Who are any of these people—Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. But mostly it’s a premonition.
There may be no singular best answer in an impossible situation, but the question remains: how do we find the kernel of shared struggle, the channel of solidarity into which we can direct our energies, not only for our own good but for the other mothers around us? What would it take to stretch out from our atomized lives and ask other mothers, in other social locations, “What are you going through? What do you need to flourish as a human? What do your children need?”
At the start of the pandemic, I found myself in the enviable position of translating Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty, a round-the-world travelogue co-authored by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and his son Carlo, a journalist. My world had shrunk to the size of my apartment, or, on many days, my screen, yet every day that I sat down at my desk, I could be sure that, thanks to this book, something new would sail across it. A new setting, a new memory, a new subject kicked around by father and son, newly relevant reflections on public spaces by someone who has spent a lifetime redefining them. I felt lucky and grateful, as if I was being propped up and fed light, like a giant peony, or one of the airy buildings built by Renzo.
Yet the theory of niche construction is controversial among evolutionary biologists, partly because natural selection is traditionally believed to work ‘blindly’: it is thought to sculpt organisms over millennia to become adapted to their ecological niches, with no steer from the goals or purposes of organisms. Humans undergo the same sculpting, but rather than evolving to fit a pre-existing niche, it’s widely accepted that we’re active agents who shape the environments to which we adapt.
Caitlin Horrocks’s second collection, Life Among the Terranauts, is compiled of humorous and tenacious stories that serve as a reminder that the flyover states are rife with folklore and intrigue. The sense of place matches the sense of wonder, a perfect amalgamation of geography and plot.
Vanderbilt becomes frustrated with the parental malaise surrounding him at his daughter’s tournaments. “Seeing someone playing Angry Birds, I want to tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Why are you having kids do chess while you do that?’” he writes. Determined to reverse this trend, Vanderbilt starts playing chess himself: entering beginners’ tournaments, occasionally even drawing matches against his own daughter. Inspired by the resulting sense of cognitive rejuvenation — the “beginner’s mind,” he explains, is one in which the ego dissolves and the world becomes once again interesting — he launches an ambitious curriculum of skill development, focusing primarily on chess, singing, surfing, juggling and drawing, with briefer diversions into open-water swimming and jewelry crafting.
1. Once when I was still small, maybe five years old, I fell over in front of my grandpa and banged my knee and he praised me for not crying.