Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.
At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.
The most exciting thing to encounter in the world of publishing is a writer who doesn’t sound like anyone else. I first read Gabriel Smith at the Drift, where our then fiction editor spied his story, “The Complete,” in the slush, so it’s been a thrill to help bring out his debut novel, Brat, in my other role as an editor at Penguin Press. Brat is sharp, wickedly funny, moving, unusual, spooky, haunted, textually layered—the adjectives sort of flow endlessly. It’s a book you’ll keep turning over in your mind long after you’ve read it, which is why I relished the opportunity to chat with Gabe about the project of Brat and the process of writing fiction. I sent over some questions in the format every writer and editor loves most—Google Docs—and I hope you’ll enjoy his responses (and Brat itself) as much as I did.
Gabriel Smith Writes Like He Has Nothing Left to Lose
Close city – “Proximity governs how we live, work, and socialize. Close is an interactive travel time map for people who want to be near the amenities that matter most to them. Close builds on two core principles:
- Different people will prioritize being near different amenities
- A neighborhood is only as accessible as its most distant important amenity
When you select multiple amenities in Close, the map shows the travel time to the furthestof those amenities. You can set your preferred travel mode to get to each amenity.
Walking + Public Transit, Biking or Combined. Close is currently in public beta, with more features and destination types coming over the next few months. The reliability of destinations will continually improve as new data sources and user feedback are incorporated. Close is built and maintained by Henry Spatial Analysis.
You can stay up-to-date on the latest improvements to Close by subscribing to the newsletter. How to use Close – Close includes travel time information for cities across the United States. To view a different location, select the icon on the top left of the screen and enter a city or county name. To access map details, including a link to this About page, click the icon in the top left corner of the map.”
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life
BY MARIA POPOVA
Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child.
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after a savage struggle with meningitis.
Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).
Between Mathematics and the Miraculous: The Stunning Pendulum Drawings of Swiss Healer and Artist Emma Kunz
BY MARIA POPOVA
Emma Kunz (May 23, 1892–January 16, 1963) was forty-six and the world was aflame with war when she became an artist. She had worked at a knitting factory and as a housekeeper. She had written poetry, publishing a collection titled Life in the interlude between the two World Wars. Having lost two of her siblings to childhood illness, then both her surviving brother and her father to suicide when she was seventeen, she had coped with the physical fragility of life and the spiritual difficulty of bearing our mortality by becoming a healer. Her friends called her Penta, from the Pythagorean symbol for health — a pentagram drawn with a single line.
