The human brain has a method for dealing with the intrinsic fear of death. Terror-management theory, which builds on the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, explains that the psyche handles this fear in a variety of ways. Many people either escape reality or adopt a belief system that promises immortality: so on the one hand, sex, drugs, or entertainment; on the other, religion, fame, or careerism.
Committed anxious types like me rarely find a poem opening as enticing as this one from the late Mary Oliver:
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Why yes, I have worried about that: Will the natural order of things suddenly turn against itself? And what can I, a small, unremarkable being, do to fix it? The poem’s troubles go on to cover aging, illness, regret.
In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler’s propaganda. The novel was published in 1947—part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature.
Kate Middleton has been reduced to her body. By which I mean: Many weeks into her recovery from surgery, and many years into her life as a royal, the physical form of Catherine, Princess of Wales, has become a commodity that the public feels entitled to consume.
While still a student in the late 1960s, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, pregnant with her first child, encountered a famous sculptor. She recalls him declaring, upon seeing her round belly, “Well, I guess now you can’t be an artist.” He wasn’t, she later realized, entirely wrong; once she had a baby, Ukeles found herself trapped in the kind of mindless automated work that defines early motherhood—bottle, diaper, rock, repeat.