Stefano Scanu

Eva Legge

Stefano Scanu tells me that there is a gradient of literacy in Italy. Starting in Milan and going south, people read less and less. A nexus of factors resulted in the pattern, he tells me. The first factor is wealth, for the opulent families in the north have more time to devote to books, to art, to poetry, to music. As the financial stress increases as one travels south to Florence, then Rome then Sicily, so do one’s daily responsibilities. “When you are poor, the last of your interests… is to read a book, because you have to clean up everything, or pay your bills.” Besides, Stefanu says, what little time they do have is spent enjoying the sun and the sea, “and not stay at home with a rainy day outside and read a book.”

“This is not my opinion,” he adds, “this is a kind of a theory.” 

“And bookshops close, day by day, year by year, and it’s a big, huge problem for our country. It’s like movie theaters. Movie theaters close every year, every year, because people stay at home watching Netflix and don’t go to the movie theater. And bookshops have the same destiny.” 

But now, bookshops all across the North, in Turin and Milan, especially, are in “really, really bad moments.” But in Rome, one of the least literate cities in Europe (at least now), bookshops are the only businesses in the city to be open. According to the governing body of Rome, “books are like bread. And this was a really, really, really dangerous thing to say.”

***

Stefano is the vice president of Libraccio, a chain of second hand bookstores “which in Italian means ‘Bad Book.’ This is hilarious,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a kind of Strand — an Italian Strand,” he explains in an attempt to extend the comparison to America. Strand is the multi-story independent bookstore in Manhattan with the slogan “18 miles of books.” It was a landmark in Manhattan long before it was officially designated so by the city of New York. Any avid reader living in New York knows about Strand,” my mom added later. 

Libraccio was founded forty years ago and now there are “so many bookshops around Italy,” Stefano boasted. The shops are scattered in a flower-shape across the peninsula. Fourteen stores make a rough circle in northern Italy, seven of which are in Milan alone. And then the thin stem: one shop in the capital city of Calabria, at the peninsula’s southern point, and one in the center of Rome. 

Stefano’s bookshop is in the center of Rome, an area of the city Stefano compares to the borough of Manhattan. It’s surrounded by offices and “charming restaurants” and museums. The Roman equivalent of Grand Central Station is only a few blocks away. Nobody lives in the area, Stefano says, so the customers are not neighborhood customers. His clientele, he adds, is the exact opposite of Chiara’s bohemian art community. Instead, his customers are primarily tourists and Romans alike who “passed through the bookshop maybe once in their life.” 

It’s unsurprising that a passerby may find themselves wandering into the store. Libraccio is housed in a grand 18th century building, so grand that tourists often stop to take selfies in front of the store. The inside is even more impressive: three stories of corinthian columns, vaulted ceilings, and tens of thousands of books. One floor is dedicated entirely to secondhand books, the next to new imports, and finally, one story is reserved for DVD’s, CD’s vinyls, and records.  

***

When the government announced in early May that bookshops would be the first businesses in Rome to open, Stefano was shocked. The government was never particularly interested in bookshops. They’ve existed in a mutualistic relationship for decades — the government doesn’t expect to give them money, and they expect the same from the government. Stefano decided it must have been a symbolic act, one to attain political favor from its citizens. “The government right now is in a bit of a crisis,” Stefano said, “and they opened bookshops to say, ‘I’m smart. I think that reading art, literature and poetry in this time is like food for us because we don’t have anything”

 “It’s a symbolic act,” he added. “They really don’t care anything about bookshops.” 

Stefano’s team of 23 works in shifts, with five employees in the shop at a time. At 10am on May 5th, Stefano and his coworkers stood in their empty shop, waiting for a customer. After an hour, a few people began to wander in, not with inquiries about books to buy but with questions about how a bookstore could possibly be open before anyone else. Now, a lot of the people come to the bookshop just to waste time. “You can’t go to the club, you can’t go to the restaurant, you can’t go to the gym, but you can go to the bookshop.” 

As more and more people wandered into the shop, Stefano noticed a common interest. Everyone wants books about the virus, Stefano says, about “The Problem.” “The kind of books we have in our shop… they talk about another era… and we have this huge place full of books, but the books inside are not useful for this moment.” There are a few authors in the shop who have written novels about pandemia, like José Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen King, and all of those shelves have cleared. 

“I’m kind of surprised,” I say. “With limited things to do, wouldn’t you want an escape? And this is the perfect time to sit down and read a book that takes you out of this moment.” 

He says that a few people “are really, really convinced by the purpose of buying books. They come in and buy stacks and stacks of books, many of which include the complete Twilight saga. 

Perhaps a reason everyone wants to read science fiction, he muses, is because of the space man. “We have this guy who come in two time a day to the bookshop, and they spent something like two hours to do that because the bookshop is huge, and when people, when customers see him, because he has this kind of costume with a mask, and gloves — HUGE gloves — and this kind of tube that sprays I don’t know what, it’s like a scientific movie, it’s a man from the moon that comes in two times a day to wash everything. It’s weird.” 

