face the problems of the world with Stoic resolve. In my first real encounter with “taking things hard,” I concluded that I was not, and have never been, a real philosopher. But after reading Simon Critchley’s recent Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, I think another interpretation is possible. After some difficulty, perhaps it is possible to become, in Nietzsche’s words, a “tragic philosopher” after all.