Williams poured himself a glass of water in the bungalow kitchenette, settled into a chair in front of his desk, and addressed the topic of the “Star Wars” cycle. He is a tall man, still physically vigorous, his face framed by a trim, vaguely clerical white beard. “Thinking about it, and trying to speak about it, connects us with the idea of trying to understand time,” he said. “How do you understand forty years? I mean, if someone said to you, ‘Alex, here’s a project. Start on it, spend forty years on it, see where you get’? Mercifully, I had no idea it was going to be forty years. I was not a youngster when I started, and I feel, in retrospect, enormously fortunate to have had the energy to be able to finish it—put a bow on it, as it were.”
Now we come to the problem: today, speech predominates. People gesture, but their gesture is clearly a secondary supplement. People also sign but, outside of deaf communities, they favour speech. So, if language did get its start in the hands, then at some later stage it decamped to the mouth. The vexing question is: why? Already in the 18th century, Condillac appreciated the difficulty of this problem. ‘With the language of action at that stage being so natural, it was a great obstacle to overcome,’ he wrote. ‘How could it be abandoned for another language whose advantages could not yet be foreseen?’ This is now known as the problem of ‘modality transition’. To his credit, Hewes fully acknowledged it, and every gesture-first proponent since has had to address it in some way. Can it possibly be explained?
And I now realize that it is this—that feeling of personalities colliding and conspiring in the serendipity of a moment—that makes a restaurant so essential to the hum of a community. It is this that I am craving. People. People savoring a moment together. We don’t need restaurants because we are hungry. We need restaurants because we are lonely.
There is a fine line between admiration and envy. I was reminded of that while reading Amy Stanley’s enthralling portrait of an intrepid 19th-century Japanese woman and the city she loved. Stanley, a professor of history at Northwestern University, renders the world of that rebellious woman, Tsuneno, so vividly that I had trouble pulling myself back into the present whenever I put the book down. “Stranger in the Shogun’s City” is as close to a novel as responsible history can be.
On the final page, Lilia cedes that “Roland was right about one thing. When you start writing about yourself, it feels like you can go on living forever.” Freedom or folly? For once, Lilia doesn’t offer a corrective intervention. I’ll try: What sounds like comfort, especially to the ears of readers and writers, actually expresses the book’s—and Li’s—deep ambivalence between writing and its illusion of immortality and the unspeakable suffering of going on living. But Li’s wisdom is this: we don’t own the ambivalence. Death does. In the end, as Lilia tells Roland, we all must go.
There’s an obvious irony to reading a global history of migration in this time of global stillness, when most of us have been confined to our immediate surroundings for months. Shah describes how our xenophobic tendencies may be an embedded immune response to the fear that outsiders carry novel pathogens, a disturbing theory in the midst of a pandemic that has heightened our divisions. However, “if we were to accept migration as integral to life on a dynamic planet with shifting and unevenly distributed resources, there are any number of ways we could proceed,” Shah writes, briefly touching on schemes such as permeable borders, legal pathways for migrants and wildlife corridors to stitch together broken biomes. As we begin to emerge from this forced suspension, perhaps newly ready to move, Shah’s book is a provocative invitation to imagine the inevitable migration of the future as an opportunity, rather than a threat.
Silence accelerates
the continental drift between us.
Your cold tea, my stale coffee,