Between the two of us, my father and I have more than 50 diaries. Mine are a wealth of embarrassments: elementary-school poems that rhyme first base with corn flakes, a photo of an ex–best friend with the edges burned in some teenage rage, gushing during college about first love and infidelity, and more recently, a list of baby names that I’m relieved were never chosen. (Was I really considering Amapola?) My father’s diaries, which date back to the 1960s, are a mash-up of half-finished watercolors, to-do lists, and reflections on addiction. As humiliating and incoherent as most of these diaries are, I cannot part with them. And so they sit there, stacked in banker’s boxes in my childhood attic, collecting dust and rat poop.
My diary collection is dwarfed by Sally MacNamara Ivey’s. She has read more than 10,000 unpublished diaries and spent 35 years collecting them. She keeps nearly 1,000 in her Washington State home. With her blue-rimmed librarian glasses and wavy golden hair, she’s part archivist and part romantic, on a mission to sort, catalog, and find a forever home for all of her diaries. They’re tucked away in plastic bins in each of her closets, stacked on nightstands, and stored securely in six-foot-tall, 1,000-pound safes in her garage. “If someone robs me,” she told me, “they’re going to be very disappointed.”
But after traversing those first 600 pages—I have read only the opening slice of Proust’s million-word novel, a small, small sample, I admit—I could not shake the impression that Proust loved not only food, but also writing food. The cookery runs deep into the language. Food is a truth of its own: young Marcel feels his mother’s love “like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin,” and later, preparing for his first trip to the theater, finds he is “as little capable of deciding which play I should prefer to see as if, at the dinner table, [someone] had obliged me to choose between rice à l’Impératrice, and the famous cream of chocolate.” (How better to convey cravings than with something sweet?) At one point, a frantically lovesick Swann approaches a window he believes to be that of his then-mistress, Odette, and peers jealously “between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice.” Eating and loving intermingle, with many characters seeming to conflate one with the other. Later, in a moment of jealousy that interrupts his enjoyment of a glass of Odette’s orangeade, Swann works himself up imagining that someone else would ever taste her recipe.
Enter Solarpunk. By its simplest definition, Solarpunk is a literary and art movement which imagines what the future could look like if the human species were actually to succeed in solving the major challenges associated with global warming, from reducing global emissions to overcoming capitalist economic growth as the primary motor of human society. These seemingly titanic tasks are actually pragmatic necessities dictated by scientific knowledge. We know, for example, that it is simply impossible to have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. And yet, this impossibility is exactly where we are still heading towards as a species.
We know, in other words, that we need to move towards a situation in which there is some kind of equilibrium between our species and the rest of the natural world. Some popular films already do this — think of Marvel’s Wakanda in “Black Panther” or Hayao Miyazaki’s films — but what is often missing; the gap which Solarpunk is trying to fill; is a positive futurism grounded in our present world. This is why Solarpunk emphasizes community-building and mutual aid. Its imagined futures lie at the intersection of both positive and negative scenarios, all of which are possible, incorporating everything from degrowth or postgrowth to Indigenous rights, feminism, racial justice and decolonization.
I read once that when ducks sleep in a big group, those on the outer rim keep one side of their brains awake. This is what it’s like to be a writer, at least in my case. You’re never off the clock. What if you miss overhearing a perfect word from two booths down at the diner? What if someone opens their purse in a waiting room, and random objects spill out: a pair of pantyhose, unicorn-flavored gum? If you are on a walk, and a neighbor’s garage is open, you want to see what they have on their shelves: laundry detergent, potting soil, rock salt. Like the duck on half alert, the writer doesn’t let their guard down.
It is clear early on that “A Dangerous Business,” the new mystery novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley, is a love letter to Monterey. The fickle exchanges of fog, rain, wind and sun are characters as much as the novel’s two young heroines are. The flora and fauna are properly noted and kvelled over, and the layout of the town, circa 1853, is rendered in such detail, a reader might be tempted to sketch a street map just to keep track. It is this richness of detail, both historical and in the natural world, that elevates the novel above the likes of Nancy Drew.
By eschewing pseudo-intellectualism, it gets straight to the heart of the problem — a problem as relevant now as when the book was first published, in 1946.