With his latest memoir, No Time Like The Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, Michael J. Fox reminds us that hope is an exercise and a discipline, not just a feeling or even a state of mind. The actor, author, and activist has already published three books, including two earlier memoirs, that course with the optimism he’s maintained nearly 30 years since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Introspective and poignant, No Time Like The Future is the latest installment in Fox’s series of reflections on just how hard-won that famous sense of hope is.
Ross was right: the truths of the giraffe are more fabulous and potent than our fictions. Giraffes are born with no aid from the camel or hyena, but even so their birth is a wonder: they gestate for 15 months, then drop into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth. It looks as brisk and simple as emptying out a handbag. Within minutes, they can stand on their trembling, catwalk-model legs and suckle at their mother’s four teats, biting off the little wax caps that have formed in the preceding days to keep the milk from leaking out. Soon they are ready to run, but still liable to trip over their own hind legs, a hazard they never learn entirely to avoid.
So, apparently, I was on the high school basketball team for three years until I was expelled from school, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. How is that something I could forget? The forgetting causes me great unease. I don’t want to see the photographs.
Reading Barack Obama’s deeply introspective and at times elegiac new presidential memoir, I thought often about something the writer James Baldwin said in 1970, two years removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and despairing about America from abroad.
“Hope,” an exhausted Baldwin told a reporter from Ebony magazine, “is invented every day.”
David Farrier’s Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils attempts to harmonize poetic and geological time — and does so at a moment when the uncannily rapid pace of climate change has forced us to renegotiate our relationship to the natural and political future. We think in hours and days, not in centuries or millennia, but Farrier sets out to help us overcome this limitation through vivid evocations of what our distant ancestors might uncover thousands and even millions of years down the line.
The result is spare but effective, and its theme of endurance in the face of loss hints at how the genre may evolve to reflect our own continuing catastrophe, for which the most dystopian fantasies may turn out to be nothing but a dry run.