WRB—June 5, 2024

Literary posters

The Washington Review of Books, in its latest installment, says . . . well, it says many things, but none of these, though I have just read them, do I clearly remember, nor am I sure that in the act of reading I understood any of them. That is the worst of these fashionable Managing Editors—or rather, the worst of me.

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on the evening of June 15th. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Propaganda: do you know it when you see it?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In the Financial Times, Cordelia Jenkins leads a discussion with Brian Cox, Simon Russell Beale, Kathryn Hunter and Greg Hicks about playing Lear:

  Hunter: Marcello [Magni, her husband] was the Fool in my first production in 1997. He died, I was in denial about it, while we were doing the Globe production in 2022. Afterwards, I had this kind of visitation about those “nevers.” There’s a strange thing in that last scene. Lear goes, “I know when one is dead and when one lives, she’s dead as earth.” She. And then he goes, “Cordelia?” Direct address. “Cordelia stay a little, what is’t thou sayest?” Direct address. And he keeps going back between “she” and “thou.” And then he goes, “Thou’lt come no more.” Not “she’ll come no more.” “Thou’lt come no more.” Thou.

  And it’s almost like Cordelia goes “What, never?” That he’s explaining death to her. “You see how it is darling? You’re never coming back.” “Never?” he hears her ask. “No, never darling.” “What, never?” “No, never, darling.” I don’t know, it just flipped in my head that it’s his last ever story to his little girl. “You’re never, ever, ever coming back.”

  Beale: Jonathan Miller once said that “to be, or not to be” is an impossible statement because we have absolutely no conception of the second half of that sentence. We can’t, as human beings, locate not being. And what you were saying just struck a chord about trying to define what “never” means. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it? So he needs five goes at it.

  [I’m pretty sure the film that Hicks describes at one point and that Cox identifies as The African Queen (1951) is actually Fitzcarraldo (1982). Interesting juxtaposition, though. —Steve]

• In The Yale Review, Lydia Davis on darkness:

  I also thought more carefully, after that experience, about what darkness feels like. In describing deep darkness, I want to use words like velvet or soft or blanket. Is that because darkness con­ceals the edges of what we see in light? The room I am in, illumi­nated by daylight, has many edges in it—not only the hard edges of the furniture but also the softer borders of a rug or the lines where the walls meet each other and the ceiling. A forest, though it is, in season, full of soft-seeming foliage, is also striped by the vertical hard trunks of the trees. Even the vast, billowy body of water that is the ocean is defined by the straight edge of the horizon. Absolute, unbroken darkness feels like one massive, enveloping substance, though it is not a substance and is not palpable. It feels close to the face, right up against the face. We need some light—even the faintest light will do—to create a perception of dimensional space. When there is no light at all, I have no depth perception, and so the darkness seems to press up against me. When I look into the near-complete darkness in my darkened bedroom at night, I sometimes see stipples, or pixels, evenly spread through the space, overlaying the dim shapes of furniture and walls, and I think perhaps they are coming from my eyes themselves.

  [If you haven’t made it out to a part of the world with minimal light pollution, you owe it to yourself to do so and look at the sky. Go canoe the Allagash. The stars are waiting for you. (So are the bugs.) —Steve]

• In Orion, Lulu Miller on “an arithmetic of grief and memory”:

  The creature ahead in the creek is a fawn. It is standing, alone, chest deep in the water, in front of a small wooden footbridge.

  I am trying to stop the kayak but can find no way to do it silently. My son is pressed against my chest. We are all, all three of us animals, frozen. Except that my son and I are gliding, rather quickly, toward the fawn. If ever there’s a moment that won’t last, it’s this one.

  I drink in its every white spot, the pinks of its swiveling ears. My brain flicks off a million questions: Where is its mother? Do deer swim? Would it allow us to touch it? Is this a miracle?

  Zeno’s paradox, the most famous of his paradoxes anyway, says that if you try to reach the other side by always moving halfway from where you are standing you will never reach it. Half and half and half, getting infinitesimally closer . . . but never there.

  This odd mathematical thought exercise has always struck me with frustration, a peak lack of satisfaction. Until today, five days after the tall nurse’s death. As we careen toward the fawn, I wonder if any passenger ever tried applying Zeno’s paradox to their journey across the River Styx.

  [Approaching wild animals by water is, in my experience, either solemn or farcical; in either case, it affords plenty of time to think—especially if the experience of time slows. And something about the animal intelligence on the other end tends to prompt unfamiliar reflection. What is it like to be a fawn? —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Julia on various translations of a letter from Heloise to Abelard, Steve invokes Zeno’s paradoxes again, Torah scrolls, Niebuhr, posters, The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest, late antiquity, Anne Carson, Barbara Pym, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]