How can culture escape the doldrums of algorithmic capitalism? Through social housing, an expanded role for the state, the energy transition, fresh imagination in political thought, a new spirit of conflict between society’s owners and nonowners: all of that, yes, and (why not?) through stiffer regulation of the tech platforms as well. But what’s needed more than anything else, I think, is for culture—in the way that critics discuss it, institutions present it, and artists produce it—to recover a sense of its own historical importance. That means complete immersion in culture, the culturization of everything, the rediscovery of culture’s vocation as the motor of history rather than the scenery we all pass on the way to whatever is next.
There are no photographs of my father holding me as a baby. Or, if there are, I’ve never seen them. He’s never brought them out and gotten misty remembering the day his first child, his parents’ first grandchild, was born. He was not in the delivery room that morning; it would be many hours before he met his son.
This isn’t surprising—in those days, fathers took no part in childbirth. Our modern idea of the supportive husband crouching at his laboring wife’s bedside, holding her hand as she screams and sweats and shits herself, would have baffled and horrified a man of his generation—and in any case, my mother was unconscious through the whole thing, as was also the norm.
But there are certain aspects of Japan that are clear to anyone, even a young reporter on his first night in the country, dropped off the Narita Airport shuttle at the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. One of those things is the coming of the cherry blossoms. Every spring on Japan’s four main islands, from the southwestern reaches of Kyushu to the northern island of Hokkaido, the country pauses to witness the brief flowering of the sakura, the cherry blossoms. It’s a moment, a few days at most, when a country that otherwise feels as though it is in perpetual motion comes to a halt to engage in hanami — gathering to see the blossoms, well, blossom.
But thanks largely to climate change, that moment is more vulnerable than ever.
Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.
Two Hours is an impassioned account of the change we undergo as life pummels us – or, as Clara puts it, “the collision between my life story and the one I had imagined for myself”. To go back after the end, with everything she has been through, and see again her innocence and optimism at the start of the book, is heartbreaking. And if the end felt a bit too sudden to me, that’s mainly because I would have been happy to keep reading for ever.