Language is often cited as the quality that distinguishes us as humans. When I asked Robert Berwick, an M.I.T. computational linguist, about birds, he argued that “they’re not trying to say anything in the sense of James Joyce trying to say something.” Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that humans and songbirds share a trait that many animals lack: we are “vocal learners,” meaning that we can learn to make new sounds throughout our lives. (Bats, whales, dolphins, and elephants can, too.) “To me, the most amazing thing is that every generation of vocal learners has its own sound,” Kleindorfer said. “So, just like our English is different from Shakespeare’s English, the songbirds, too, have very different songs from five hundred years ago. I am sure of it.” We humans have long tried, often mistakenly, to differentiate ourselves from nonhuman animals—by arguing that only we have souls, or use tools, or are capable of self-awareness. Perhaps we should see what the birds have to say.
There's a reason the man and woman sitting on the mangy couch hold hands. They've endured what you and I have not, and what they’ve endured has led them to question whether to live. You see it in their faces, in their bearing, in the shared glances before speaking, a weighted maturity that slumps their shoulders and draws into sharper contrast their youth: he with his shaggy reddish-brown hair and childlike freckles, she with her olive complexion and taut cheekbones and tattoos up and down her arms.
From an outsider’s view, it seems like crabs appear so often because Mother Nature “loves” crabs. In the immortal words of English zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, who coined the term, carcinization is “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.”
The concept is so intriguing and delightful, it has spawned the crab meme, which swept some little nerdy part of the internet a few years ago and with it, a wacky speculation that we are all going to evolve into crabs one day. But all bizarre fantasies aside, what’s really happening here is far more interesting.
Acting out of impulse and spite? Refusing to learn from painful experiences and instead lashing out and self-medicating with mind-numbing technology? Forgive us, evolved readers between the ages of 18 and 30: it was 2004, and we were still reeling from the anticlimactic emotional terrorism of Y2K.
As I talked to more people about soursop, I began to think that perhaps the small-scale, slow cycle of the fruit was not such a bad thing. When I decided to make my milkshake, I was forced to sit with the fruit, searching for and eventually finding sweetness beneath the surface. I can’t say the same for most other food I consume. When I purchased my first soursop at RAYA, I saw the fruit’s novelty unfolding in real time, as a group of American tourists passed the store in awe. ‘Oh my God, look! All your exotic fruit right here!’, one said. ‘What the hell is a soursop?’ her friend shouted back. I hoped the sign that read, ‘Do not squeeze you WILL be charged!’, propped up against the soursop, would give them a clue.
We humans are collectors. We collect the animate and inanimate until the mysteries of nature soak through and become, when we’ve forgotten we live in a compiled world, our natural shells.
I don’t know if death is in the eye of the beholder, as Marlen says. Perhaps we do live our lives over and over until we get it right, achieve perfection. This notion is certainly more hopeful than thinking it all comes down to a final explosion of light, and then darkness. It’s an odd thing to say, but Krause renders the end of the world rather beautifully.
Shred Sisters is, indeed, incisive and wry; but, given its central subject — an upper-middle-class, Jewish, suburban family all-but-capsized by the mental illness of one of its members — this novel is anything but contained and controlled.
Certainly, it’s clear that Presley was nothing if not radically honest. It’s also striking how Keough seems to almost plead with the reader to understand and love her mother as much as she does. Ultimately, this is a book built on grief: Lisa Marie Presley’s for her father and son, but also a daughter’s for her mother.
Towards the end of the book, Ernaux asks herself the impossible question: “How do I conceive of my death… my non existence?” That, in turn, precipitates a short philosophical meditation on the unimaginable. “None of what awaits us IS thinkable,” she reflects, “but that’s just the point: there’ll be no more waiting. Or memory.” It is this “shadow of nothingness”, she concludes, that informs The Use of Photography and, indeed, all her work. Without it, she asserts, “writing, even of a kind most acquiescent to the beauty of the world, doesn’t really contain anything of use to the living”.