One thing Pankaj Mishra seems certain of is that humans are uncertain creatures, but uncertain in a notably coherent way. “Human identity,” Mishra wrote in the prologue to Age of Anger (2017), is “manifold and self-conflicted”. He thus feels “unqualified regard for a figure like Montaigne”, for he recognised “the acute self-divisions of individual selves”. Mishra is hardly alone in emphasising human ambivalence, but his is a rather spruce, even schematic vision of perplexity: we are less awash in inarticulate doubt or disarrayed by our unconscious than intelligibly sundered between our “inner and public selves”.
As a writer, Mishra’s public self has had the upper hand for most of his career. He is best known as an intellectual and essayist, and among the essays that have appeared in prestigious Anglo-American journals over the past 25 years, he is more associated with his forceful political, sometimes polemical, writings than with his mellower literary criticism. But as an aspiring twenty-something writer in the early 1990s, living in verdant seclusion in a Himalayan village in north India, when he imagined himself writing it was “always as a novelist”. Being a writer, however, demanded a kind of cerebral worldliness: “to engage rationally with, rather than retreat from, the world; it was to concern oneself particularly with the fate of the individual in society”.
Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds — hands (wings?) down.
The Indian subcontinent had been the home of muslin, a cotton fabric of plain weave, for centuries. Indian muslin was as treasured in Rome as in China, and in the 16th and 17th centuries it was all the rage in Europe. Yet, if we seldom speak of muslins today, or come across fine Indian muslins only in the pages of Jane Austen, there is a reason. British colonialism, which wedded aggressive protectionism at home to violent free trade abroad, forced local artisans to give up their craft and switch to cotton cultivation instead, bringing a long and beautiful tradition to a swift and precipitous decline. Indian muslin became a rare, sought-after commodity in Europe, while English muslin — cheap, industrial, protected by the state — became the norm. As Mr. Tilney observes, “Muslin always turns to some account or other.”
Sofi Thanhauser’s “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing” is a compilation of many such “accounts” of fabric, from which we learn that, if we were a bit more curious about our clothes, they would offer us rich, interesting and often surprising insights into human history. It is a deep and sustained inquiry into the origins of what we wear, and what we have worn for the past 500 years, as well as into the material conditions and social consequences of their production.
In her wide-ranging and intricately argued book, “Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Laura F. Edwards, a prizewinning legal historian at Princeton, explains how ordinary people participated in the American economy and the legal system before the Civil War despite the fact that most of them lacked formal rights to do so. What made it possible? Textiles.
The illness narrative, ending in financial ruin and decreased quality of life, has become one of the classic 21st-century American stories. In her debut essay collection, Emily Maloney documents the complex intersections of money, illness and medicine. For Maloney, the primary experience of receiving health care is not merely a bodily or spiritual event but always, also, a financial one. She understands on a granular level the relationship of money to being ill, to developing a drug, to housing and caring for patients and, of course, to managing an unfathomable amount of debt. Her broad perspective is hard won; at different times she has been a multiply diagnosed chronically ill patient, an E.M.T., an emergency room medical technician, a drug rep, a data analyst, a medical writer, a medical debtor and an American citizen who has — so far — survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit medical care.