My own materialism, fervent though it may be, veers into a type of wooly, incarnational mysticism that I imagine would be anathema to my more sober Marxist friends, but for me the book very much is the thing. I’ve had a few opportunities to actually touch the crinkled, brown paper of a first folio, the fine threads of the rendered rags which compose the individual pages visible and slightly textured to the touch, the individual fraying of faded black letters indicative of the sorts wearing down printing after printing. I’ve been able to turn the page of a first folio to the frontispiece of MacBeth at Lehigh University’s special collections, and to slowly paw through Carnegie Mellon University’s first folio and linger over lines like “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” from The Tempest in its earliest printing. At the risk of sounding sentimental, there are many things that go through one’s mind, not least of which is a sense of reverence for the sterling craftsmanship of what was still a mass-produced object; startling to consider when most of our contemporary books will transform into an acidic pulpy mass before the end of the century. Skill is why the book survived, why people wanted to pass it down, why so many still remain, especially when compared to other books from the time period. I’ve worked in the archive with sixteenth-century books where there is only one remaining copy, far fewer than the first folio’s 233 extant copies. Monetarily, these are worth far less than a folio, and the librarians scarcely paid me any attention, even though I could have suddenly lost my mind and began ripping pages and eating them.. That’s because nobody cares about Thomas Crashaw, but Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Maybe initially the binding and pages and cover, the thread and paper and leather, can explain the endurance of the folio, but it’s fair to say that if we think of a folio as a material object, then it’s certainly a relic, too. By definition, all relics are physical, and if the relic is where matter finds its apotheosis, then it’s hard not to see the folio as a sacred object.
In 1940, Chaplin made his first talkie, a satire of Hitler and Mussolini called “The Great Dictator.” It was a huge hit. And then the sky fell. The country, or a very noisy part of it, turned against him, and eventually, after a decade of critical and political abuse, Chaplin left the United States, cashed out his American assets, bought a house in Switzerland, and did not return for twenty years.
While time travel is fundamental to Doctor Who, the show never tries to ground the Tardis' abilities in anything resembling real-world physics. It would be odd to complain about this: Doctor Who has a fairy-tale quality and doesn't aspire to be realistic science fiction.
But what about in the real world? Could we ever build a time machine and travel into the distant past, or forward to see our great-great-great-grandchildren? Answering this question requires understanding how time actually works – something physicists are far from certain about. So far, what we can say with confidence is that travelling into the future is achievable, but travelling into the past is either wildly difficult or absolutely impossible.
Word spread quickly in my neighborhood one morning a few weeks ago. Phones in a certain corner of Astoria, Queens, buzzed with frantic group-chat messages. Pictures were shared on Instagram. Facebook posts about the news elicited crying emoji responses. We couldn’t hide our gut-level shock. I felt blindsided by sadness—mostly, I thought, on behalf of my younger daughter.
Basra’s too smart to think she can explain to us “the immigration situation” in one novel. But she does want us to feel Happy’s plight, and to share her anger at the dehumanizing methods by which our capitalist systems exploit migrant labor. To a profit-driven boss, one worker is the same as another, and is easily replaced by the next one who dares to come. But Happy’s indelible voice won’t let us take that attitude, or let Happy be forgotten.
Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Day,” visits a family on April 5 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — before, during and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shadows the book although the words “Covid” and “pandemic” never appear.