To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the lawn, with its hair in long, curving crimps and a deerstalker hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find you, its face lights up, there is something in this world for you to do.
A sandy bluff towers above the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. Every year, Alaska Native resident Ken Shade watches as a little more of his land falls over the edge, into the sea.
Dillingham is just one example of a small Alaskan town with a big erosion problem. Around the state, dozens of coastal communities are watching their coastlines crumble, losing at least 3 feet of land per year. Critical infrastructure such as airport runways, fuel tanks, and schools are in danger. Many Alaska Natives have been hard hit: Now, with climate change altering weather patterns, melting permafrost, and reducing sea ice, the land these communities are built on is falling into the sea.
In one sense, these new discoveries have injected drama, even anxiety, into a field that was quite stable. “It’s incredible how the universe is just so much weirder than we thought it was,” Erica Nelson, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me. But in another sense, it’s just fun. When I asked Kirkpatrick whether she feels stressed about the uncertainty her profession is navigating, she cackled with glee. “It’s the beginning of the universe!” she said. “It’s not going to affect my life, so it’s really fun to think about this kind of stuff.”
Decades before journaling became a verb, Alba de Céspedes explored in Forbidden Notebook the insidious, inflammatory, radically self-affirming potential of women’s life writing. Like her grandfather ending slavery on his plantation before taking up arms against Spain, she knew that true revolution begins at home.
There’s a point when you realize that the fairy tales you read as a child were eerily prescient. Their familiar plots surface everywhere as the cumulative absurdity of everyday life warps your consciousness. “Fairy tales themselves are well-trodden paths,” writes Sabrina Orah Mark in “Happily,” her new essay collection. “I connect pieces of fairy tales to walk me through motherhood, and marriage, and America, and weather, and loneliness, and failure, and inheritance, and love.” When history and truth are subject to excruciating debate, returning to the ur-texts of one’s childhood seems completely sensible.