To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.”

Leonard Cohen came to music late, at least compared to his countercultural contemporaries. Bob Dylan was twenty-one when he released his first album; Leonard Cohen was thirty-three. He struggled to adapt his literary strategies to the new form. Even before his baritone stiffened with age, there was something workmanlike in his sensuous, spiritual, serious songs—not just in his delivery, but in his compositional structure, his preference for the heavy-handed end rhyme. Park / dark. Alone / stone. Pinned / sin. Soon / moon. He never made much use of slant rhyme, syncopation, or any of the sinuous tricks of great vocalists from the blues tradition. The second verse of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (1969) seems to describe the monastic simplicity of his compositions: “I choose the rooms that I live in with care / The windows are small and the walls almost bare / There’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer / I listen all night for your step on the stair.” For me, Leonard Cohen’s voice is that step on the stair—stumbling through the song’s tidy rooms, making the floorboards groan. His flatfooted rhythm makes wisdom’s weight hit harder.

I sometimes think of Leonard Cohen seated like a stone on Mount Baldy, where he became an actual monk in 1994 and where he lived for five years. I know a guy who studied at the same monastery. He would try to catch the singer stirring during morning meditation—even just breathing—but his stillness seemed absolute. This discipline frightens me, though it must have been hard-won. I like his songs because they let us overhear the rage and desire rattling discipline’s wooden frame: “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival,” Cohen told David Remnick. He liked the Beatles just fine, but he needed Ray Charles. And I need Leonard Cohen—not the Zen master, but “this laborer called a writer” (his words) arduously working through a voice too plain for his own poetry. He keeps me company in the difficult silence between my own sentences. “I can hear him coughing all night long, / a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.” We’re both still straining—sweetly—for the music.

About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it.

I couldn’t pretend to be that surprised by the proposition, or ignorant of my part in engendering it. I was too tired. I was too busy. The baby the baby the baby. I had a deadline. I was reading. I was watching The Sopranos (again). I was depressed. I just wanted a nap, needed a nap, ached for a hot throbbing nap. This might, I figured, be “real” marriage, harder deeper marriage, marriage opening its cute mouth all the way and showing the mess that was back there.

Accidental iPhone video of forty minutes in the kitchen one night, a view of the cutting board and the wallpaper: You can hear a baby and the banging of something metal and you can hear our two adult bodies rustling around the space, running water, sliding a knife into the knife holder, dragging a chair across the wood floor, opening and closing the fridge―a sound like a breath and then nothing. We speak in short, muffled bursts, loving to her, not unloving to each other.

Maybe, I thought, the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until, with a final ragged pant, it expires. Could it expire so early? Or perhaps it was taking a breather postpartum—understandable, surely, given how a six-and-a half-pound human body had been slither-pulled out of the place I get fucked, or one of the places.

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

If apocalypse were at hand, would you choose to light a seventy-dollar Bois Cire scented candle by your bed and leaf through a Penguin Classics copy of George Herbert’s The Temple as the air conditioner ran on high, “Who By Fire” playing softly on your phone, the world slowly sifting itself down to ash? Some of us might. Some of us would. Leonard Cohen embraced the spiritual and the carnal, and his aching insistence on chasing pleasure at the edges of oblivion has made his voice ever more seductive—comforting, troubling—since his death in 2016. 

That we are now at the edge of several oblivions needs no elaboration. The question of pleasure remains—what we might do with it, since we are all but numb to spectacular shock, and whether it can or should be comforting. I first heard Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” as a teenager, before I heard Cohen’s original. At the time I preferred the cover; its beauty was immediate, seamless, intoxicating. But over time I’ve come to love Cohen’s churchly lounge act for the opposite reasons. There’s something uncanny in the synthetic sheen and gravel of Cohen’s track—a self-negating camp performance of spiritual grandeur that erases the line between rapture and sleaze.

