The idea of a spontaneous order emerging from chaos may sound implausible. But in nature it is ubiquitous, from the self-organization of snowflakes and flocks of birds to the hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and later the economist Friedrich Hayek, pointed to spontaneous order in human affairs by stressing that markets produce an orderly system of prices and production from the chaos of the marketplace.
Perhaps it is also the case that the order of language arises not from a hard-wired instinct within the genes and mind of each individual but from the cumulative result of social interactions among individuals. To see such a process in action, consider the remarkable phenomenon of “grammaticalization”: the curious process through which words with concrete, specific meanings transmute into components of grammar, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, verb endings and more.
Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies.
It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.
As a writing exercise, walking becomes whatever you require—an outing with a specific creative goal in mind or simply an opportunity to take in the unexpected details of your environment. No matter the approach you find yourself heading out the door with, there are the undeniable benefits, as walking challenges how we observe, record, and experience the everyday. To write while we walk, or walk while we write, is to find something new in our most unassuming actions. It’s the perfect way to launch into a creative project you already have in mind or to gather fascinating odds and ends for later, when you’re ready to sit down again and fill the page.
If a ghost story isn’t scary, is it really a ghost story? I asked myself this question as I read through Edith Wharton’s Ghosts, newly reissued by NYRB Classics. The collection, which was initially published in 1937, consists of a preface and 11 stories that Wharton selected and arranged herself shortly before her death that year. The publishers describe it as “an elegantly hair-raising collection,” a description which, if you ask me, is slightly exaggerated. The stories in Ghosts are not particularly spooky.
But they are conventional. While ghost lore has existed in some form or another for centuries, it coalesced into the mode we’re familiar with sometime around the early 19th century, with the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s ghost stories, which drew together formal and thematic elements from an assortment of emergent genres, especially the Gothic. Wharton’s work is clearly indebted to Scott, as well as to American practitioners of the form such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving (one gossipy character in her 1910 story “The Eyes” even tells us that a distant aunt knew Irving). In the preface, Wharton writes that she was inspired to begin writing ghost stories after reading the tales of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), saying that she finds James’s now widely popular story incomparable in its “imaginative handling of the supernatural.”
Alice starts the book as one of a cast of swimmers. By the end, we have been plunged into the recesses of her life, submerged into the reality of dementia. It is frequently painful to read, for it is unflinching in its depiction of decline and human frailties – but it is also exquisite and very, very moving. A work of great depth.
In The Wonders, two women, living and working in Madrid generations apart, are always the caretaker, never the ones cared for. Their search for any little money and independence leads to solitude and sometimes self-destructive behavior. In her debut novel, out now in English, Spanish poet Elena Medel captures the plight of working women who are limited by class and gender dynamics.
In that juxtaposition of a traditional sport and a startlingly new perspective, the author exposes overlooked places and history in a world where, against all odds, there is always something new under the desert sun.