I don’t mean to pick on this single paper. It’s simply a timely illustration of a far deeper trend, a tendency that is strong in almost all humanities and social sciences, from literature to psychology, history to political science. Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes harder, more quantifiable, more scientific, more precise. That, it seems, would confer some sort of missing legitimacy in our computerized, digitized, number-happy world. But does it really? Or is it actually undermining the very heart of each discipline that falls into the trap of data, numbers, statistics, and charts? Because here’s the truth: most of these disciplines aren’t quantifiable, scientific, or precise. They are messy and complicated. And when you try to straighten out the tangle, you may find that you lose far more than you gain.
We know, from history, theology, philosophy, and anthropology, that there are other possibilities. The temporal orientation need not be toward an open, this-worldly future, but toward wisdom, narrative, memory, and, for people of faith, a future that is eternity. The social orientation of the evening of life need not be individualistic, but toward family and the localization and strengthening of social relations. Similarly, the view of the life cycle need not take its bearings from youth and middle age but from roles and identities appropriate to old age, with their own norms and rewards. These norms and rewards need not be defined in terms of active striving and productivity, but in terms of release, such as from social climbing, and a more contemplative attitude toward the world. Surely, in the last stage of life, health and longevity need not continue to be treated as ends in themselves. Rather, they might be set within a larger framework of limits, a recognition of our vulnerability and dependence, and the ethic of a well-lived life. There are other possibilities, and if we are to free ourselves from the iron cage to which our cultural logic consigns us, we must look to them for direction.
‘Well, let me see it then,” says my mother from the screen, her iPhone camera set to the trademark lockdown angle that means I’ve never been better acquainted with a specific patch of her living room ceiling. A little fearfully, reaching over a saucepan of bubbling oil, I do as I’m told: stick a spoon in the dense batter I’ve mixed to make my first ever West African “puff-puff” doughnuts, and hoick some up for inspection. “Hmm,” she says, squinting. “It looks a little heavy, son.”
“Do you think?” I say, doubtfully, picking up one of the misshapen dark brown blobs I’ve already fried and pulling it apart. A rope of wet, uncooked batter spills out over my fingers and it feels, for a moment, like the ghosts of my Nigerian ancestors have gathered at my shoulder to shake their heads sadly.
It’s the last Friday in May when I attend the grand reopening of the drive-in after the pandemic forced its closure in March. But it feels like I’m about to take a standardized test, not catch a movie with an audience for the first time in three months. No banners are commemorating the event, no fanfare is celebrating the business’s return; instead, signs have been posted by the box-office booths warning guests to park nine feet apart, walk six feet apart, and stay inside their vehicles during the screening. These instructions have also been printed on flyers; an attendant hands me one to keep in my car as a reminder.
By the time I purchase my ticket, I’m on high alert. I hesitate when an employee offers me a pen to sign the receipt. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I sanitized it.” Then she smiles—or, rather, her eyes crinkle above her mask. I crinkle back.
Daniel Mason’s novels come slowly – his latest, The Winter Soldier, took 14 years to complete. This is his first collection of short fiction, and it is full of stories that provide the nutrition of a novel at a tenth of the length. In all the tales the setting is historical, so the perils have safely passed. Which is not to say that it is a relaxing read: Mason, a psychiatrist, is particularly strong at depicting the state of mind a character works himself into when struggling with fear, uncertainty or even impostor syndrome.
Rosenblatt describes his career as “in the news business — or on the soft edges of it.” His knack, as I recall from my days at Time, was to see what everyone else saw, only, somehow, more clearly and more movingly. “As a young writer, I was the dandiest, cleverest wit and wise guy — a cinch if one possesses the meager gifts,” he writes. “And then after witnessing enough pain and plain courage in the world, I simply reversed course and started writing about the life before my eyes.” In “The Story I Am,” that life is on vivid display.
James Wood is perhaps one of the most intelligent and passionate literary critics working today. He is known for his brutally direct reviews (the Boston Globe once called him the “Elegant Assassin”) that were a trademark of his early career, as was his insistence that fiction hold itself to a standard that is not dependent on cultural temperament or weighed down by cliché. He takes the obligation of the critic seriously, and is the professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. Whether reviled or revered, he is always treated with regard, and after he takes you through a critique of a subject with deft enthusiastic and near surgical precision, it is difficult not to feel that, even if you disagree with his argument, you are that much smarter for just having taken the time to read the piece in the first place. He has elevated the critical essay into a work of art and some have said that to read Wood on literature is in fact to read literature. And read it carefully and well in an age when our attention span seems to diminish with each new app.
Even with the status Wood enjoys in the literary community, the recent publication of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997–2019 occurred without much fanfare, yet for Wood enthusiasts it feels a long time in coming. The collection contains 28 essays selected by the author and his British publisher. Each one appeared previously in either The New Republic, The New Yorker, or The London Review of Books, and all but six essays have been included in previous collections. The title of the book comes from the third essay. After all, serious noticing is the business of the writer and it would have been a shame had the collection not repurposed that gorgeous title.
The “Galileo affair” continues to fascinate and provoke after 400 years. It was, in a way, both simple and very complicated. What was simple was its upshot: The great founder of modern science was tried, convicted and sentenced in 1633 to perpetual house arrest by the Catholic Church for defending the idea that the Earth goes around the sun, and was forced to recant under oath. This offense against freedom of thought, research and conscience can never cease to shock.
The complicated question is how and why it happened. It was not inevitable. Saint Augustine had warned eloquently in the 4th century against interpreting scripture contrary to what is known with certainty by reason and experience. This was a well-established principle, accepted by Cardinal Bellarmine, the church’s top theologian, who admitted in a famous letter to one of Galileo’s friends that “if there were a true demonstration that . . . the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them, than that what is demonstrated is false.”