And on the other side of pleasure—a luxury candle, poetry, air-conditioning—there is often both rapture and sleaze: tender depravity. How much of it are we willing to accept? A lot, maybe. While there’s a time for the sensuous charms of “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne,” I’ve always been drawn to the songs in which Cohen allowed himself to sound unhinged. In “Diamonds in the Mine” he is an unlikely vector of proto-punk rage, particularly at the end, as he genuinely screams his way through the final refrain—“And there are no letters in the mailbox / And there are no grapes upon the vine”—in an atonal vocal shred, his unfazed backup singers hoisting up the chorus’s sunny melody behind him, a spring breeze blowing through a nuclear meltdown. Amid the decadent, Oedipal party music of “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On,” he snarls, “It will only drive you insane / You can’t shake it or break it with your Motown / You can’t melt it down in the rain”—a meltdown of a different order.

“It’s good they told me what / the moon was when I was a child,” reads a line from a poem by Marilyn Monroe. “It’s better they told me as a child what it was / for I could not understand it now.” The untitled poem, narrating a nighttime taxi ride in Manhattan, flits between the cityscape, a view of the East River, and, across it, the neon Pepsi-Cola sign, though, she tells us, “I am not looking at these things. / I am looking for my lover.” The very real moon comes to symbolize the confusion of adult experience. I quote these lines back to myself when I feel acutely that I understand less, not more, than I used to.

The poet Marilyn was the first Marilyn I encountered. Like her when she was young, I lived in a strict Pentecostal environment that forbade much of pop culture, but unlike her, I didn’t gorge myself on movies after escaping the prohibition. Although I had heard of “Marilyn Monroe,” I hadn’t yet happened to see any of her films when I came across Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe in a bookstore. I, like so many, fell for the allure—still, to me, a forbidden one—of her image: Marilyn on a sofa seemingly caught looking up and away from the black notebook in her lap. Her expression suggests she hasn’t yet decided whether the distraction is a source of apprehension or delight. Wearing coral lipstick and a black turtleneck, she is beautiful and bookish. The apparently candid photo is actually from a 1953 series for Life by the photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt. Then twenty-six, Marilyn was famous, and only becoming more so: she’d started dating the baseball star Joe DiMaggio. The revelation that years before she’d posed nude for a calendar (and wasn’t ashamed) had recently scandalized McCarthyite America. Life’s portraits of a sex symbol among books play to an audience’s wish to condescend to the object of their desire, to laugh at the “dumb blond” who thinks she can read. (Desire, after all, is an involuntary subjection often trailed by resentment.) As always, Marilyn insisted on approving the images; the contact sheets show her red pen. And in this photo, whatever anyone else intended, I also see her considered self-creation. 

Marilyn’s poems are, as the book’s title indicates, mostly fragmentary. Rarely (if ever) did a first draft become a second, but themes and motifs recur as though being reworked. They were written in notebooks and on scrap paper alongside lines of dialogue from her films, song titles, lists, outpourings of anxiety, and accounts of both real events and dreams. Sometimes lines that read like poems actually aren’t, as with some of the notes made during her years spent in psychoanalysis and in classes with Lee Strasberg, a controversial proponent of the “Method,” a technique that demands actors dig deep into their emotions and memories in order to fully inhabit their roles. Some of Marilyn’s pages are tidily penned, starting precisely at the red vertical margin, but often the poems and notes range across or even around the page, with words crossed out and sentences connected by arrows. Because the lines often end where the paper does, it’s not always obvious where they break, or whether they should break at all. According to Norman Rosten, a poet who became better known for being a friend of hers, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

Marilyn left high school when she married her first husband and, aside from a continuing-education course in literature at UCLA, never had further formal education. But she was a committed if haphazard autodidact, going to a now-defunct bookstore in Los Angeles to leaf through and buy whatever books interested her (Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for instance). Although the playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, claimed she never finished anything “with the possible exception of Colette’s Chéri and a few short stories,” others contradict this. She professed a love for The Brothers Karamazov and a wish to play its central female character, Grushenka. Her library contained more than four hundred books, including verse collections by D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and Yuan Mei, and an anthology of African American poetry.