I ask if most people are conscious of safety measures, like the spaceman. He says no — people are uncomfortable with washing their hands and wearing a mask and staying apart. He’s beginning to feel like a policeman, for his dialogue with customers has become little more than “okay you can come in, you can wait, just two minutes more, please, don’t move like this, please don’t touch the book” They posted signs about social distancing around the shop, but he says as if it’s obvious, “Roman people are not really comfortable with the rules…. They don’t read anything. And they stay all together like ships.”

 

***

 

During quarantine, Stefano read twelve books. They’ve “been waiting for me for ages,” he says, waving his hand to the color-coordinated bookshelf above his head. He read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, a speculative work about the birth of the Greek tragic poem. He read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the novella that inspired Blake Edward’s classic film. He read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, “a swash-buckling account that begins with the origin of the species and ends with post-humans,” writes The Guardian. Harai predicts that the end of Homo sapiens will come not through disease, but through the biotechnical revolution: we will be replaced by immortal post-humans, immune to disease and capable of living forever. 

“I am a kind-of writer,” he adds, “and I finished my big novel.” It’s about Odysseus and it’s about the invention of paper in seventeenth century England, and it’s about the small particles that people inhaled due to the production of paper. Every day for weeks, Stefano sat at his desk for five hours a day and laid out the roadmap for his novel, until it was finished. 

“And it’s actually like a gift for me,” he says, “because I am like never, ever, managed to have this free time all for me, and every day, no distractions, no phone rings, no emails, no everything. So I slowed down, and that was unexpected, and it’s like a gift. I don’t know the words in this language. And I [was never] sad or depressed about that, because it’s like, [I found] something that I, that disappeared in the last years because I did the same job for seventeen years.” 

“You are able to live with less now,” he continues. “You are able to live with more free time. You are able to live in the same place where you need, to move less than before and come back to the old life and start to run, from one appointment to another and work like a slave and be, all the time, so nervous, I think it’s a bit shocking for everyone, when everything will be opened like the old times.” 

***

I learn later that by ‘kind of a writer,’ he means that he has already published five books at the same time as working as the vice president of the biggest bookshop in Rome. He wrote Come un Albero in un’ampolla, (Like a Tree in a Bottle), a book of poetry about trees and landscapes. “It’s like haunted poetry,” Stefano says. He wrote a guidebook “about places in the world that move.” Take Mont Saint-Michel, a tidal island in France, he says. It’s “a kind of mountain, but it’s an island as well, because the sea comes down, up and down, at different times of day. And you can go by car to the islands but you can’t go out with a car, you need a boat, because after 5pm, the sea goes up.” 

Stefano wrote a collection of fifteen biographies of musicians, directors, architects, “that have a weird life,” like “the first monk who jumped from the Tour Eiffel because he invented a kind of parachute… but he died… or the first actress who jumped from the “H” of “Hollywood,” you know, Hollywood sign, the big one? Or Peg Antwhistle, he adds, the failed actress who jumped from the “H” in the Hollywood sign. Finally, he wrote a “kind of guidebook about movie theaters in Rome… I tell the history of Rome, telling the history of these movie theaters.”

 At the Sapienza University of Rome, Stefano studied Italian Literature with Professor Benvegnu. Graduating with a major in the humanities is “not good for Italian people,” Stefano adds, “because you can’t find jobs with this kind of education. Just for your passion… if you don’t want to be a teacher, it’s hard with this kind of education.”

“It seems like you found a very fulfilling job, though — two or three!” I reply. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “it’s not easy… because, as we said before, people don’t buy books … [writing] is hard to do, if you do this, but it’s fun… and it’s a quite good job.” 

“People in Italy don’t live with books,” he continued, “so you must be really really famous, because [the publishers] pay not so much for the books. So [writing] is just like an hobby” 

***

“So… have you been watching any good Italian movies?” I ask. 

Stefano tells me about Ultras, a film about dueling soccer clans, and an Italian movie about the painter, Antonio de Gaboie. He “was a knife painter,” Italian painter, really really wild, it’s quite mad, and he used to paint animals, tigers, lions, but he used to live in a mountain, an Italian mountain. Nothing that he painted was real for me, but it’s like an expression of his soul, his fears, and it’s a nice story. They [made it]  a movie just last year, [and I watched it in] the movie theater just before the lockdown. This is a problem for me because I used to go to the movie theater one day a week, and now they are closed, it’s kind of a drama. It’s drama for me.” 

“Yeah… I’m definitely sad,” I reply. “I love going to movie theaters. My mom’s a film teacher, so watching movies is very important to us.” 

“Oh! Lucky you, lucky you… movie and cinema is my passion,” he adds, “but I don’t work with this. It’s just a passion, just a hobby. But it’s the most important art of my life.”

