In our 23 years on the AT, as it’s known, our lives were ever-changing, but the trail always offered us familiar peace from the outside world — a walking meditation through the quiet forest shared with each other and the countless hikers we met.
Ours was a journey only made possible by sobriety, as both Dad and I struggled with alcohol dependence for many years. Then there was his cancer.
I went from a bouncy teenager to a 41-year-old with a bad back. I converted to a new religion and got married. So much time has passed that I’m only seven years younger than Dad was on that rainy May morning in Virginia.
The Grieving Parents monument, which stands at a war cemetery near Vladslo in Belgium, is a memorial for the grief-stricken parents of the war dead. The statues of mother and father stand at the foot of a small stone path that runs along the grass by a line of tombstones. The woman, in the likeness of the artist, kneels on a stone pediment. Her head bows forward as if rocking in grief and pain; a sheet is wrapped about her body, interwoven by arms and hands that hold the blanket in place. Käthe Kollwitz, as both artist and mother, designed the statue in the 1930s for her son, who had died in the trenches during the First World War. In shifting the subject from soldier to parent, the sculpture displaces the dead with the living.
I thought of The Grieving Parents on a visit to the 9/11 Memorial in New York. Visitors took selfies and photographs with iPhones, images that most likely will be shared with friends online. A group of three young women placed their arms around each other as one held a selfie stick aloft in the air. A masked tourist took a selfie a few feet away. The backdrop was the reflecting pool, the stone indent flowing with water where the towers collapsed. Rather than the names of the dead on the bronze placards, the visitors focused on the photographic act: finding the right angle or lighting or filter to portray themselves or the space.
A diligent cultivator, Brent Leggett will spare no effort to ensure a bountiful harvest, but even he can’t control the dirt. In Nash County, North Carolina—where cotton and tobacco were once king, and where sweet potatoes now reign supreme—enterprise is indebted to the earth, a soft, sandy, and khaki-brown soil perfectly suited for tubers and industrial crops alike. At the cusp of the 19th century, enslaved workers tended to this county’s agricultural output. Today, the harvest periods for sweet potatoes and cotton still overlap, from the beginning of October into early November. As I sink my heels into the loamy ridges of Leggett’s plot, I ponder this tangled history of bondage and reinvention.
I read hundreds of submissions a year from emerging writers. They don’t feel constrained by old arguments about literary versus commercial, or the value of a newspaper versus Instagram review. Let’s meet that bold energy with a more level playing field and an expansive view of what’s possible.
The more we learn about the many paths our ancestors have taken, the more possible futures open up. “The Dawn of Everything” begins as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available. Knowing that there were other ways to live, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, allows us to rethink what we might yet become.
"A ghost story" is how Gary Goodman characterizes his memoir "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade," and there is a whiff of sepia among its pages. It is, after all, about a way of making a living that has changed dramatically in recent years, thanks to the internet, but it's also a swashbuckling tale of thieves and forgers, a man who would be king, celebrities and the never-ending search for gold — in this case, books, rare ones, and the lengths some will go to acquire them.