“I have to be beaten over the head with certain insights about life,” Burkeman said after we’d circled a portion of the park twice and found a perch that overlooked a meadow (he was desperate to make sure we were both sitting comfortably in the breeze). In Meditations for Mortals, his practical advice reveals a new take on his old message. Maybe we aren’t just afraid to die—maybe what equally intimidates are the real, unvarnished sensations of living: the fear of being unprepared, of letting a pleasant moment slip by, of facing even minor consequences for our actions. By the end of Four Thousand Weeks, he’d arrived at the realization about life that animates this new book—summed up in a favorite quote of his by the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” His solution? Develop “a taste for problems,” a readiness to say to yourself, over and over, that problems are “what life is fundamentally about.”
To read Djuna Barnes attentively is to begin to suspect how wretched she must have been. Her themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts. In nearly every other story, one encounters a man or woman on all fours, trembling, weeping, half mad with either lust or torment. In “Spillway,” the tubercular Mrs. Julie Anspacher returns from a long stay at a sanatorium with the dying child of a dead lover, and tries to explain the nature of her misery to her bewildered husband. “It is a thing beyond the end of everything,” she tells him. “It’s suffering without a consummation, it’s like insufficient sleep; it’s like anything that is without proportion.” Yet her suffering fills her with a hysterical joy—with the ecstasy of having become “alien to life.” When, at the end of the story, she lowers herself “down, down, down, down” onto her hands and knees, one wonders if she will ever get up.
We Solve Murders is an entertaining read, fast paced, bewildering so at times as the settings change so rapidly, and always great fun. It’s full of delightful characters.
Her latest book reflects a lifetime of keen observation, explaining the science behind a leaf while also wondering at its beauty, describing how trees seed the soil while contemplating history from a tree’s perspective.