It’s not difficult to create a tiny tree: you just need to restrict the roots and prune the branches. This has been known since at least the Tang dynasty in China, circa 700 A.D. One method was to plant a seedling in a dried orange peel and trim any roots that poked through. With a smaller root base, the tree cannot find the necessary nutrients to shoot upward, and thus remains small. In certain environments, like rocky cliffsides, this can occur naturally. The artistry, then, lies in shaping the tree. For most bonsai practitioners, “styling” a tree is a question of which branches to cut off and how to bend those which remain, using metal wire, so that the plant’s over-all form elicits a feeling of something ancient and wild. The usual aim is not to imitate the profile of big trees—which are considered too messy to be beautiful—but to intensely evoke them. In culinary terms, bonsai is bouillon.
Truth is a topic philosophers have spent centuries considering. We have asked questions such as: what is the content of the concept of truth? That is, what is it to think of something as true? And what is truth itself? Can we come up with a true and illuminating account of what truth really is? For example, is truth the same thing as matching the facts? How does truth relate to other important philosophical topics, such as knowledge, reasoning and assertion? Those are all good questions, but the question I’d like to focus on is one that has been discussed far less often. As it’s far more fundamental, it deserves close examination. The question is this: do we have good reason in the first place to think that some things are true?
To be fair, Spam did send a warning: The email about the brand’s new, limited-edition holiday flavor read, “Let’s just say, it’ll have you asking ‘WTF?’”
That is, indeed, what I said when I opened a mailer from the company to find figgy pudding-flavored Spam, bearing the tagline “flavor, spice, and everything nice.” Figgy pudding, of course, is that dessert of holiday carol fame, which is similar in flavor profile to fruitcake but is steamed instead of baked.
Early in The Ghost Variations, the third novel by Damian Lanigan, the narrator approaches a woman in a bar to ask her a question: “Would you mind if I played the piano a little? I’ll be quiet. And I’ll be good. I’ll be quietly good.”
Quietly good: the phrase aptly describes this accomplished book about love, grief and the constraining and consoling effects of art.
Quan Barry’s comedic 2020 novel We Ride Upon Sticks presents the story of a Massachusetts high school field hockey team that has ostensibly turned to the dark arts to turn their season around. After the starting eleven sign their names and pledge their mischief to the darkness in an Emilio Estevez-emblazoned notebook—known thereafter simply as Emilio—the Danvers Falcons run roughshod over their opposition, all the way to the state final. While carrying the reader joyously through the irreverent narrative, Barry’s first-person plural narration creates the semblance of a unified whole that is also prescient in its selective individuation: while doing the necessary work of dipping into single characters’ arcs to develop the team members as individual people, that separation and isolation prepares the reader to meet and accept the novel’s ending.