My shrink says I’m on Twitter too much and that it stirs up my anxiety. And while I don’t disagree with her, there are things I enjoy on there—Darth, for instance. But the reason I find myself returning to the site routinely called a “hellscape” by its users, is Ruth Reichl. I want to know what she’s having for breakfast and what the animals outside her window are doing. Her tweets represent some of the happier moments of my day.
As I write this, Reichl has tweeted: “Pewter sky. Snow melting in rain. Three deer nibble the grass. Feels like fall. Roast beef hash; fried egg. Waiting for spring.” This moment of calmly observed beauty appears in my timeline between several tweets about whatever horrible thing a politician did or said and a few mentions of whatever famous person is canceled now.
I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.)
But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.
The Boston Marathon course looks like it should be fast. You start out in the distant suburb of Hopkinton—elevation 490 feet above sea level—and then cruise steadily downhill until about mile 9. The finish line has an elevation of a mere 10 feet above Boston Harbor. Fans pack the sides cheering you on. The route is pretty straight, west to east, with few 90-degree turns of the sort that slow your momentum. The road is asphalt, which is more forgiving than concrete.
So when the gun goes off Monday morning for the 123rd running of the race, everyone should feel good about hitting a personal best, right? Of course not. As every veteran marathon runner knows, Boston is slow, wicked, and tempestuous. It’s a wonderful course if you want to experience camaraderie, history, and emotional uplift. It’s a terrible course if you want a personal best.
My friend used to joke that if I were the subject of a biopic, it would just be a montage of me ordering the same thing, over and over, at different Starbucks. He was right. My Starbucks habit feels like the spinal cord running through my life, holding it together as I move from place to place, from school to job to job to graduate school.
By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week. Outside Port Stanley, on treeless uplands whose names ring distant bells – Goose Green, Mount Harriet, Tumbledown – the conflict is still unofficially memorialised by chunks of crashed war planes and the wires of field telephones from a pre-digital age. Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan’s new novel, also turns in part on the Falklands conflict, eternalising a version of that year’s events, though in the book’s fictional world things have turned out rather differently.
“The Alarming Palsy of James Orr” starts with a nod to one of the most recognizable plot openers of all time: An ordinary man wakes up one morning to find that he’s been transformed overnight by a grotesque affliction.
By beginning his first novel on such a blatantly Kafkaesque note, it’s as if the British writer Tom Lee is announcing on Page 1 that he’s forgoing all subtlety when it comes to his central metaphor — physical disfigurement as a product of bourgeois dread, a sum of the daily spiritual paper cuts that aspirational living can inflict.
Maybe it was you
Maybe we’re marching to the store
Maybe we’re coming back from the ballpark
Maybe we’re plump robins shopping in your birdbath