Photo: Scott O’Connor.

On a mild evening at the end of May, the day after the official U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached a hundred thousand, I drove thirty miles from Los Angeles to see a work of art. I’d first visited James Turrell’s Dividing the Light seven years before with my wife and son. We shared a night of quiet beauty in the outdoor installation on the campus of Pomona College. That experience stayed with me, a moment of meditative calm to remember when things were hectic or difficult. But the feeling had faded over time. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, I hoped that by returning to the site I could recapture some of that peace.

I listened to the news as I drove, discussions of the number dead. I tried to wrap my head around what it meant that the lives of a hundred thousand people in this country, and so many more around the world, had ended in just the last few months. But after a while I turned off the radio. The enormity of the tally made it impossible to comprehend the individual lives lost. The number was a shapeless whole that consumed its separate parts.

Dividing the Light is one of Turrell’s Skyspaces. Once inside, the Minimalist architecture blocks a visitor’s view of the vastness above, except for an aperture cut into a wall or ceiling, which focuses attention on that single circle or square of sky. The Pomona College piece is an unassuming metal pavilion nestled into a courtyard between academic buildings. There’s a sixteen-foot square opening in the center of the pavilion; a shallow reflecting pool of the same dimensions sits directly below. A low wall of granite benches rings the perimeter, coral-colored, like the light one often sees in the west at the end of a Southern California day.

It was just before sunset when I reached the empty pavilion. I stood and looked at the opening above, the whitish-blue square of sky that seemed removed from the rest, as if it had been cut out and set apart. My mind wouldn’t stop racing, though, cycling between the U.S. death toll, the even larger worldwide number, and the staggering numbers yet to come. Read More

Fernando Pessoa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Fernando Pessoa’s life divides neatly into three periods. In a letter to the British Journal of Astrology dated February 8, 1918, he wrote that there were only two dates he remembered with absolute precision: July 13, 1893, the date of his father’s death from tuberculosis when Pessoa was only five; and December 30, 1895, the day his mother remarried, which meant that, shortly afterward, the family moved to Durban, where his new stepfather had been appointed Portuguese consul. In that same letter, Pessoa mentions a third date, too: August 20, 1905, the day he left South Africa and returned to Lisbon for good.

That first brief period was marked by two losses: the deaths of his father and of a younger brother. And perhaps a third loss, too: that of his beloved Lisbon. During the second period, despite knowing only Portuguese when he arrived in Durban, Pessoa rapidly became fluent in English and in French. Read More

Olaus Magnus, Carta marina (detail), 1539. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the collections of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, there’s a round ceramic disk, about the size and shape of a cobblestone, with the barest image of a face on it. Two eyes in a mushroom-shaped head, a mouth opened in a howl or scream of some kind. Radiocarbon dating puts its age at about seven hundred years old, which would make it one of the earliest known images of the Jersey Devil.

The Lenape knew it as Mësingw, a spirit being vital to preserving the balance of the forest. Mësingw (“Living Solid Face,” “Masked Being,” or “Keeper of the Game”), according to Herbert C. Kraft, who devoted his life to researching and documenting Lenape culture, was of prime importance to the Lenape. Of all the manetuwàk (spirit beings whose job it was to care for and maintain the world that Kishelëmukòng had cre­ated), Mësingw had one of the most important jobs: looking after the animals of the forest and ensuring their health and safety. Mësingw could sometimes be seen riding through the forest on a large buck, cov­ered in long, black hair from head to toe like a bear. The right side of his large, round face was colored bright red, the left side colored black.

Alternately revered and feared, he ensured the prosperity and preva­lence of vital game for the people but could also, if displeased, ruin a hunter’s luck, or “break his speech,” causing him to stammer uncontrol­lably, or scare him to death. Mësingw, for the Lenape, kept the forest in balance, mediating between humanity and animal life. When white set­tlers came to the land where the Lenape lived, they saw images and masks of a strange creature who, they were told, lived in the forbidding wilds of the Pine Barrens, the edge of the settled world. As they heard tales of Mësingw and saw the masks and effigies of the god, they saw him not as a figure of order but of terror. Read More

Detail from lithograph by Matthias Rudolph Toma depicting Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “character heads,” 1839. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The “Theophrastan character” is not often mentioned today, perhaps because it is so little known as a genre. Yet for centuries this was what “character” meant in literature. A list of familiar social types compiled in the fourth century B.C. that chronicled human traits and foibles—from bore to boaster, cynic to coward—influenced the development of later fiction and drama, and remains sharply pertinent in psychology, journalism, cartoon art, and popular culture.