Now, every Sunday at five, “when people go to the movie theater,” Stefano does a small feature on a local radio station. He began the first week of quarantine.

He seems to look above his computer screen at something that no longer exists, but should. “And I say to the people, if you can move from your couch, just imagine to stay in the movie theater, and I describe the movie theater. I describe the neighborhood, and I describe the movie that I’m going to see…” Nothing was real anymore. Instead, it was an expression of his soul.

Chiara Capodici

Eva Legge

A letter from Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò Niccoli, on the death of his close friend and fellow humanistic book-hunter, Bartolomeo de Montepulciano. Rome. July 1449.

I could not write you from the city on account of
my grief over the death of my dearest friend and on
Account of my confusion of spirit, deriving partly from
Fear and partly from the sudden departure of the Pope.
I had to leave my house and settle all my things; a great
Deal had to be done at once so that there was no oppor-
tunity for writing or even for drawing breath. There
Was besides the greatest grief, which made everything
else much harder. But back to the books…

 

“You know, I think a lot of people suffer from loneliness and from the fact of being stuck
at home, but I didn’t feel stuck. I started gardening. I started growing artichokes and
strawberries, and it’s not that bad.”
Later, she showed me her backyard: lush trees sagging from the weight of ripened fruit,
verdant bushes shivering in the breeze, leaves brushing the sides of the iron grating covering her
window. “I’m just belonging to that part of the world, at least in Italy, who enjoy it a lot, this
period [of quarantine].”

Quarantine “reconnected me to my home life,” she said. “It’s not having a home or
belonging to a home;” it’s something else, something she couldn’t yet articulate.
“I realised it had been months… I hadn’t even opened the… how do you call them? The
blinds. I wasn’t even opening the blinds. I was working so much and traveling so much, in order
to let my [business] survive.”
“And so,” Chiara said, “I discovered light again.”

***

Leporello, Photobooks et. al, it says on the postscript to her email. Also in the postscript
is a link to “my favorite book of the week.” Before we spoke, I followed the link, and it led me to
an online sale on the bookstore’s website, for a photobook by Isea Suda. “These photobooks
have never been published to this day,” it says on the description. Below were a few sample
pages. An old man walks down the street of Tokyo, holding two beer bottles and two flowers
inside. I thought they were firecrackers, until I saw the leaves. A father and son sit on a bench
with banana leaves covering their faces. A smoking man in the middle of a slow exhale, letting
the smoke collect around his mouth. Small, everyday, moments becoming still.
“So, you’ve discovered my perversion.” This is how we begin.
Leporello bookshop “is mostly focused on photography,” she says, “but… I’m not so
much into a specialization but look for intersection between things. After university, I found
myself specializing more and more into the photography field, mostly as a curator, and as a self-
taught book designer. I used to work as a freelance book designer with a friend, and we were

devoted to making exhibitions and books and teaching and making workshops almost all over
Italy, a little also abroad, but then… I guess we just needed to get rid of our collaboration.”
Three years ago, Chiara opened Leporello. “I was particularly obsessed with two things,”
she continues. “The first thing was, of course, books, and the more I delved into this interest, the
more there wasn’t a place to buy books in Roma, but I could only look for the things I was
interested in on the web and in fairs, basically. So, I’d say, why dont I make this try? And
secondly, you know, as a freelance, I was feeling kind of out of the world, like this is a very
beautiful bubble, but don’t connect me to very real things related to everyday life in Italy, and I
guess, [Rome was] not experiencing the very best moment…. economically, culturally,
politically, and I think that it was even more important, because of it, to open a shop. A shop
means that you make apparent that the government makes no differences between cultural
challenges, and more commercial things, and that all the things that you read in newspapers,
become kind of more real.”
“Now that I decided to open this book shop, my interests that were already kind of wide,
widened even further, so architecture, of course, is one of the branches that intersects more easily
with photography. But a part of that, say, I’m really really interested in graphic design, design,
and image-based works mostly when they take the shape of the printed matter — that’s the thing
I like most. And recently, I fell in love also with silk-screen processes, with all that’s involved in
it, and, you know, you’ve never been to Roma yet?”
“No, I haven’t.”
She goes on to describe Roma as an archipelago of islands. They are not isolated, she
says. Each island has a life of its own. She tells me of Pigneto, a neighborhood (or island) in the
heart of the city. It used to be a poor area, but over the past decade, it became gentrified by

designers and architects and young creatives until one day, it wasn’t poor anymore. Quite the
opposite — it was now the bohemian hub of the city. This is where her bookshop is, on Via del
Pigneto. A 40-square meter enclave tucked into a much larger building, it’s just large enough just
for two, she’s learned, to avoid each other's breath during the post-quarantine reopening.

