What is it like to read as a child? Is there something in it – the headlong, hungry, immersive quality of it – that we can get back to? When I was young I read with a rage to understand. Adult memories of how we once read are often de-spiked by nostalgia, but my need for books as a child was sharp and urgent and furious if thwarted. My family was large, and reading offered privacy from the raucous, mildly unhinged panopticon that is living with three siblings: I could be sitting alongside them in the car, but, in fact, it was the only time when nobody in the world knew where I was. Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.
For most readers, acquiring a newly released book means heading to your local bookstore, hitting the library, or logging on to Amazon. For others, however, it involves opening up a thoughtfully designed box that includes a copy of the book, alongside gifted items like a custom tote bag, a scented candle, beauty products, and maybe even a box of tea. If you’re a book influencer, the latter is often the case.
Doing nothing in a world where everybody seemed busy doing something – anything – struck Cioran as the only lifestyle worth pursuing and defending. A life devoid of action and practical ambitions, of distractions and busyness, is a life in which room has been made for meaning: ‘Anything good comes from indolence, from our incapacity of taking action, executing our projects and plans,’ Cioran wrote. And he behaved accordingly. When a journalist once asked him about his writerly routines, his answer was candour itself: ‘Most of the time I don’t do anything. I am the idlest man in Paris … the only one who does less than I do is a whore without clients.’
Like many folks who had been cooped up at home at the start of the pandemic, I got in the habit of talking long walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. I told myself it was enough exercise to justify all the comfort eating, as well as an opportunity to support local businesses and cure my cabin fever.
Over time, I started paying attention to—really noticing—the space I was using: the sidewalk. And the more I paid attention to the sidewalk, the more I saw.
At the entrance of The Good Place, you stopped to fill up your tubs from a drinking fountain with two spouts – a cold one and a warm one. What is it good for? I asked a Gypsy man with a face pummeled with hardship. What do I know, he chuckled. Everything, they say, so I fill up and hope.
The luxurious water embraced your insides. The summer was late, life was caught in a sticky web. Something emanated from the mountain. It felt like predestination. Destiny, destination, destino. Destino, purpose, goal.
“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, In a series of chapters focused on everything from the origins of the universe to the speculative scene of first contact, Green writes about imaginary microbes and massive extraterrestrial engineering experiments and tentacled squid people and radio signals from distant, unknown origins. But her main characters are sci-fi writers and scientists whose lives are and have been dedicated to dreaming of and seeking out life beyond our home planet. We are, for better and worse, stuck within the worlds we have imagined and built here, unable to see beyond ourselves in ways both petty and profound. The Possibility of Life is not a book about aliens; it’s about human beings and the possibilities of our lives, together and alone.
My son says you’re listening so you might tell us
what we want. If so, I want to know
what is lost under my fingertips
besides home? And whether you understand