In the late afternoon of September 21, 2018, I exited my New York apartment building carrying a folding table and a big sign reading GRAMMAR TABLE. I crossed Broadway to a little park called Verdi Square, found a spot at the northern entrance to the Seventy-Second Street subway station, propped up my sign, and prepared to answer grammar questions from passersby.
This might seem bizarre to some, but to me it felt like destiny. I’ve been teaching writing and grammar for decades. I love grammar. I’ve studied twenty-five languages for fun. My bookshelves are filled with grammar and usage books, carefully alphabetized by language from Albanian to Zulu.
What I saw was the symptom of a universal story. All societies are locked in a dialectic relationship with water over time. It falls from the sky, comes from the sea, flows over land: floods, droughts, storms are expressions of Earth’s climate. People respond, finding solutions to protect themselves. It is a story of action and reaction, of water encroaching on daily life, of catastrophic failures, of people organising to shift water’s course or hold its force at bay. What propels this story forward over centuries is the fact that the solutions of any age are transformed – or rendered obsolete – by the changing expectations of those who follow, in a never-ending human dance with water.
What is it that’s so compelling about the wild horses of Sable Island? Maybe it’s that they turn up where horses have no right to be—grazing on a sand dune, or standing on a broad beach beside the speckled form of a gray seal, or galloping through the window of a gallery in Manhattan, where I was once stopped short, in passing, by an image of the tangled mane and salt-flecked coat of a stocky Sable Island horse.
It’s an unmistakable and shocking sight: a human body falling from the top of a tall building. On a clear October day, tourists and commuters moving through Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz square may have caught this glimpse, a few seconds of terror as a man fell from the roof of the 41-story Park Inn hotel.
The man was Salvatore Escalante. “I was screaming. Then I had to take a breath, and kept screaming,” recalls Escalante, who survived the fall because it was not exactly a fall.
Middle-aged woman trying to reconcile her sense of self with her rapidly receding youth? Check. Parent trying to protect her strange and vulnerable child during a pandemic? Check. Wife feeling trapped in a house with a less-than-perfect husband? Formerly creative person watching too much Netflix and drinking too much wine? Check and check. This is the COVID novel I’ve been wanting to read — the COVID novel that feels brilliantly true to real life while elevating the monotonous drag of lockdown into something funny, sad and universal.
The way we talk about the natural world is getting odder. In the early days of the pandemic, sightings of wild animals in cities and rideshare scooters abandoned in waterways prompted the “nature is healing” meme, with its suggestion that human inactivity was a boon to the planet. Writers have long picked up on this anxiety, composing stories that question assumptions about our connection to nature. Some depict plants communicating with people telepathically, while others imagine people’s moods influencing planetary collapse. Such premises insist that we are more deeply linked to our environments than we tend to believe. As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape, argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature—and, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other.
In 1954, when he was in his late 30s, the poet Robert Lowell was committed to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City after a manic episode. As part of his therapy, he began to write personal prose about his family and childhood, to tap into the torrents that streamed below the glacier of his intellect. This writing was a trial run, of sorts, for the autobiographical poems in his breakthrough book, “Life Studies” (1959).
The bulk of this material has never been published. It appears for the first time in “Memoirs,” a new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time.
We humans arrived in the midst of grass’s heyday, and it is doubtful we would exist otherwise. Homo sapiens evolved in and around the savannas of Africa, then spread around the world, often following grassy corridors. With the invention of agriculture, many societies fed themselves on domesticated grasses like wheat and corn, and on livestock that turned wild grasses into edible protein. We are, many of us, grass people.
But for all grass has done for us, we haven’t done much for grass lately. Grasslands rank among the most imperiled and least protected biomes on Earth. They are disappearing even faster than forests, and much of what remains has suffered varying degrees of damage. Their decline threatens a huge chunk of the planet’s biodiversity, the livelihoods of roughly 1 billion people, and countless ecological services such as carbon and water storage. Yet these losses don’t register with the same force as deforestation. Perhaps because we do not notice, or perhaps because we do not care.