Photo of a frozen daisy, found here.
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Maria Sybilla Merian, drawings of two moths from Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects &c, ca. 1701-1705. The British Museum.
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Quilted Robe à la Francaise, ca. 1750. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Rennes stocks a covetable modern version of the luxury quilted housedress by Maku.)
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Unknown artist, lover's eye ring, ca. 1890. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Other eyes.)
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We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston.
Peter Brannen, "The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth's Ancient Rock Record." The Atlantic, 3/2021.
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Life with an obsessive, often absent, geologist must have been hard. In one recollection Mary Ann is described as 'an eccentric little round-faced woman,' oddly dressed, with rouged cheeks and black curls, often seen walking a few paces behind Smith, 'who plodded steadily on his way, apparently too much immersed in his geological meditations to give a thought to her who followed behind.' Occasionally she had tantrums. Smith never argued but walked quietly out of the room, locking the door behind him. More than once she was known—and who could blame her—'to dash some object through the window of her temporary prison as he passed outside of it.' In February 1842 she was sent to York Lunatic Asylum, where she died two years later. Hers is a story that asks to be written.
Jenny Uglow, "The Reader of Rocks." The New York Review of Books, 3/11/2021.
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For rock hunters: A jazz musician explains how to find micrometeorites.
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She has freed me from the nagging worry about relevance, because, reading her, I know I am entirely irrelevant, nearly extinct or saved from extinction by some kind conservationists who allow me to graze on austere pastures.
Mary Gordon, "Beatifying Patricial Lockwood." LitHub, 2/24/2021.
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Everything is too long these days, isn’t it? Every series is at least two episodes too long, podcasts go on for hours, you have to scroll through pages of someone’s barely disguised eating disorder mania to get to the recipe on their blog, and every documentary on Netflix is four hours long, forcing me to go to Wikipedia halfway through just to finally find out what happened ...
Jessa Crispin, "Why I Am Obsessed with this Podcast's Merciless Little Romps." The Spectator, 2/27/2021.
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This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships”—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents.
Joan Didion, "Letter from 'Manhattan.'" The New York Review of Books, 8/16/1979.
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Yes, writing is very hard, and no book really lives up to its aspirations, but once you’re an adult you can’t be writing bad books all over the place. People might read them! It’s not your right to be a writer. It’s not your right to be read. It’s not your right to be a public figure. A just society is one where everyone has a home, food, healthcare, an education, and vacation for four weeks a year. A just society does not mean everybody gets to be a celebrated writer if they want to be.
Lauren Oyler, interviewed at The End of the World Review.
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The blues are both a feeling and a situation, [Angela] Davis writes. America is in the blues now, and the blues are in our history. The United States isn’t occupied by Nazi Germans, it’s occupied by the same people it has been occupied by since it was colonized. “Occupied territory is occupied territory,” James Baldwin wrote in 1966, “even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.”
Eula Biss, "The Resistance." The Paris Review, 2/23/2021.
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I have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. The country, the house, and the grounds are, as I have said, divine. But, alack-a-day! There is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you—pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky—and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like.
Charlotte Brontë, writing to her sister Emily in 1839, via Lapham's Quarterly Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring 2011.
"One person is the hider, and the other person is also the hider."
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