If you, transported to the turn of the twentieth century, were to visit Call in her private office on Arlington Street in Boston with similar complaints of nervous strain, the advice she would offer might strike you as rather contemporary. Call told the overtaxed young woman to perform her job “the lazy way,” by tensing only the muscles directly engaged in the task at hand and relaxing those that weren’t. As an illustration, Call asks the reader to imagine the feeling of holding a pen “with much more force than is needful, tightening your throat and tongue at the same time.” By adopting a looser mode of gripping, she argues, “ten pages can be finished with the effort it formerly took to write one.” Anyone, she seems to suggest, can manage long hours of demoralizing labor if only they can learn to relax. She prescribed breathing exercises, mindfulness, and cognitive reframing for all sorts of ills. After weeks of following Call’s regimen, her patient still faced the same predicament but now met it “with a smiling face, better color, and a new and more quiet life in her eyes.”
When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses.
If we are what we do, then to-do-lists are itemized descriptions of our true selves. Although I like to think of myself as a tropical bird, impulsive and free, my daily lists describe a much more boring and prosaic woman. Fold socks. Call dentist. Buy cat food. My soul wants to dance on rainbows, but life demands that I pay the gas bill on time.
Occasionally the lists offer an intriguing mystery, thanks to my chicken-scratch writing. Kitten garage? Knitting grasp? I’ll move that to tomorrow.
Wealthy, dysfunctional families are so common in novels that it’s easy to dismiss books centered around them. Don’t make that mistake with “The Latecomer,” which introduces readers to the Oppenheimers, a New York family with triplets born via IVF who were “in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish.”