What’s lost in such diluted coverage is proper assessment of the basic cultural unit. Just as the individual work is what individual artists—whether directors, actors, crew, or producers—create at a given moment, it’s also how viewers fundamentally seek out works: one at a time. And what a review embodies, above all, is one viewer’s experience of it. The essence of the review is evaluation, which of course doesn’t imply the crude simplicity of a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. (There’s a special pleasure for critics in hearing from readers who are unsure whether to take a particular review as positive or negative.) Even as a review confronts a work’s commercial role, it also embodies the opposite—a work’s potential vastness, the possibly overwhelming and transformative impact of a single viewing or listening.
So, what does it really mean to embrace an entangled life? The answer is not straightforward. Truly affirming entanglement means recognising that we are vulnerable, and terrifyingly edible. This is the shocking realisation Plumwood had in 1985, when she awakened to a ‘parallel universe’ in which she was no longer just a person but also ‘food’ for a predator. In the aftermath, she contemplated the tremendous gap between these realities: ‘There is an incommensurability which shuts these two worlds off from each other. They exist as parallel universes, in different dimensions. Yet, we exist in both simultaneously.’
This raises a hard question for those who want to pursue a more intentionally entangled life: how do we embrace living as both ‘people’ and ‘food’? Can we reconcile our moral sensibilities with our immersion in the relentless processes of the natural world? This question has become urgent in recent decades. It was also, perhaps surprisingly, a point of intense concern for one of the 19th century’s greatest thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche.
When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, we lived in a house in the country—on a rural road on the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois, where the water was from a well, the street name was a number, and the neighbors were farmers. The flat plain of our mowed backyard smudged from tamed grass to tall trees, which marked the edge of my world. I imagined those trees were a primeval forest, its trunks and branches witnesses to the land’s past. I was rarely brave enough to wander more than a few paces into their dark understory, but close to the edge I dug in the dirt looking for arrowheads and fossils. The older I get the more I think about the past of this land that we tread and build upon, and profane.
Teen-agers today are the most photographed generation ever, having been snapped incessantly by their parents before graduating to selfies and Instagram in their own right. Compared with the self-curated, only partially self-disclosing pictures that are the mainstay of social media, however, Salinger’s images—many accompanied by a short text drawn from extended video interviews she conducted—have a disquieting intimacy, offering a sense of the perennial perilousness of adolescence. Danielle D., seventeen, shot in Syracuse, New York, in 1990, is pictured seated in a white wicker chair like a throne, a pair of pink ballet pointe shoes draped over a pushpin board above her bed. Dressed in a stripy T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tube socks, with fair, cascading curls and a winsome smile, she looks like a paragon of the high-school popular girl. The text on the opposite page reveals that, after a manic episode, Danielle spent thirty days in a mental hospital and was diagnosed as bipolar. In the photograph, she is on lithium.