Many things keep me awake at night. I worry about my kids’ future. I worry about rising sea levels and declining democracies. But if I’m being honest, those worries aren’t the main cause of my insomnia. No, what robs me of the most sleep is an innocent-looking little grid of seven letters that pops up on my iPhone every day. I speak of the delightful and infuriating New York Times Spelling Bee.
To be precise, it doesn’t pop up every day. That’s the problem. For some reason, the genial sadists at the New York Times puzzle section have scheduled the find-a-word game to appear every night at 3 a.m. Which means that when my body wakes me up around 4 a.m. for a bathroom break, against my better judgment, against many promises I’ve made to myself, I grab my iPhone and click on the Spelling Bee, unable to fall back to sleep until I find the hidden word that uses all seven letters.
At some point in life, we come to realize that we exist in a context. If you are a scientist, you might make a small but useful contribution in your subfield, a subfield that is impossible to explain to anybody else. If you write short stories for literary magazines and exist in that ecosystem, you may not really exist to people outside of it. And — for most of us — our lives form part of the circumference of that context. We live a little while and then we go into the ground. Our children, if we have them, remember us, their children remember us a little less, their children even less, and so on until we are part of a school genealogy project.
In The New York Times review of the original Seven Steeples, Ben Bradford wrote: “For this gentle minister, Maine’s nature world is an over-arching cathedral…” and then he quoted a sentence that I vigorously underscored in red—it marked the moment I realized the extent to which my Seven Steeples had been channeling its namesake. “Every trip down the road…” Henrichsen wrote, “…was an experience of worship.” Time and again her descriptions stirred in me a weird nostalgia for a place I’d never visited and a faith I’d never practiced, but most of all for a time when nature thrived and could be observed and adored without the awful knowledge of climate change and habitat loss.
Morton remembers his younger self scornfully thinking: "You're still trying to work out your stuff with your parents! Does it ever end! Christ, you must be thirty years old!"
"And here I was, at sixty," Morton dryly comments.
No, it never ends. But one thing that sets Tasha far apart from the usual one-sided literary conversation with a deceased parent is Morton's rigorous attempt to see his mother, Tasha, whole — as a person — not "just" in relation to him, or, God forbid, an eccentric "character."
To read Davis’ elegantly written but sometimes harrowing memoir, Finding Me, is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career and life she has today—and to acknowledge that even for a performer as outrageously gifted and dedicated as Davis is, the ingredient X known as luck can never be underestimated.
genius of planets & stars, rotations & spinning,
meteorological time maybe, geologic maybe. &