Theophrastan character sketches deliberately describe a recognizable model of behavior rather than a mocked or skewered individual. Dickens’s ever-hopeful Mr. Micawber, clinging to the thought that “something will turn up,” is a descendant of the Theophrastan character, as are Molière’s miser and hypochondriac. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have created character types on what could be called the Theophrastan model, like the obsessive-compulsive, the hysteric, the impulsive man, and the paranoid (whom Theophrastus, lacking the resources of the DSM, might have called “The Suspicious Man”). The “white working-class voter” is a Theophrastan type, as is the equally hypothetical “soccer mom,” not to mention generational “types” like the baby boomer and the millennial. By the twenty-first century, the “character sketch” (or “character portrait”) had become the frequent province of editorial journalism, both print and electronic, as well as of social media and stand-up comedy. “Any kid with a passionate interest in science was a wonk, a square, a dweeb, a doofus, or a geek,” wrote the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a self-confessed geek. (Within a year or two, however, this “depreciative” term—“an overly diligent, unsociable student,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—would morph into the glamorous style called “geek chic.”)

Why has this ancient mode survived so long? “The Characters suggested an adaptable form and a set of basic techniques, according to which human types of any century or country could be depicted,” observes J. W. Smeed. “The book seemed to offer an invitation to later writers to borrow the method and use it to describe their own contemporaries.” He adds, “I cannot think of a smaller book with a greater influence.” Read More

French postcard, c. 1910

The other night I was doing what I do all too often after a long day: watching crime shows on TV. My tastes run fairly low. CSI, Criminal Minds, NCSI, and, my personal favorite, Special Victims Unit. I am capable of marathoning any of these shows, but that night was the nadir. On Wednesdays my husband works late, and there’s no one to stop me. I’d already spent two or three hours watching heinous crimes depicting women in various states of torment and decay. My excuse to myself was that I was mulling something over—something that disturbed me more than threats of bondage and mutilation.

That afternoon I’d been working on a short story that I was enjoying, but it contained a problem. It was loosely based on an argument I’d had with a neighbor regarding the pruning of our backyard tree. It seems that I had miscalculated what his share should be in terms of caring for the ancient oak tree whose branches and shade we both enjoyed. I’d proposed an even three-way split that included the family in whose yard the tree actually sits. The wife in that family was ill and so I’d taken this financial task upon myself. And then I received the email.

I liked this neighbor and was stunned when he sent me a three paragraph harangue for setting a precedent regarding the oak as communal property that required equal fiscal responsibility. It seemed that I had assumed powers that were not mine to assume. He’s an accountant and I’m not. Enough said. Why not pick up the phone? Or talk to me in person? Instead he’d thrown the book at me. After my initial shock, I did what I normally do when someone sends me something of this nature. I filed it away. I have a special folder for such matters. It’s called “MISC IDEAS.”

Now, I was faced with a moral dilemma. This neighbor, with whom I’ve gone holiday caroling, voted for the same political candidates, swapped recipes, and become Facebook friends, had inadvertently given me the germ of a story and, the closer I got to feeling good about the story, the worse I felt about writing it. How could I draw from what had transpired between us—even if it really wasn’t about us anymore at all, but merely a springboard to say something about love and loss, mortality and the human condition? I tried changing tree pruning into sidewalk repair or loud music, but the impact just wasn’t the same. It had to be a tree. And the accountant really couldn’t become a dentist, could he?

The previous Sunday, I’d voiced my concern about the story with another neighbor, a good friend who also happens to be a reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper. I’d already shown him the angry email. Over brunch I told him that I was going to write a thinly veiled story based on the incident. “Oh, no,” he said. “You can’t do that. You’ll have to move away.”

That Wednesday evening, guilt and fear were getting the better of me. I lay on my couch, paralyzed, watching body after body being sliced and diced and reassembled on a coroner’s metal table.  I was pondering my dilemma as Detectives Stabler and Benson collared a rape suspect and Stabler read him his Miranda rights.

You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you say can, and will, be used against you.

This time those words struck a chord. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. This is what I needed to explain to my neighbor in a language he’d understand.

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Juan Cárdenas.

In Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, the city has no name. It could be here, or anywhere. Its location in time isn’t specified either. There’s a faintly futuristic overlay, but the narrator’s diction swings between antiquated formality and present-day slang, and, among other anachronistic details, there are both spider monkeys and henchmen on the security team. Characters, too, are referenced only by generic designation. “My wife,” “the directors,” “the taxi driver,” “the architect.” Even descriptive nouns of that kind are withheld from the study participants, who have volunteered for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. They’re granted only numbers.

The choice to leave those coordinates unfixed suggests universality, as if this same story might have played out (might be playing out) in any number of labs, in any number of cities. But it also enacts the social and political repression of a certain kind of anonymity. “A city can’t be talked about without names, it’s impossible,” number 4 says. “It’s all been worked out so the story stays neatly inside the mute numbers.” How, Ornamental asks, do the nameless—disembodied voices, unattributed speech, figures “emancipated from any arithmetic”—participate in meaningful discourse, find a place among others, work toward common interest, tell their stories? And when do we encounter those stories, as readers who live in named cities and bear names ourselves? Read More