***

The announcement was broadcasted at six o’clock on Holy Friday. All bookshops in
Rome, as “a symbol of Italy,” were to open the following Tuesday. She studied me from over the
camera. “Sorry, you are probably not Christian, or Catholic,” she said, but you can imagine our
history is important here in Italy. Later that Holy Friday, she received another message from the
region governor, rescinding their earlier announcement. “Sorry to tell you that,” she said, “but
for me this sort of gives you a feeling for Italy, when things are announced on the spur of the
moment and you have to change your mind. And so the governor said, well, maybe it’s too crazy
to open right away… maybe, we need, like, the time to reconvert all things, so they will open up
next week.”
The week before the opening, Chiara went to the bookshop on her own. She has two
employees, “a collaborator who comes to Lorello every afternoon and another cool guy who is
helping us once a week.” That’s all she says about them. “I opened [Leporello] on my own
because I wasn’t fine asking my kids to come back.” By kids, she means her employees.
She waited until the official end of lockdown, May 4th, to open shop. She and her
employees alternate shifts in the small space. Every few hours, they have to completely clean the
shop. “According to the rules we have, you know, rules,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We have to,
like, completely clean the shop, which, if you have books, is kind of difficult.”

She paused to look up the word for candeggina. “Bleach!” she yelped. “I should have
known this word. Coming from the nineties, it’s a very important Nirvana album.” Every
surface, from the floors to the walls to the shelves to the covers of books, have to be cleaned with
bleach and water and masks and gloves. She and one of her employees are in the shop during
opening hours, but whenever a customer comes in (and only one customer can come in at a
time), Chiara has to wait on the street.

***

I got in touch with Chiara through Damiano Benvegnu, my professor at Dartmouth. I
emailed him out of the blue, asking to interview friends of his in Rome about their experiences in
quarantine. In reply, he cc’d two of his best friends from the Sapienza University of Rome:
Stefano Scanu and Chiara Capodici. “As promised, I am introducing you to two dear friends of
mine, who both live in Rome. They both speak excellent English and have kindly agreed to be
interviewed, so I'll leave it to the three of you to figure out the when and how. Please follow up
with them as soon as possible and be thoughtful that they have their own life and job.”
Chiara studied art history at university, and met Damiano in an art criticism class, where
they talked about Freud and Lacante in relation to great ancient artworks. “And I guess we were
all, I wouldn’t say obsessed with this stuff, but, Professor Benvegnu, it’s another mind.”
“I tell you one thing but don’t tell Professor Benvegnu,” Chiara said with a grin. “From
time to time [Damiano] would call just to have a chat, and I would say, ‘No, Damiano! It’s
impossible! I am getting prepared for an exam, let’s talk in three weeks!’
“Chiara,” he’d reply, “you are not talking to anyone for three weeks?”
“Yes!” she’d say. “I want to get concentrated.”
***

Chiara’s sister lives in a small, thirty square meter apartment with no terrace in
downtown Milan. A week after her sister’s lockdown began (far before a whisper of the disease
had reached Rome), she called Chiara, who lives in a large house with gardens and terraces on
the outskirts of Rome.
“You know, Chiara,” her sister said, “the first week of lockdown, you didn’t even call
me!”
“Well, you know,” Chiara replied, “I didn’t realize. I thought that this was simply that
your boss said it was better for you to work from home for a week or two. I didn’t realize.”
Her narration bled back into the present. “And I think this was a common feeling all over
Italy. We didn’t realize. So, what happened was like a slap in the face, and the first slap was
because we didn’t realize, and it’s how irresponsible we were, up until now, how we
underestimated what was happening. So, I guess part of like Italians also have a kind of paranoia,
for the first days, and the other part just comes down and say, take it easy, don’t be nervous, just
try to be at home and do your things and be patient, we cannot do anything, just let it go. And
then I guess we faced, we all faced a lot of ups and downs, like from an emotional point of view,
and for our perspectives on the future that is still quite unclear, but, um, I think we all said to
take this every day, day by day.”
Later in the conversation, my mom tip-toed into the kitchen. She was boiling water for
her Aeropress when I asked Chiara when the lockdown began. Chiara paused for a moment. It
was the second monday of April, she said, but couldn’t remember the exact date.
Mom walked towards me to throw the coffee grounds in the compost bin. “April Ninth,”
she mouthed at me. My mom’s birthday. She tiptoed back out of the kitchen and closed the door
to her study.

***

“So lucky this thing is happening in spring,” Chiara says. “I think that in this weird thing
we are experiencing, we are kind of lucky, no? Like, we can enjoy the sun, and we can enjoy the
energy of the earth. Sorry, I don’t want to sound like a hippie, but if I think about sad, winter,
rainy days, where the sun sets at five o’clock, god, I’m so happy it didn’t happen back then.”

