The End in the Middle of Nowhere: Report from Wyoming
It’s been a long day, and I end it as I have the last several, in the worst of all possible ways — scrolling news stories and scientific research articles, poring over modeling studies and trying to teach myself statistics. A research paper published in the Journal of Autoimmunology last month (which has already been cited thirteen times since then) suggests that the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 is the wet animal market in Wuhan City, China. I text John: “This is how the animals get us in the end. Everything else was just warnings. How are you guys?”
No answer. I realize it’s almost 1am where he is. I should go to sleep myself. But I can’t stop seeing the shape of a pattern, in these floating images of a molecule that looks like a planet itself. I marvel anew at how the universe endlessly repeats at different scales, the perfect symmetry of actions and reactions: gravitational pulls, tides, imperceptible waves of movement, contractions of muscles — systole and diastole.
Malia’s Tears
. . .Malia’s was a hard cry to watch — for me and I am sure for many — because it was a cry that we know intimately: the public-private kind of breakdown that one usually has for the first time in the late teens or early 20s (Malia is 18.) The kind of cry you might have on a bus, listening to music, looking out the window and letting your mind wander, only to realize, after the tears have already come, that you are not invisible to your fellow passengers. It was a cry caught between the loneliness of the window and the humiliation of the aisle.
Seeing Both Sides of the Shield: On Rebecca Harding Davis
Whether she should turn out to be the hero of her own life — the Dickensian question that animated so much of late 19th-century literature and thought — was immaterial to Davis. If Emerson is right and “there is properly no history; only biography,” the story of a life that places others at its center might be the biography we need most. Harris channels Davis’s ability to offer us a history that engages the ideas we’ve come to embrace alongside those we’ve come to distance ourselves from, our heroes in conversation with our villains. Davis wrote that “[t]he man who sees both sides of the shield may be right, but he is most uncomfortable”; that discomfort seems a small price to pay for a step in the direction of truth.