Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script. Despite our advanced natural sciences, we are neither prepared nor trained to really look at things, being rather at loggerheads with nature. Other eras, indeed, perhaps all other eras, all earlier periods before the earth fell to technology and industry, were attuned to nature’s symbolic sorcery, reading its signs with greater simplicity, greater innocence than is our wont. This was by no means sentimental; the sentimental relationship people have with the natural world is a more recent development that may well arise from our troubled conscience with regard to that world.
A few miles west of San Diego is a stretch of ocean that’s rather unremarkable from the surface. The water is cold and blue. There’s some green seaweed peeking out.
Sink below the waves, however, and a whole other realm appears. Under the sea here, near Point Loma, is a forest as beautiful as any other. It’s made not of trees but of strands of giant kelp, a species of algae that can grow taller than a 10-story building.
For Angelenos of a certain era, Kawafuku was the place where they first tried sushi — at a small, L-shaped bar installed by its flamboyant owner, Tokijiro Nakashima. He’d done so at the urging of Noritoshi Kanai, the food importer who’d gotten the idea in the mid-1960s to push sushi in L.A. from his associate Harry Wolff Jr.
Kanai and Wolff believed that if Japanese restaurants were persuaded to serve sushi, a lucrative supply chain could be built to support the cuisine — eel, wasabi and all. And Kanai set his sights on Kawafuku, which until then had mostly been known for dishes that were friendly to Western palates. When Nakashima agreed — it took six months to convince him, Kanai said in a 2015 interview with The Times — sushi began its norm-busting journey from culinary curiosity to mainstream Los Angeles offering.
Or, to put it another way, what begins as the romance of comedy eventually melts away into the romance of romance. But maybe that’s okay. After all, many a feminist reworking of the rom-com lies precisely in this gray zone—one in which reclaiming the genre is hard to disentangle from simply taking its fantasies seriously to begin with.
By figuring language as a kind of “unbodied apparition,” Han seems intent on reconsidering how humans conceive of their relationship to it. Writers have long lamented the insufficiency of words in the face of the rapture and terror of our emotions; as Flaubert wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.” Yet here, Han asks us to consider another possibility. What if it is not human experience that exceeds the limits of language, but language that extends beyond human limitations, and is capable of expressing concepts and feelings that we might be too afraid to acknowledge or explore?
What does it take to lead what’s called a “flourishing life”? Pleasure? Satisfied desires? Friendships? Opportunities? Fulfilling labor? Paul Woodruff’s new study Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of Socrates (2022), confirmed and illustrated by his experiences as an officer during the Vietnam War, suggests an item that seldom makes it onto contemporary lists: a reasonably clear conscience. We all know—some of us via testimony, others by bitter personal experience—that guilt and remorse over terrible deeds can rip a soul into shreds, putting inner harmony, and thus happiness, beyond reach. Here is a book that takes conscience seriously and offers a path to peace of mind.