She smiles. “So, talking about my private, everyday life, I just reconverted back to this kind of
homey person I used to be with, so I am kind of lucky in this regard because I am a kind of
solitary person, and love to spend a lot of time at home.”
Every morning during quarantine, Chiara woke up at seven am. She spent her first hour
drinking coffee, and “looking around myself.” Then, she did her yoga. “Usually, I do hatha, a
very soft vinyasa,” she says. But now, “I am really feeling the need to feel the energy within my
body. So, she switched to power yoga.
She wrapped her hand around her right upper arm. “And I’m becoming like a popeye!”
She balances power yoga with Kundalini and Hatha, which is her original practice. Once a week,
she takes an Ashtanga class. “I think we are tempted to focus on our body, and so I think on the
one hand it’s a need, and on the other hand it’s like a temptation.”
After her yoga class, she worked until lunch on converting her bookshop to a fully online
platform.
After lunch, she spent five hours reading. During the first few weeks, she read one book
every two days. She read a photography book by a brilliant Israeli writer, creator, and scholar
named Ariella Astulai, l’Ontologia Politica de la Fotografia. She read Un Certain numero de
cose, a catalog of visual artist Transteriesta Parteriusti’s last exhibition. “The more you go along

with the book and the more all these objects become recurrent in his artistic life, and so it’s a
connection about everyday things in life, and an artist’s life, and the relationship between art and
life itself.”

Chiara read a book called l’Ardore, by Roberto Calasso, which she finished in a three
hour sitting. “I don’t know whether it was translated in English,” she said. “Ardore is like a very
important word in Italian. I don’t know the exact translation in English, but it’s when you have
an inner fire. Something like this. And so, the inner fire was the very basic thing that ancient
yogi’s had, and that, it’s not only belonging to them, but to all the world in a different way.”
After spending the afternoon reading, Chiara worked until eight, the time her shop
normally closed. She would spend the evening cooking dinner, watching movies, and reading a
bit more.
Chiara’s favorite recipe to cook for dinner is Pigna Rola.”You cook in springtime with
things that grow close to the vigna, that are artichokes, peas, asparagus, and lettuce, and fava
beans, that are very typical of Italy. And you can find all of these ingredients growing up
altogether just like two, three weeks a year. And this is the first year I’m not having vigna rola
because it is hard to find all the ingredients. But I had a lot of asparagus, and artichokes, and
artichokes are like my obsession. You know, in Roma, we have a typical Hebrew cook, we call it
like a Judicah, using a term that might sound weird, but it’s just ancient for us, and so we have
carciofi l’acoltia, which are deep fried artichokes, miracle.”
Now, my dad is in the kitchen. He grabs the coffee grinder and carries it into the other
room so we wouldn’t hear the whir. After he returned the grinder, he hovered near me as I
continued my conversation.

Chiara continued, “The weekend became like, how do you say?”
“Errands,” Dad butted in.
Chiara’s face lit up. “Oh, thanks for the suggestion, Mr. Father!”
I wave Dad over so Chiara can see his face. “This is the architect,” I said, referring to an
earlier conversation we’d had about architecture books.
“Ciao The Architect!”
“I’ve been listening in on the conversation,” Dad murmured.
Chiara laughed. “I realized that.”
My dad began asking her questions. He wanted to know how far she could walk outside.
Whether the police were enforcing the lockdown. Whether she could go grocery shopping. After
a few minutes, I wrote “I ASK Q’s” in my notebook and slid the message over for him to see.

***

“Now, it’s a very difficult moment for most of us. Because most of us are set in this
reality, and it’s hard to get back to the everyday life, stressful reality. We experienced what it
means, working with less stress, and it humanized us, in a way.”
“Yeah I definitely agree that I’ve been really enjoying spending some time at home,” I
say. “When I was first leaving for college I was definitely excited for my new adventure, but
now that I’ve had a year and a half of adventuring, I just feel really lucky to be with my family
right now. And I really don’t feel like leaving.”
Chiara grinned. “ Even when your father contributed to your Skype conversation? Father,
where are you?”
I laughed.

“Well, let me anticipate something that happens, at least for me,” she said. “The first days
will be kind of unfamiliar, but what ends up happening is you reconquer your enthusiasm, no?
And you remember why you ended up stressed, because it is also so beautiful to be out in the
world. I think what we have to remember is not to get into that stressed mood anymore, no? And
we don’t have to sloooow down too much, but a little bit, it’s gonna be worth it. And that’s my
target, don't forget it, no? Because it’s easy to forget it right away.”

***

I wait until the end of the conversation to tell her that I, too, am an avid yogi. As I had
previously discovered, introducing this topic could dominate the conversation. She smiles and
presses her palms together. She brings her thumb knuckles to her third eye center and bows her
head to the camera. “Om Namah Shivaya.” I echo her, my palms together too, although I;d never
heard the phrase. The kind of yoga I practice is a more mutated and americanized form of the
vedic text. After the interview, I searched its meaning on Wikipedia, and found a list of
definitions, including “O salutations to the auspicious one!” “Adoration of Lord Shiva” and
“universal consciousness in one.” But none of those seemed right.