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Transcription by Kate Atkinson for $1.99

There’s no point in typing “it’s been a week” anymore because every week is A Week. But as we continue into a crumbling democracy, the growing sense of hopelessness is hard to ignore.

The fall is going to be brutal for schools and libraries across the country. We know this, given how last school year went and how the summer has turned into an opportunity for right-wing groups to protest and intimidate those showing up to library Drag Queen story times and those stealing or complaining about Pride displays. This summer is ample opportunity for these groups to recalibrate and set into motion their plans to implement book rating systems they’ve personally developed, which will inevitable trigger more book bans. Given the overturn of Roe this week, there is little doubt books about abortion or pregnancy will be getting the same treatment as those by and about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks, too.

While “go vote” continues to be a rallying cry about stopping this — and it certainly does matter — there are other avenues for creating change, too. There’s running for school board, seeking appointment or election onto a library board, and there’s showing up to those meetings (in person/virtual or via email/letter writing). One of the easiest? Become an election judge. This may be called something slightly different where you’re at, but it is the person who sits at an election site and ensures everyone is able to vote.

Every state operates a little differently, but every state requires a number of volunteers to work the polls for elections. You can do this during early voting periods or on election day, depending on your schedule and the needs of your community. Again, depending on needs, these can be long days, but you may be paid for that time.

Sitting as a poll worker helps ensure everyone who is able and registered to vote is given the same opportunity to do just that. In some places, you may help register those showing up that day. The typical day involves setting up voting booths, ensuring that all materials are accessible and working, and helping every person who walks in to vote knows the process and procedure. It also involves making sure that everyone follows the rules of the election: no electioneering at the election site, no advertisements for politicians or ballot measures within a certain distance of the door, ensuring that no one influences the outcome of any vote throughout the day. You may also have to help direct individuals to their appropriate polling place (though hopefully more communities will go the route of DuPage County, wherein residents can go to any polling location to cast their vote).

We may be past pride month, but as we all know, reading books with LGBTQ+ rep should be an all-year-round affair. Especially when it comes to dark fantasy. Especially when those books are sapphic.

Why are sapphic fantasy novels so important? Traditionally speaking, sci-fi and fantasy genres have long been dominated by straight men’s voices. Which is… fine. But it’s empowering and exciting to see that in our contemporary literary culture, we’re starting to expand a little more in representation. There is a wide range of highly inventive, beautifully rendered, and yes, super dark fantasy worlds in which women’s stories are centered.

For me personally, I love to see women setting off on their own adventures in fantasy scenarios. And dark fantasy is especially satisfying because it gives women characters the space to act in morally questionable ways and do surprising things.

Here are 1- fantastic sapphic fantasy novels — some adult and YA. Fair warning: you’re going to want to pick up as soon as you finish checking out this list. Your TBR pile might never recover.

We at Book Riot like a social media trend just as much as anyone, especially when we can find a bookish slant. You might’ve seen this latest viral formula when it first appeared on TikTok as a rating game. Or perhaps you, like this elder millennial, caught on when it made its way to Twitter.

The basic formula is that you say someone is “a 10 but” and then follow it with some sort of dealbreaker. At first it was just friends posing fictional scenarios for each other to respond to. I might post “she’s a 10 but she pronounces the l in salmon.” Then my friends could respond with her new rating based on that quirk. (She’s a 3. If you pronounce that l, we can’t talk. I am working on unpacking oppressive linguistic biases, but I can’t get over that one.)

Then, it grew to be sort of a self-deprecating thing — TikTokers pointing out their low-stakes toxic traits. As an example:

While they’re often silly things, some include some real red flags. For example, one of my fellow Rioters suggested this bookish gem: He’s a 10 but his bookshelves only have Ayn Rand.

