Purple is a paradox, a contradiction of a colour. Associated since antiquity with regality, luxuriance, and the loftiness of intellectual and spiritual ideals, purple was, for many millennia, chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of molluscs that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders. That insalubrious process, undertaken since at least the 16th Century BC (and perhaps first in Phoenicia, a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’), was notoriously malodorous and required an impervious sniffer and a strong stomach. Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure.
It took tens of thousands of desiccated hypobranchial glands, wrenched from the calcified coils of spiny murex sea snails before being dried and boiled, to colour even a single small swatch of fabric, whose fibres, long after staining, retained the stench of the invertebrate’s marine excretions. Unlike other textile colours, whose lustre faded rapidly, Tyrian purple (so-called after the Phoenician city that honed its harvesting) only intensified with weathering and wear – a miraculous quality that commanded an exorbitant price, exceeding the pigment’s weight in precious metals.
What is freedom? We who came of age half a century ago found ourselves well placed by unearned good fortune to test its limits. Our parents, having suffered the privations of the Great Depression and the anxieties of World War II, had subsequently harnessed themselves to the task of rebuilding. From their discipline emerged a world of prosperous plenty sicklied o’er with the pale cast of gray-flannel conformity and lonely crowds. We wanted more. Throughout 1968, our inchoate desire bubbled over into the public sphere.
The nature of that desire—perhaps I should call it a yearning, because it was vaguer than desire, limitless and without object—was vividly evoked by a surprising witness to what happened in Paris that spring: Yves de Gaulle, the grandson of Charles de Gaulle, who was president of France at the time of the May ‘68 student uprising turned general strike, and whose grip on power was loosened by what the French to this day simply refer to as “the events.”
In many ways, we still think like Aristotle. Most everyone strives for happiness. Today, the standing dogma is that purposelessness and disorder are nihilistic. Whether you’re mulling a major life change or healing from trauma, being told that there’s no purpose in life might be particularly devastating. The chances are better that you’re looking for an ultimate explanation. Or you could simply be searching for that something or someone meant for you — God, a soul mate or a calling of sorts.
I’m certainly no Aristotelian. Not because I reject happiness. Rather, as a materialist, I think there’s nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it. Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe. From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose.
Before I started work on this manuscript, I was sufficiently familiar with these subjects that nothing I’ve read, so far, has truly shocked me. I keep thinking I’ve become habituated; that, like a vaccination containing a measure of attenuated bacteria, the hundreds of thousands of words have immunized me against the horror of it over time.
But it has turned out be more like a dose of a something that lies dormant before metastasizing. Neither of my previous books involved reading of this magnitude. Never before have I shrouded myself in material of this nature for so long, and so intensely. I want to make something that feels real, to capture the emotional temperature of the era and places I’m writing about. Research is critical for verisimilitude. But there is something demented in making yourself read this stuff. And I’ve always been hyper-cognizant of becoming a trauma tourist.
I want to write about insidious, cumulative weight. I’m trying to write about writing about trauma, and the ways it changes your brain.
With so much life waiting in my reading list, I'm ready to leave my other ghosts behind. But next time you put down a book, remember this: It's not you. It's not the book, either. (OK, maybe it's the book.) It's the timing. A year down the road, maybe more, that book might be just the thing you need. Maybe you need to grow into it; maybe it needs to grow into you. But you're not going to discover that connection if you pretend it never happened. Anything can drive you away from reading—but only a book will bring you back.
Here Naomi Novik has gathered countless old tales and turned them into something all kinds of new. The theft of summer, a burning demon who lives inside a prince, a witch’s hut in the woods, the secret power of names, the frozen winter road that winds its way through the depths of the forest — they’re all here.
But she also borrows our everyday truths: the way a family can disintegrate into violence, the way a ghetto can be disappeared, how the everyday persecution of Jews can erupt into mass violence, the magic of young children becoming people, the creation of food and clothing and blankets and shelter from plants and animals.
By focusing on less exalted characters, often of a literary bent, Ms Baker produces a highly readable and intimate view of an unusual time and place. At times her fluent writing beguiles: it is easy to forget this is non-fiction and wonder how a novelist might have invented a more satisfying plot for her well-sketched characters.
Sometimes the best way to understand how a “normal” brain works is to explore those that are unique. Such is the insight in reporter Helen Thomson’s enjoyable new book, “Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains.” Unsatisfied with the “cold and impersonal” accounts that make up the bulk of modern case studies, she reaches out to the humans they feature to get a fuller picture of their lives. She goes one step further than her idol Oliver Sacks: Instead of interviewing them in a clinical setting, she meets them on their own turf — in their homes, favorite restaurants and other haunts of regular life. What is it like, she constantly asks, to live with a brain that is so incredibly different?
Drawing on interviews with his unhappy correspondents, he defines a (expletive) job as employment “that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious.” Not all bad jobs are unnecessary. Some workers — in municipal services and the restaurant and transportation industries, for example — may do menial, unpleasant work, but if they all quit, the rest of us would notice. This may not be the case, Graeber writes, with some higher-paid workers such as “private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants.” But don’t take Graeber’s word for it. If the polls are correct, a substantial percentage of these workers would agree.
Complementing Graeber’s sharp analysis of white-collar ennui, the journalist Sarah Kessler reports on the burgeoning gig economy in “Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work.” She follows freelancers as they try, and mostly fail, to find a better way to make a living. Taken together, the professor and the journalist offer a deep look at what Graeber calls our “civilization based on work” — and what’s so often unsatisfying about living in it.