***

A week after my interview with Chiara, while reading a memoir on a
woman’s spiritual journey in India, I stumbled across the phrase Om Namah Shivayah. I learned
that it wasn’t just a phrase; it was a mantra, the most popular Hindu mantra, in fact, a phrase that
one repeats, over and over, in order to reach enlightenment.
Om
Na
Mah
Shi
Va

Ya
Om Namah Shivaya.
I honor the divinity that resides within me.

Formal Policy Brief

Eva Legge

In our Marine Policy class, we were tasked with creating a formal policy brief. I focused my studies on the sustainable harvest of Ascophyllum nodosum, a brown macroalgae that grows in Maine’s intertidal zone. I interviewed policy experts, harvesting companies, and marine scientists. The formal policy brief can be read below.

Essay on Moby Dick

Eva Legge

In Literature of the Sea, we read with a number of novels that engaged with the maritime imagination of New England.  Our keystone novel was Moby Dick, which I analyzed through the lens of Rebecca Solnit’s book on resiliency during the climate crisis: A Paradise Built in Hell. 

Among scholars and laymen alike, Moby-Dick is usually read as a world dismantled, a cosmic horror, or a Shakespearian tragedy. It is read as a novel in which everything falls apart – whether it be an individual’s sense of security or the relationship among crew-members. Readers perceive that, as the Pequod nears Moby-Dick, the ship’s power structures isolate Ahab all-the-more. Chaos seems to radiate out from an Ahab until it infects the crew, the ship, and even the entire ocean. At the novel’s very core, then, is darkness, and it touches everything within its reach. I propose an alternate reading of the novel, one that is supremely hopeful – even joyous – not in spite of chaos, but in anticipation of, during, and in the wake of disaster. In the novel’s moments of havoc everything does not fall apart – it falls together. 

“Consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of [nature’s] hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself,” writes Melville in my favorite chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale” (185).  Just as every color of light coalesces to become the color white, fear and serenity, sorrow and joy coalesce to become a force present in everyone, but one that few have experienced and even fewer have acknowledged. I cannot claim to know the origin of this divine force or describe its dimensions. Like our understanding of dark matter or other forces beyond our comprehension, it only presents itself in traces: the emotions it makes someone feel, or act, or live, or die. Many of such traces are Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell. In this piece of nonfiction, she writes of “the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster.” The sorrow and fear that comes from chaos, she contends, foster the rising of its complete opposite -altruism, bravery, and joy – at the very nexus of destruction. The white whale, of course, is the axis around which this novel revolves, and in all of his menace, has the power to buoy the reader into a sense of supreme hope that can inform the ways in which we responds to the chaos in our own warming world. 

 

~INDIVIDUAL~

From the beginning of the novel, Melville contends that our human existence revolves around an axis of peace. Unlike the popular Christian belief that this divine substance becomes most pronounced in the afterlife, Melville believes it is most present when humans are most alive. “Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance,” muses Ishmael. “Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that think water is the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.” (51).  Moreover, he believes that this substance is ever-present within one’s body, but its appearance (and thus the times which humans are most alive) are inextricably tied to chaos. “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life,” writes Melville (248). Within all of us, then, is a kind of paradise, but it cannot exist without the ocean that surrounds it. After this comment, Melville adds a warning for the reader, to stay on the island if you can.

However, he does not continue to clue the reader into how this can be achieved until much later in the novel. It seems that, when close to death, a patient becomes imbued with a heavenly intervention of knowledge that lay dormant in one’s normal rhythms of life. “I have heard, murmured Starbuck, gazing down in the scuttle, ‘that in violent fevers, men, in all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues” (419). When Queequeg is on his deathbed, he “had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” (421). When Ahab gets scorched by a hot iron, be begins speaking in a latin tongue.  Then, it seems that the divine substance gets all-the-more pronounced when close to death. This, Mellville seems to be saying, is not because it is providing a window into the afterlife, but because one is most alive when they brush chaos and destruction.  

“We don’t even have a language for this emotion,” writes Solnit, “in which the wonderful seems wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear.” (Solnit 5).  After hearing from the Rachel that Moby Dick was within their reach, the emotions of the individual crew-members began to turbulently and inarticulately coalesce. At first, this mixing of emotions seems singularly doom-filled. “Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to the finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul” (Melville 468). However, this falling-together of emotions, if you will, becomes something heavenly. In the third day of the chase, Starbuck experiences a moment of sublime clarity in the midst of the chaos. “What is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant – fixed at the top of a shudder… strangest problems of life seem clearing… is my journey’s end coming?” (495). Even Ahab, the unhuman, lone wolf, experiences a similar coalescence on the third day of the chase, when he exclaims, “Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, how I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief” (499). It is important to note that Ahab, just as with the rest of the crew, says that his greatness lies in his grief, not outside it, just as the Tahiti resides at the center of a turbulent ocean.                                             

