I walked, I talked, I carried beers. I didn’t apply for 'real' jobs. I always said, soon, soon, things like this cannot last forever. I thought I’d get too tired to keep waiting tables, I thought if I waited much longer I’d lose the chance to get a ‘real’ job, in publishing or media or who knows what industry. I knew I couldn’t wait tables forever, though I certainly never thought I would be stopped by a global pandemic.
The job at that bar was the best job I’ve ever had, in concert with the life I’d always wanted—publishing my writing, running a literary magazine, having several close circles of friends, living in the city I’d always dreamed of. I loved my apartment and I had the money to do things like get facials and use ClassPass. I took vacations and went to literary awards or friends’ book launches and plays and fancy dinners, and one night when I was sad I bought a pink suit, and then I felt better. Waiting tables gave me a life I didn’t think I’d be able to attain for myself. I was a lackluster student in high school and I went to a small college in a strange town where we didn’t get grades. I’d never gotten a response when I applied for a job, an internship, or even a volunteer opportunity in the arts. Waiting tables felt like the bane of my existence, but it also gave me access to everything I loved. I didn’t see any of it coming. Where do I begin?
“Entangled Life” has turned Sheldrake, who is 36, into a kind of human ambassador for the fungal kingdom: the face of fungi. He has flown to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania to shoot an IMAX movie, narrated by Björk, that is screening this summer. Shortly after his London talk, he was scheduled to leave for Tierra del Fuego, where he would join a group sampling fungi on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a conservation-and-advocacy organization founded by the ecologist Colin Averill and the biologist Toby Kiers. Sheldrake described the trip as part of the group’s effort to map the global diversity of mycorrhizae, which help plants and trees survive, and to establish protections for fungi. (In the United States, just two fungi, both lichens, are protected under the Endangered Species Act.)
I’d come to relish night hiking. In this and many ways, forest activism awakens the senses. Traipse across miles of moonless nights on labyrinthine logging roads, with fifty pounds on your back and an injunction on your head (Kurt already had one; mine was coming), on roads patrolled by armed, territorial security squads, and your senses do push-ups. Climb a thirteen-foot-diameter tree in the middle of the night and you’re running a marathon. Do it enough and the trees start talking to you.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.
The book then moves back to their first meeting, tracing step by step the contours of a relationship that is not only intellectually and emotionally complicated in itself, but whose difficulties are compounded through its relationship to the collapse of East Germany. Katharina and Hans meet in East Berlin in 1986, and they live out the disintegration of all their hopes and dreams, personally and politically, throughout the course of the novel.