A few miles from my home lies a 175-acre garden cemetery full of hills and glens, groves and clearings, fountains and ponds and winding footpaths. The layout is such that no matter how often I go walking there, the place remains capable of bewildering me. Suddenly I’ll come around a curve to experience the pleasure of finding myself somewhere other than where I’d expected.
Occasionally I’m able to slip my bearings altogether and for whole seconds turn in place before recalling in which direction the entrance lies. How fatly the birds trill then, how sharp the air tastes. In these moments before reorienting myself, the world reveals itself as giddily, lavishly alive. Can anything compare to the wonder of being lost?
Recently, I’ve felt that the TV landscape, in all its modern sensibilities, seems to be closing the book on a particular image of what it means to be young—no longer a child, but not quite an adult. Teen TV was once as triumphant as it was confounding; to see it become an endangered species is as alarming as it is depressing.
From their inception, Western encounters with the mountain now called Everest were intimately tied to visualising and integrating it into the developing mapping of the region. To climb the mountain, one had to know it – its height, its approaches, its composition, crags and crevices. Recording the geography of Everest is a process that involved various individuals and continues to this day, thanks to the changeable nature of mountainous terrain and the alterations wrought by increased human interaction and climate change.
For most of one’s life, “stuff” is temporary. You buy new fluffy towels and you know that, someday, you’ll have washed the life right out of them and they’ll start to fray and you’ll cut them up and turn them into rags and then use those rags for a painting project one weekend and they’ll be garbage. Dishes break, spoons get lost, books are borrowed by a friend and never returned. Toys are handed down to younger children, shoes lose their soles, luggage zippers break. Some things have a longer lifecycle: clothes, if chosen wisely, can last years, through many seasons and trends and countless wearings. But they, too, will eventually thin and tear. Yes, a few objects will outlast us; we can imagine our jewellery going on to children or grandchildren, and a solid hammer can be handed down over a few generations. But most of the goods that pass through our hands are short lived in the grand scheme of things. We will always need another one, of whatever we’ve just bought, at some point.
Until one day we won’t.
Beginning a Claire Messud novel is like beginning a journey: coat on, suitcase in hand, you reach for the door and turn the knob, knowing you’ll be profoundly changed by the time you return. As I began Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, the feeling was the same, though having gained by now some wisdom from previous experiences, I had the sense this time to bring a bigger suitcase, as it were, to fit more souvenirs. Here is a book to savor, to slow down to, to mark up and reread. Like in traveling, when we can feel more attuned to the present moment but feel the insistent tug of excitement (or apprehension?) for what will come next, This Strange Eventful History presents a lush space to explore—to be able to luxuriate in a single paragraph or chapter while sensing the bigger story at hand, then discovering, sometimes from different vantage points, how the micro connects to the macro, is a lasting gift.
In The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall (2023), Cookie Woolner uses the backstage meeting between Dunbar-Nelson and Waters as a thematic framework for the larger narrative she explores in her study of the Jazz Age: how Black women—musicians, actresses, writers, and middle- to upper-class clubwomen and society ladies—“craft[ed] queer kinship networks.”