At 2:44 A.M., the Space Control Squadron notified Jim Cooney, the I.S.S.’s trajectory-operations officer. Cooney, a NASA veteran, was asleep at home, but an app on his phone triggers a high-volume alarm for such alerts. “Your brain gets engaged really fast,” he told me. He had become accustomed to late-night calls. Only a month earlier, NASA had adjusted the spacecraft’s trajectory to dodge a fragment of a Minotaur rocket: a former intercontinental ballistic missile repurposed to ferry cargo into space.
These maneuvers have been performed more than two dozen times, and can be executed without much trouble if Houston has five and a half hours’ notice. But, when Cooney called the Air Force, he learned that Object No. 36912 would make its closest approach in about four hours. “I had them repeat the information to make sure I was doing the math right,” he recalled. Never before had the I.S.S. faced such a high probability of collision on such short notice. Moving the station was out of the question.
My editor blinked at me. She was barely into her twenties and thoughts of her own mortality were decades ahead. I, on the other hand, had just turned 40, and it was turning into something of a preoccupation for me.
“Death,” she whispered, as if the mere mention might invite it into the room.
When I was a teenager I was, like most teenagers, preoccupied with the idea that somewhere on the horizon there was a Now. The present moment came to a peak out there; it achieved a continuous apotheosis of nowness, a wave endlessly breaking on an invisible shore. I wasn’t quite sure what specific form this climax took, but it had to involve some concatenation of records, poems, pictures, parties, and behavior. Out there all of those items would be somehow made manifest: the pictures walking along in the middle of the street, the right song broadcast in the air every minute, the parties behaving like the poems and vice versa. Since it was 1967 when I became a teenager, I suspected that the Now would stir together rock ’n’ roll bands and mod girls and cigarettes and bearded poets and sunglasses and Italian movie stars and pointy shoes and spies. But there had to be much more than that, things I could barely guess. The present would be occurring in New York and Paris and London and California while I lay in my narrow bed in New Jersey, which was a swamplike clot of the dead recent past.
Piranesi is a mystery, a mystery of the mind, a way for Clarke to communicate the incommunicable. What is this place? Why is Piranesi, so wonderstruck and innocent, stuck there? Reading it, one can’t help but imagine its origins in Clarke’s own life, the years she spent sick, dissociating, wandering the rooms and hallways, Strange-like, inside her head.
In her portrayal of the ways in which individual longing and frustration unfold against the constraints of forces beyond our control, Tremain has long been one of our most accomplished novelists, and here is further confirmation.
Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami brings to light the forces that made Murakami the powerhouse of Japanese literature that he is today, but it also showcases the influence that translators, editors, and publishers have on the final product, thereby breaking apart the myth of access to the “real” voice of the author.
A decade later, “More Than a Woman” celebrates the hard-won wisdom of middle age. The humor is still there, and the anger, but also humility and joy. In her prologue, Moran acknowledges that her observations are those of a “straight, white, working-class woman,” hardly speaking for everyone but instead seeking points of connection.
My friend lives on this road
the same as me, two hollows down,
two gladed mountainsides,
It will be different –
nobody will cry,