One of the best things about reading nonfiction is that it reminds me just how big and weird this world we live in is. I read a lot of nonfiction that tackles big ideas about language, history, current affairs, and identity. But I’ve recently come to love another kind of nonfiction — books that explore the ordinary. I love nonfiction that takes something I know nothing about, and, in many cases, something I’ve never even considered, and makes me care about it. How often do you think about how clocks work? Have you ever pondered the important role rain has played in human history? How much do you know about salt, iron, fig trees, stone walls, cameras?

I will never be an expert in any of the subjects these books explore. That’s part of what makes these books so interesting — they let me into their secret worlds and change the way I think about things I encounter every day. They remind me of what’s so wonderful about being a human: that we share the world with so many incredible creatures, places, and materials, and that sometimes, we make pretty cool things, too.

Many of the books on this list are pure fun. Some of them tackle big themes — race, culture, colonization, environmental destruction, the history of science. But all of them hone in on the specific. I guarantee that every one of them will teach you something new that will totally blow your mind.

Superhero comics have many well-worn motifs which have been popularized, subverted, and scoffed at over the decades, like secret identities, reporter girlfriends, and radioactive everything. In Tropes in Capes, I’ll look at the history of these elements: how they got started, when and if they fell out of favor, and where they are now. First up: the kid sidekick!

The first proper kid sidekick in superhero comics is not going to come as a surprise to anyone: it’s Robin, of course. Robin the Boy Wonder debuted in 1940, created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jerry Robinson. The cover of his first issue declares him “The Sensational Character Find of 1940!” and for once, the hype is not overblown: Robin coined and defined a crucial aspect of the genre almost overnight, and remains one of the most beloved superheroes in the world over 80 years later.

From the perspective of someone trying to sell comics in the 1940s, the kid sidekick makes a ton of sense. First of all, the hero needs someone to talk to — Sherlock Holmes has Watson, and now Batman would have Robin. (In fact, there’s a popular but unsourced quote by Bill Finger floating around the internet making this exact comparison.) Second, the hero needs a regular someone to rescue. Superman had Lois Lane, but Batman had an inconsistent love life, so why not give him a ward with a propensity for getting tied up?

But most importantly, the kid sidekick is a kid, and in the 1940s, so were almost all comic book readers. What could be cooler than living vicariously through Dick Grayson while he lived in a mansion and fought ne’er-do-wells and never ever had to go to bed when he didn’t want to? The dream!

Robin paved the way for a host of other Golden Age sidekicks. By the end of 1940, the original Human Torch had gained a sidekick, Toro. By 1941, sidekicks were already so de rigeur that some new superheroes were given one right off the (pun intended) bat: the first appearance of Captain America is also the first appearance of his sidekick Bucky, and ditto Green Arrow and Speedy, while Sandman’s makeover from a The Shadow-esque pulp vigilante to a spandex-clad superhero came complete with a new sidekick, Sandy the Golden Boy. The trope was even already being subverted, as with the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, where the kid was the hero and the adult was the sidekick. Even Jimmy Olsen, absolutely a kid sidekick despite his (usual) lack of spandex, made the jump from the Superman radio show to the comics in 1941.

Being a woman in ones twenties might feel like walking through fire at times. When we are on the verge of a societal collapse, we can do very little to evade the feeling of being doomed. While nothing alleviates the heartbreaks of that challenging decade, books do in fact tell us that our grief and anxieties stem from the world around us and are not just makings of our own. In times of despair, we can always resort to them and find a deep sense of sisterhood in the world of our literary counterparts.

