In 2000, my parents and I moved to Austin, traversing the southern states in our black Toyota Camry and a half-full moving truck. It was a strange but welcome reprieve from the bucolic quietude of Oxford—in place of magnolia trees, giant rocky cliffs that had been cloven in two to make way for the snaking highway. We lived in the Lost Creek neighborhood, finally shedding the graduate school housing of my parents’ earlier years with a real house. By the time I was in high school, my mother was commuting to San Antonio every day for work via Interstate 35. Even in 2004, the drive was odious. Austin was growing at an unprecedented rate, certainly beyond the limits of what its hippie college town infrastructure could sustain. The corridor between Austin and San Antonio was and remains one of the most clogged roadways in the state, with more than 100,000 vehicles passing through on average per day.
For my mother, though, the drive was negligible compared to the relief it gave our family. My father had been unemployed for years by this point—a casualty of working in tech startups during the dot-com bubble. Faced with our mortgage, my impending college tuition, and the unknown future, my mother accepted the commute without question. Making money, even if it was all the way in San Antonio, was worth everything.
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.
Old God's Time is a powerful, painful novel, another excellent offering from Barry, who is clearly one of the best Irish writers working today. It's also a book suffused with a deep moral anger that refuses to let go of the crimes that destroyed the lives of so many.
Regan Penaluna’s book is a combination of memoir and analysis, as she looks at the careers of earlier female philosophers; in particular, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Cockburn. I would hazard that only one of the four names is familiar to the average reader. They are united by concerns. How to be independent? What is obligation? Is self-sufficiency possible, necessary or desirable? Penaluna makes an excellent job of counterpointing these women’s own lives, in all their ambiguities, to their work.
You remember this, don’t you?
We said, later, we’d remember,
and now it’s later. Do you?