Prayer attempts to control—or at least come to peace with—the uncontrollable. It is an aspiration but also an assent: you are believing in something, acknowledging something, hoping for something. You have given shape to what is amorphous and uncertain. Psychologically, prayer is a survival tactic.
Two years ago I wrote a short piece meant to be artful, so I went looking for an artful photo. I found it in an image by Wiki contributor Victor Albert Grigas.
Hope changes form as we age. We are no longer hoping for new things or adventures or lovers or careers. We are not “living for” any particular cause or project. We are simply living. Hope is now a compact with the universe: a resolve to keep trying, keep giving, keep reaching out. So when the world tells us it would rather we die already, that we are about to become a great deal of bother, why would we not bow out gracefully?
All narratives might be said to have other things on their minds than what they show us directly. Andrew Davis’s and Jeff Bigger’s novel has a lot on its mind too, which might be summed up as a desire to save the world. Yes, the bad guys’ evil plot to destroy Chicago and international diplomacy must be foiled, but the book is also thinking about threats such as nuclear proliferation and the impossibility of “fail-safe” precautions, racism, historicide, and America’s cultural divide.
There are two things I fear about class discussions about current events: that they would inevitably be pointless and that the class would spin out of control or, shall I say, out of my control. I hate pointless classes where no true objective was achieved and I hate not being in control of my classes. I treat a class in many ways as an autocratic director treats a film set. I do not necessarily think this is good but I am, as all people are, helpless before my own temperament.
A marriage must be flexible. One is strong while the other flags, then you meet in the middle and run parallel for a while, then the music stops and you switch, fast as a game of musical chairs.
The future is written faster than we can read it, but that does not mean we cannot try, even if all there is to see or read are backs turned toward us, or eyes looking away. One trick of being a capable parent is not overplaying your hand or pressing your argument. Just do your best to see what your child sees.
Given how busy we all are, particularly as the pandemic recedes, perhaps we should thank these lists (and their makers) for not wasting our time or abusing our goodwill, but instead helping us hack our way through that ever-growing thicket of anime, books, films, podcasts, manga, radio shows, stage plays, television series, video games, and the endless number of other cultural productions we feel honor-bound to track despite this impulse being a forever-frustrated wish that, to switch metaphors, cultural capital’s always-hungry maw ensures will never be satisfied.
None of us, including Newt’s owners, really knew how much he got around until he got us all talking about him. People said they had seen him in the night by headlight; he roamed far wider than we thought. One woman had taken him on a five-mile bike ride; Newt was equanimous as always, it seems. The comic surprise that lined the grief was that hundreds of us thought of him as our own.
Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.