Have you ever felt that everything you’ve been working towards has been a lie? Well, our twenties are the time of constant learning and unlearning and then relearning. This is when the illusions fall off and we are left to contend with cold hard reality. Ingrid, from Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel — Disorientation, is going through something similar. She is a final year PhD student, struggling with her dissertation on a Chinese American poet named Xiao-Wen Chou. Through the larger-than-life characters and humor, Chou has highlighted the exclusion, frustration, and identity crisis 29-year-old Ingrid is going through. Her fiance turns out to be a gaslighter who fetishizes Asian women and the Chinese poet she has been researching for ages turns out to be a white man in yellowface. As Ingrid navigates the perils of academia and her interpersonal relationships, readers can feel that her uncertainties and stubbornness are a direct impact of a deep sense of self-resentment.

Ingrid’s self-loathing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The separation of the exterior self from her inner self is what many Asian Americans face considering the racism hurled at them daily. Ingrid is unaware of all the potential she carries as she has been raised in a society that benefits from her self-negation. Ingrid wrestles with estrangement from her Chinese culture. She is always gaslighting herself into believing that maybe she is meant to be satisfied with the crumbs thrown at her. Despite being smart and strong, it takes her years to see through her fiance’s emotional manipulation.

Disorientation also sheds light on the importance of female friendships. Eunice, Ingrid’s best friend, has been quite a force, pulling Ingrid out of the consequences of her actions time and again. Even though Vivian and Ingrid have their differences, they do come through for each other in times of need. As much as the outside world tries to wreck Ingrid, ultimately she revives the strength within herself that has been lying latent all along.

In Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein, we meet beautiful twentysomething Cleo. She marries Frank, who is decades older than her, after six months of dating him. But being married to an entire person is too much for Cleo. She is all alone in the tyranny of her mind. Attraction cannot be helped, as Cleo listened to the heat of passion and plunged into a marriage that is far from ideal. Her terrible childhood and apathetic father make her life more vacant, adding to the hollowness inside her. She doesn’t have the means to heal herself just yet.

Trends in fiction are often a contentious topic. How many times have we heard “YA is dead” or “dystopia is overdone?” Despite this, publishing and the broader bookish world are always discussing the latest trending genres and topics, trying to work out what will be hot or not in upcoming publications.

The London Book Fair took place earlier this year, for the first time in two years. Following the fair, The Guardian published an article asking “What will we be reading next year?,” going through the broad upcoming trends in books that we can expect to see on the shelves in the near future.

One of these trends was “darker women’s stories,” focusing particularly on thrillers and dark historical fiction. A stark contrast from upbeat romance or cosier fiction, which has enjoyed popularity in previous years, these darker stories explore murder, abuse, postpartum depression, sexual violence, and other difficult topics. While some readers might wonder why darker stories are gaining popularity during a pandemic and during an increasingly frightening political climate, this does seem to tie into broader trends of changing literary interests, particularly amongst women: for example, the boom in true crime reading that we’ve seen amongst women in recent years.

But why are women drawn to these dark stories? The answer may lie not only in the books, but in the social and political background against which these books are written.

Are you looking for hardcovers out right now with a clever design under the dust jacket? You have come to the right place. The excitement of buying a hardcover book, bringing it home, and realizing it is even more gorgeous under the dust jacket is unmatched. I want to be shocked, awed, amazed, and bewildered. The assignment was to wow me, and these books did not mess around.

Book cover design has become a vital part of book sales. Although there was a time in print history when you would go to your local binder, drop off the loose pages of your new book, and come back to find them bound per your specifications, now we expect our books to come with the bindings. Although beautiful books can come in all shapes and sizes, today we are talking about the hardcovers out right now with the cleverest designs under the dust jacket that I could find.

My methods were chaotic but as comprehensive as possible. Because most online listings for books do not include what is underneath the dust jacket, I had to conduct some field research — the field in question being my local Barnes & Noble where I proceeded to look at the design under the dust jacket of every hardcover book they had in stock. I took pictures of the interesting covers and narrowed my list down when I got home.