~ POPULATION ~

When the Trinidatian critic CLR James was interned on Ellis Island in the midst of the McCarthy trials, he wrote Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and The World We Live In. In his first chapter, “The Captain and his Crew,” he presents an unsettled reading of the novel. Because of the dire circumstances of leadership under which the crew worked, the crew becomes a kind of fellowship. “In contrast to Ahab’s exclusiveness is the relaxed discipline among men,” he writes (James 28). Midway through the novel, Dagoo believes he sees Moby-Dick, and the crew, in response, act as a cohesive unit, working to fulfill their overbearing tyrant’s orders. This collective effort becomes one that draws the group of crewlings closer.“Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you have never heard over the mahogany,” writes Melville (431). With the rising of tension, its opposite comes in to meet it. James, in a way that I can’t help but compare to Solnit, muses about this scene. “There is tension [in this scene], the tension of strenuous labor, but there is skill and grace and beauty” (James 31). 

 “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic,” writes Solnit. “The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being has little truth to it” (Solnit 2). When one member of the crew is in danger, another member always steps up in aid. In Chapter 77, the Pequod is being pulled over by the weight of a dead whale on its deck, and Tashtego falls overboard. Immediately, Queequeg jumps out after him in an act of altruism. When disaster strikes in the novel, the crew members knit together connections to each other: they rely on each other for aid, they lean in close to share jokes about the irony of it all, and they work as a cohesive unit amid stress. 

“It is all a unity,” writes James of the crew-members. “You cannot distinguish between man and nature and technology, between sweat and beauty, between an imperative discipline more severe than war, and yet sensations are as new and powerful as any human experience” (James 30-31). Indeed, at the height of chaos and conflict in the novel, (that being, of course, the encounter with Moby-Dick) these two extremes coalesce to form a kind of paradise, in which the crew members form their strongest, and most unearthly bonds. At the end of the novel, the crew does not just act as a cohesive unit, they act as one being. “They were one man, not thirty,” writes Melville of Moby-Dick’s final chase. “Though it was put together of all contrasting things … all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness” (486). 

~ COMMUNITY ~

` “Ahab is the most dangerous social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization,” writes James. Undoubtedly so — Ahab displays characteristics of the overbearing, individualistic and monomaniacally greedy leadership structures present both in the McCarthy and the Industrial Era. At times of stillness (or even at times of relatively normal turbulence), Ahab is obscured from his inner Tahiti, and therefore, is therefore unable to form connections with his crew. Solnit explains why this may be the case. “If I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities. Thus does everyday life become a kind of social disaster” (Solnit 3). If the novel is read through this lens, the social organization of the ship for most of the novel, at least in terms of Ahab’s relation to the crew, is a kind of social disaster. 

Continuing his analysis of Ahab’s character, James writes, “Never for a single moment does it cross his mind to question his relationships with the people he works with… he has been trained in the school of individualism and an individualist he remains to the f 

end” (James 20). However, I believe the exact opposite is true – though Ahab remains separated from his crew for most of the novel, these power structure break down by the end. “The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being,” writes Solnit. “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems , we are free to act another way” (Solnit 7). This is exactly what happens with Ahab – it merely took a larger push from the universe for his walls of isolation to crumble than it did for the rest of the crew. That push, of course, was their encounter with Moby-Dick. On the first day, when Ahab gets injured in the heat of the chase, he seems to emotionally unite with the rest of his crew in an unprecedented way: “in an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one great pang,” writes Melville (482). On the second day of the chase, Ahab finally removes himself from his perch, and joins his crew. “Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering on his men, he told them he would take the whale head and head” (487). Ahab, then doesn’t remain an individualist to the end. Far from it — because of the chaos that surrounds him he becomes central, and he becomes the axis around which his crew revolves. 

“The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures,” writes Solnit, “but the prevalent human nature in disasters is resourceful, empathetic, and brave” (Solnit 8). When it becomes ever-critical to do so, Ahab doesn’t just become a vital member of the community, but becomes a force that buoys his community to bravery. “So with Moby-Dick,” calls Ahab, “two days he’s floated – tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more – but only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave, men, brave?’ ‘As fearless fire, cried Stubb’” (Melville 490).  This is far from the signs of an overbearing individualist. This is a leader that empathizes – a leader that recognizes how much he must lean into his crew instead of remaining apart. 

~ ECOSYSTEM ~

The radius of the chaos that revolves about this Tahitian core doesn’t just encompass individuals, poplations, and communities. It is also very present in ecosystems, and the reaction of the crew members to the ecosystem’s peace amidst chaos helps inform the ways in which their community can, and should, evolve and respond to it. Our alternate nature of joy, of altruism, and of bravery is then folded into the context of the forces of nature – forces that become nurturing, illuminating, and uplifting in the epicenter of destruction. When the Pequod happens upon a pod of whales, Ishmael observes that the sprawling pod is organized in concentric circles. At the very “innermost fold,” they found mother whales nursing their calves (345). “Though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the center freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful contentments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight,” observes Ishmael (346). Upon sighting these nurturing creatures, Ishmael and Queequeg became equally nurturing. They lowered their harpoons, and even patted the pups’ heads. At least for a moment, Ishmael seems to left the murderous waters, and entered paradise island. 

