Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours cobbling together a newspaper article. Jake explains: “Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare.”
What is extraordinary about that passage is not especially how journalism made do with typewriters and carbon paper before computers and the internet were invented. It is, instead, the appearance of the neologism by-line. Hemingway was coining a word to account for an increasingly common phenomenon in American newspapers and magazines throughout the decades of the 20th century. Signed articles could occasionally be found before 1926, but they were not the standard practice they would become a century later, when a piece without a byline (now usually spelled without a hyphen) is as rare as a bird without wings.
Far from being dormant, the sleeping brain burns glucose and pulses with electricity to produce dreams. But why devote this kind of energy to the creation of wildly imaginative and highly emotional nocturnal experiences for an audience of one – especially when they often seem nonsensical? I’m confident that we wouldn’t expend the resources required for dreaming, while leaving ourselves more vulnerable to predators, unless dreams were a vital feature of our minds.
I’ll allow that passenger lists may no longer make sense in our tech-surveillance world, where even a simple series of names would get scraped by algorithms. But I think we’ve lost some sense of camaraderie without them—lost that thrill of unfurling the manifest and wondering what you might find. These lists could impress, or they could disappoint, but they always entertained.
Self-Esteem and the End of the World (such an excellent title) may be described as autofiction. But the word “cartoon” is key here, because while regular autofiction is rarely funny – more often, it’s the polar opposite – Healy’s book is hilarious.
In writing such sympathetic characters, Henry also captures with precision the complexity of human interaction, from the emotional duress of miscommunications and mishaps to the heartbreak of friend breakups and the heady, steamy, unadulterated joy of falling in love.
Arguments will not stop us being curious about our origins as a species. Nor should they. When the French painter Paul Gauguin titled his grandest work “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, he was not simply asking three distinct questions. He was suggesting that questions about our present and future require a truthful picture of our past, a past that includes but isn’t limited to our prehistoric past. Perhaps the impulses that animate this insatiable curiosity are the same ones that send adoptees and the donor-conceived on quests to find their biological parents. They can seek this knowledge without supposing that their genetic inheritance is the only one that counts.
Yet, as those analogies themselves show, our natural curiosity is almost uniquely vulnerable to the usual enemies of truth: wishful thinking, delusion, fantasy. But fantasy is best corrected in the usual scientific way. We test our hypotheses to distinguish the true from the merely convenient or flattering. The real lesson of Geroulanos’s stimulating, provoking history is not skepticism, but humility.