Hannah Black’s novella Tuesday or September or the End begins in the early months of 2020, on the heels of a strange discovery: an alien object, oak-tree-like but seemingly machine-fabricated, has materialized on the shore of Jones Beach. According to the frenetic narrative of the news, one that chokes everyday life, it would seem that everyone in America is obsessed with the possibility of alien contact. But Bird initially has no interest in the strange object; she is a communist who would rather “talk about her feelings,” while her boyfriend, Dog, a social democrat, tries to “embrace popular feeling”—he is “among the enraptured many.” In March, after COVID is recognized as a legitimate threat to life, the couple is separated without ceremony or passion. They seem uninterested in reuniting until riots following the murder of George Floyd turn into a revolution: all prisoners are released, and Rikers falls into a sinkhole. 

In the real-life early months of 2020, it was assumed—at least by magazine editors, and the writers they commissioned—that collective grief was best understood through a process of individual accounting: reflections on how one spent or wasted or optimized their newfound free time. “Pandemic diaries,” as these reflections became known, promised to do the work of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Today, they have altogether disappeared. Tuesday or September of the End bears many of the superficial marks of the genre; the events of the book are demarcated by the months in which they occur, and, as Black told BOMB, it is “a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020 … as if you can fictionalize time itself.” But while the diary fixates on the ordinary, attempting to derive collective meaning from individual routine, Black’s novella mobilizes an absurd and unlikely third party whose arrival signals a break from the anesthetizing qualities of contemporary life. Humanity submits “itself as an object of study” for the aliens, who interview people one by one; the aliens, in turn, suffer from “the introduction of the concept of prison,” but are “deeply healed by riot.” I was so compelled by their psychology, which enables the couple and all of the other humans they live among to feel collective liberation as something tangible, inevitable, and already arising. 

—Maya Binyam, contributing editor

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this—maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits—he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective.

I had first learned the word ironic from the hit nineties movie Reality Bites, but I didn’t understand it until I had lived in New York for several years. New York teaches you all kinds of interesting things. It was during this period when I was dressing like a lunatic that I used Leonard Cohen’s spoken opening of “First We Take Manhattan” as the recording on my answering machine: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” His voice is dark and conspiratorial but pure and noble, and he speaks these words a cappella, as though to announce that a great force of collective love and fury is about to overtake the world. I thought this was rather ironic, because I was a young woman who was not in the business of overtaking anything. I could barely take my medication.

Tell Us What You Know

One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate and skin moisture, in order to determine whether the subject is truthfully responding to questions. A needle corresponding to physiological changes registers a line on paper; the line will supposedly spike if a person lies. Polygraphs are finicky instruments and their reliability has been repeatedly debunked (simply being attached to one can be enough to make your heart rate jump), but they do successfully measure fluctuations in an organism’s physical state. Backster thought he might be able to incite a spike in the line of the lie detector if he somehow excited or injured the plant. He decided he might set one of its leaves on fire. But as he sat there, contemplating burning the plant, the polygraph needle jumped. Backster—who in his free time was also an acid-dropping astrologist—noted that the spike was identical to the kind elicited by a human fright response. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that the plant could experience emotions like a sentient being. And since he had only contemplated hurting the plant, he also concluded that the plant could sense his thoughts. The plant was a mind reader.

Over the following decades Backster cleaved ever tighter to a theory he developed called “primary perception,” which he believed to be a form of consciousness embedded in the cells of all living beings that, at least in the case of plants, gave them a profound sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. If it had not been the sixties, perhaps his work would have been relegated to the shelves of pseudoscience, but he hit a nerve of the Whole Earth generation with its burgeoning environmental movement. Like Backster, a certain set was already primed to believe in communion with plants in the form of, say, ingesting psilocybin or peyote. Backster became a figurehead for a cultural fascination with plant consciousness. His findings about the ability of plants to sense danger, read emotion, and communicate were publicized widely, notably in the still-popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, but also on TV shows. His ideas were adopted by the Church of Scientology, and eventually even made it back to the CIA, which invested in its own research about plant sentience.

