If I ever need to be reminded of the importance of stories, I just think about Pops and Pompilio. Pops used to tell me stories about his father, Pompilio, every day. Pops told these stories ’cause he was mostly raised by his father; his mother died when he was a child. He told these stories ’cause what child exile wouldn’t tell the stories he did have of his father? He told these stories ’cause when Pompilio was on his deathbed, Pops told him that he’d live forever, ’cause Pops would tell his stories to his own family, to his kids, and we’d tell the stories to our families. We’d breathe life into the stories that made up Pompilio’s life forever.
When Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, came to Senegal last February for an economic summit, he took a break from conference rooms in the capital city of Dakar to get his hands dirty, literally, as he learned to make compressed-earth blocks from a mix of iron-rich soil, sand, water, and a bit of cement. His block-making tutorial was part of a groundbreaking event for a cultural institute promoting German-language study. The institute’s new building was designed by the distinguished Burkina Faso–born and Berlin-based architect Francis Kéré, who is renowned worldwide for his graceful structures adapted to their local climates. The building in Dakar is oriented so that nearby trees provide shade, and its thick walls—made of the type of unfired compressed-earth bricks Steinmeier tried his hand at making—insulate the interior from the hot Senegalese climate. A layer of claustras, or perforated walls, wraps around the building like a membrane, filtering sunlight and directing airflow.
Perhaps we love Attenborough because he is an advocate and practitioner of a special way of seeing and relating. His interest in the natural world begins not with the gaze of an empath, for whom another’s feelings become real because he feels them himself, but with the humility of an observer content to be an outsider.
For centuries, sailors have been describing milky seas, rare occurrences where enormous expanses of the ocean light up uniformly at night, at times stretching for tens of thousands of square kilometers, or more. W. E. Kingman, captain of the clipper Shooting Star, had this to say upon witnessing one in 1854: “The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.”
A milky sea even made an appearance in Moby-Dick, where Melville describes a mariner sailing through a “shrouded phantom of the whitened waters” that were as “horrible to him as a real ghost.”
The Poet's House, by Jean Thompson, is the newest addition to that subset of books that's staying put. It's a closely observed, droll, coming-of-age story about an insecure young woman drawn into a shimmering clique of poets; it's also a wise story about the corrosive power of shame and the primal fear of sounding stupid, unsophisticated and sentimental.
Rule No. 42, the King says, is that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice counters that she isn’t a mile high. And, anyway, it isn’t a proper rule, because the King just made it up, then and there. “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” the King counters. But, when Alice points out that if the rule was so old, then it ought to have been rule No. 1, the King shuts the notebook he was reading the rules from (and writing them into) and shuffles away in the face of her argument. It’s a rare moment in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” when reasoning as we would recognize it proves even minimally consequential.
“Rules: A Short History of What We Live By,” by the historian of science Lorraine Daston, similarly features reason, and rule-making kings, as charismatic minor characters. The shape-shifting rules themselves are the Alice that is interrogated. Daston analyzes rules as diverse as those for making pudding, those for regulating traffic, and those governing the movement of matter in the universe. In considering a series of historic anecdotes and texts, Daston helps us see rules (and their neighbors, such as laws and regulations) through the concepts of thickness and thinness, paradigms and algorithms, failures (it was nearly impossible to get eighteenth-century Parisians to stop playing ball in the streets), and states of exception. She writes, “Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules. . . . A book about all of these rules would be little short of a history of humanity.”