In the weeks after the birth of my second child, I began saving pictures of Victorian hidden mother portraits, which are, to this day, interspersed on my phone with images of my newborn and my older child, sleepy and shocked by the transition to family of four, respectively. In the black and white photographs, Victorian mothers remain obscured so the babies can be photographed; they are often draped in sheets or curtains and holding their children, helping them stay still while the early cameras’ long exposure times captured infancy and toddlerhood. Like their mothers, I am nowhere to be found in my own pictures on my camera roll of that tender era.
What strikes me—and Kreizman, later in her essay—is the profound incompatibility between the object of the book and the ethos of productivity. Novels, in general, take a long time to create and consume. Unlike other cultural products like, say, the TikTok, they are not necessarily designed for single-use, speedy consumption. Their effects, too, are nebulous. Such that they cannot be repurposed for advertising in easy, obvious ways.
Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound.
At its heart, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book is a final love note to her husband. It will appeal to a reader of any political persuasion who wants to understand how history unfolds and marriages endure.
The Invention of Prehistory therefore ends with an impassionate call for radical modesty. It is time for us to admit that we simply do not know the deep past and cannot comprehend the “ecstasies and feelings and terrors” that our predecessors experienced. This recognition will then allow us to root advocacy for solidarity and equality on firmer grounds. Rather than far-reaching narratives that point to one key quality as the essence of humanity, we should accept our history for what it is: an amalgamation of disparate and diverse developments that led to very different modes of existence.