From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaotic than we can imagine. Its waters move in ways that lack a terrestrial equivalent and, in doing so, the ocean shirks tidy metaphor.
Right now, in the Atlantic Ocean alone, a single current, the Gulf Stream, is moving more water than all the world’s rivers combined. Across the ocean’s face, invisible to the naked eye, hundreds of eddies are whirling. Most of them are larger than the state of Rhode Island and reach more than three miles into the deep.
Throughout history, those precious few moments of totality—and the rare natural conditions that result—have proved conducive to scientific discovery. During a total solar eclipse in 1868, a French astronomer became the first person to observe helium, spotting the element in the spectrum of the usually invisible corona. In 1919, a pair of astronomers who were watching an eclipse verified Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by measuring how the sun distorts the light from other stars.
Culture is a pendulum swinging back and forth between tail ends of a spectrum. If the previous decade saw conservative politics, liberalism is on the forefront; if the starlets of yesteryear were curvy, today’s will be skinny; if your closet is stocked with skinny jeans, be prepared for the takeover of the straight leg. Culture is constantly reacting to itself, swinging from one side to the opposite side, like how your parents told you to think of them as a friend growing up, so you’re going to tell your kids that you’re not their friend, you’re their mom. Like us humans, culture learns from the previous generation’s mistakes.
Alphabetical Diaries is drawn from a decade’s worth of Heti’s own diaries, about 500,000 words that she separated out into single-sentence strands and then alphabetized. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry (made with a cyborg apprentice), with a glancing nod to the tradition of the commonplace book, a sort of personal encyclopedia of the owner’s favorite quotes, facts, and memories.
Because of the conventions of English, the first page opens with “A book,” and Heti never misses an opportunity to make fortuitous play between chance and meaning. The randomization of the sentences is immediately compelling, trained as so many of us are to the disjointed syncopation of social media and text messages. There are enough personal disclosures to reassure the reader that she is really reading a diary. Any woman who has kept one will recognize the painful repetitions of heartbreak, yearning, and romantic disappointment. Certain names (pseudonymous or otherwise) pepper the text: when the “L” section comes around, a certain Lars dominates the page as he seems to have dominated the diarist, for better or worse. The diary brought me into a rapid felt intimacy with Heti: like any girlfriend, I found that I disliked certain of her beaus (e.g., Vig) immediately and felt vindicated with each small revelation of their shallowness and misdeeds.
More than two hundred years’ worth of narratives concerning the end of the world have been chewed through. Lynskey’s definition of what constitutes such a story is roomy. It can involve ‘the total demolition of the planet itself, the extinction of the human race, and the collapse of civilization, which is to say the end of the world as we know it’. That last allows a lot of space for interpretation.
I’ve got a bottle of whiskey and some ice that’s already started to melt (c’mon, this is Florida), so let’s jump straight to the questions before I accidentally wind up drinking a glass of water. Me, hydrated? What is this, amateur hour?
Giddy up!