My parents are both dead but they are not gone. We tell stories in order to live but also in order for the dead to live again. I am looking at my parents even as I type these words. My father is dressed in a white shirt with pale stripes and he is wearing a tie, even though it is a warm day. My mother is wearing a pale brown shalwar kameez with a dupatta draped around her neck. She is smiling warmly. When I look at her photograph, framed and on my desk next to the one of my father, I feel strangely reassured she is not really gone. I look at them both, and when I move closer to their paper faces, I swear I can hear them speaking to me: “Tell your stories,” they whisper, “but don’t forget ours.”
Wilson-Lee points out “the extraordinary energy invested by our culture in inoculating us against enrapturing speech.” The West is, he says, haunted by “nightmarish visions of Communist conformity and cult indoctrination.” And yet, at the same time, the modern world is propelling us ever further from individuality: Wilson-Lee describes the internet as a “superorganism” whose power to sweep us up into a collectivity exceeds that of the most skilled rhetorician. He stops short of commenting explicitly on the role of online misinformation in determining recent political events across the world, but it’s clear that Wilson-Lee has a point: language can transport us into chaos just as often as it can into sublimity and harmony.
In 1970, a team of six women climbed to the top of Denali — and, significantly, made it safely back down. This little-known expedition has finally been exceedingly well researched and told by author Cassidy Randall. For her examination of the women’s lives as well as the climb itself, Randall accessed notes and journals kept by the women, other records, interviews with the two living members of the team, and additional interviews with their children and other climbers.