Long long ago. In the days before the words “Brexit” and “Covid-19” existed. Back when “unprecedented” wasn’t yet an everyday kind of word. I’m talking back, before the words “Windrush” and “Grenfell” took on terrible new meaning, before an MP was murdered outside the library of her constituency by a man shouting the words Britain and First, back when the word “humbug”, traditionally a sign of its speaker’s Scrooge-like spirit, hadn’t yet been used in parliament to handbag female MPs pleading with a British prime minister to be less aggressive given the real threat they faced (and face) every day. Back then, on a quiet winter dark afternoon in December 2015, I met my publisher, Simon Prosser, outside the British Library in London.
We were on our way to see some of Keats’s handwriting. I’d had an idea for a series of books; the first one, which I was about to start, was going to be called Autumn, and we thought we’d visit Keats’s poem about autumn in the original as a sort of talisman.
Today, the future of the human appears as a digitally encoded question mark.
Beyond the infrastructures we have known, how can we rethink liveness and the human anew in this context?
While the journey of self-discovery may be predictable, Miss Benson’s Beetle is a joy of a novel, with real insight into the lives of women, the value of friendship and the lasting effects of war. “There was always darkness,” realises Margery, “and in this darkness was unspeakable suffering, and yet there were also the daily things – there was even the search for a gold beetle – and while they could not cancel the appalling horror, they were as real.”
There are probably going to be a lot of lockdown books. Or maybe not: maybe as the new world becomes the new normal we’ll want to hurry forward, away from our first intuitions of change, shedding them behind us because nothing’s so stale as the news from last week. But whichever way it turns out, I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought.
Though written in prose, Trethwey’s memoir is awash in metaphor, its language a meditation on the role that poetry—and storytelling more broadly—can play in reconciling trauma. In the depth and clarity of her retrospective study, Trethewey also offers lessons for surviving the cataclysms of the present.
Like a round grey stone lodged
in the fork of a tree
the tooth sits intractably