One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker’s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will. 

That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fiancé, Robert Browning. The poets’ courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read Monte Cristo. “Are we going to have a storm tonight?” she now wrote eagerly. And, indeed, as dusk turned to darkness, the rumbles of a summer tempest began. By ten o’clock, Londoners could see flashes of lightning on the horizon. 

Back in Burwood Place, meanwhile, passing her husband’s studio on her way upstairs to dress, Mrs. Mary Haydon tried the door, but found it bolted. “Who’s there?” her husband cried out. “It is only me,” she replied, before continuing on her way. A few minutes later, Haydon emerged from his studio and followed her upstairs. He repeated a message he wanted her to deliver to a friend of theirs across the river in Brixton and stayed a moment or two longer, then kissed her before heading back downstairs. Once again alone in his studio, he wrote one final page that began, “Last Thoughts of B. R. Haydon. ½ past 10.” Fifteen minutes later, he stood up, took the pistol he had bought that morning, and, standing in front of the large canvas of an unfinished current work in progress, “Alfred and the First British Jury”—one of the grand historical scenes he favored but brought him few admirers—shot himself in the head. 

Last night I hit a deer, a fawn actually. Just a ragged thing still with its spots, it could’ve been born that day. Its mother stood on the side of the road. I saw her first and only the fawn when it was too late, my own new child in the backseat. I was immediately seized with the guilt that I shouldn’t be there and the deer should, that I was in the wrong place throttling a car through the woods. The next day at the farm where I work the lettuces were missing their hearts, the best, sweetest part eaten by deer. It is getting to be summer when things like this happen.

The solstice itself is mundane. Every December and June we have the shortest day with the longest night or the longest day bathed in light. On the first winter’s day our shadow looms, a lonesome outline imprinted over frozen ground. On the summer solstice we cast less of ourselves on the earth, which is teeming with green life. Does the waning and waxing of the days somehow govern human temperament or are we more fickle, flitting between the dark and light faster than the earth’s slow tilt and pull from the sun?

Searching through old journals, like a meteorologist’s log, I looked for the noting of many solstices amidst my own human concerns and the agricultural ones on the farm where I worked: summers lost in a frenzied blur of sunlight and bounty and winters disappeared into whitewashed hibernation. What is this burning desire day after day to note the passing of a mouse or a stranger shoveling scrambled eggs into their mouth? Why record anything at all? In wanting to redeem this compulsion to record and its accumulation year after year, why not proclaim, The solstice is a day of import! Each winter and summer passed only once, like a car charging irrevocably through a dark wood, and then was gone.

We were sitting at a long table, images and diagrams projected onto the wall behind us, while the audience faced us in silence. I was part of a panel on hoarding, along with another psychoanalyst and a memoirist. As I gave my presentation, audience members went about their business as though they were invisible, like people in cars sometimes do. One person directly in front of me scrolled and typed on her iPhone. Another stood up, walked to the back of the room to get a drink, then returned to his seat and rummaged through his bag. I became aware of my attempt to block out these actions, to pretend not to see what I was seeing.

At one point, I must have turned my head in the direction of my lapel mic because suddenly the volume shot up. I was explaining the concept of horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, pointing to the part it played in the aesthetics of the Victorian era, causing every surface to be covered with tchotchkes, and in sex, leading some men to dread a sense of post-coital emptiness so much that they stave off—and this is when it happened—ejacuLATION.

That got really loud for a second, I observed matter-of-factly, then burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I attempted to compose myself, apologize—Sorry, I just had a juvenile moment—and return to the passage, but when I reached the word ejaculation again, I lost it, doubled over, eventually putting my head on the table. 

Seconds felt like hours as I tried, with little success, to pull myself together. I had no idea why I was laughing, but the more I laughed, the more others in the room laughed with me. Attacks of laughter are contagious: another person’s laughter—even if nonsensical—is enough of a stimulus to provoke your own.