When I first met them, my own father was dying from cancer: Harold’s story was my way of dealing with my lacerating grief—of bringing shape to something that felt to have no shape at all. It makes complete sense to me now that I chose to write about a man trying to keep a person alive, when I myself was losing my father. Harold and I made our way through his journey, against the odds. I listened to him, and to his days of wonder and days of doubt, and found a reflection of what I was feeling.
In fact Harold became so real to me, and to my family, that there were times we would drive past an elderly man on a road and my children would actually wind down their car windows and wave. A few years later, I even saw him (or at least the image of Harold Fry that was on the Thai cover) as the logo on a van advertising a stair lift company. I came home and said to my husband, “You’ll never believe this, but Harold has his own private enterprise now.”
The author Alice Winn was procrastinating, digging through the archives of the English boarding school she had attended, when she came across a historical treasure trove: copies of school’s newspaper from the early 20th century.
The paper, digitized and posted online, tracked the progression of World War I through the lives of alumni and students at the school, Marlborough College. At first, the students were eager to join the fight; they cheered on their classmates and wrote letters home from the front, romanticizing the valor and bravery of war. And then they started dying.
It is, in part, a serious look at a cohort of accomplished women artists whose work has been largely lost or overlooked by the art establishment; it’s also a charming and poetic stroll through esoterica and the spirit world.
In “Saving Time,” with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch. She wrote this book to save her life, she explains, as she struggled to understand why the world came to be organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving. She charts how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells, then by the nineteenth-century railroads; the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force; and the ways that time has been progressively commodified and disciplined, from the factories of the early twentieth century to the floors of contemporary Amazon warehouses. A capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time, she argues, as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time. Modernity has pulled us out of synch with nature and the needs of our bodies; it has depleted our inner and outer worlds.
This must be the room of last resort,
this half-lit passage under the dripping bridge
where, on the only route to the Underground,