The motifs present in the scene in which Pequod sinks to the ocean’s depths runs parallel to the concentric pod of whales. “And now,” writes Melville, “concentric circles seized the the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight” (499). In contrast to what one might expect, at the center of this whirlpool was not a violent suction. It was peaceful and placid. In fact, Melville describes this powerful center in many ways, writing that the “creamy pool,” or “vital centre,” or “cunning spring” has “great buoyancy” (500). At the confluence of all things, — individuals, populations, communities, the entire ship and the ecosystem that surrounds it — there is peace. As Ahab cried in the middle of the lightning-filled typhoon, the brightest light “leapest out of the darkness” (444).  

~BIOME~

In “The Captain and his Crew,” C.L.R. James contends that every man is an isolated island unto themselves. “Isolatos, Melville called [the crew], not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each isolato living on a separate continent of his own” (tJames 25). However, this reading of the book overlooks the actual language that Melville uses. Though he calls the crew “isolatos,” he also writes that those isolatos are now “federated along one keep” (Melville 118). He continues to write that the crew is “from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the Earth” (118). This would suggest, then, that the collection of men from all over the world is united, and represents a way in which the entire world can fall together. 

These comments about the isolados are the murmurings of an answer as to whether, if at all, we can write a story about the whole world. Melville isn’t just successful in telling a story about the world; he also tells a story of the ways in which the whole world can unite. And in Melville’s eyes, the entire world unites when the Pequod meets Moby-Dick. Here, individuals from all over the world, during a close brush with death, coalesce to form a cohesive and utopian community. Moreover, this happens in what Melville believes to be innermost fold of the world: the pacific ocean. In the Pacific “rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms,” writes Melville. “All between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown archipelagos, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine pacific… seems the tide-beating heart of Earth” (422). And at the very center of that heart is a Moby Dick, and the men that surround it. 

~THEIR UNIVERSE, AND OURS~

During the second day of the chase, Moby-Dick is likened to a powerful force of nature.  “So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sky, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier” (Melville 487). However, when the men coalesce in response to this sighting, they are likened to a heavenly force that rises above the natural forces of the biome. “Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck; while Ahab, less dartingly but still rapidly dropped from his perch” (487). Thus, it seems that disaster doesn’t just make one connect to fellow men and to the ecosystem, but also to the forces of the universe, both in the ways it can torment, and the ways in which it can equally uplift.   

When Queequeg is on his deathbed, he asks the carpenter to make him a canoe, instead of a traditional Western coffin. “Not only do [Queequeg’s people] believe that the stars are isles, but far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, continents seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way,” writes Melville (418). Queequeg’s traditional belief that one lives in congruence with the universe is what ends up saving Ishmael in the end. From the peaceful spring rises Queequeg’s coffin, ready to send its passenger on a voyage among the stars. When both Ishmael and Queequeg prepare for death, it seems that they both become a camerade with the universe. 

“While ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy,” Ishmael exclaims when he finds the group of nursing whales at the pod’s center. (346). It seems that because of the ponderous planets that revolve around him, he can lie on his Tahitian paradise. According to Melville, there is a seed of peace inside the universe, inside the earth, inside humanity, and among one’s comrades, and finally, within oneself — a force that, though being incredibly anthropocentric (or is it?), is also incredibly uplifting. And it goes both ways. That center of peace and joy within oneself touches one’s comrades — it touches the entire ship’s crew and captain, and the ecosystem surrounding it, and finally, it touches the universe. 

At the beginning of the novel, Melville posed a question to the reader: “Is it by its indefiniteness [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?” (184). In an equally doomsday vein, James poses a question about the implications of Moby-Dick: “The horrible crises and catastrophes [Melville] saw coming, were they rooted in the destructive personality, human nature, or did they have other causes? [and most importantly:] Could mankind overcome them?” (James 27). Both questions assume an ethos of tragedy and darkness in the novel, and obviate the supreme ways in which goodness rises to equal its opposite. The real question, in my mind, is whether, in the midst of chaos, if the universe can fall together in a way in which the goodness can overpower the dark. 

For our universe, I believe it can. In A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit writes that during the 2003 blackout, New Yorkers saw the night sky in all its glory for the first time. “The constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and appear at times,” writes Solnit at the end of “Prelude: Falling Together.” The loss of power, the disaster in the modern sense, is an affliction, but the reappearance of the old heavens is its opposite.” (Solnit 10). In the darkest of times, we have a glimpse of who we can become. And if we acknowledge that this substance is within us at all times, as Melville seems to believe, then the greater the chaos that these next few decades bring, the more we will be able to coalesce, the stronger the world will be able to fall together, and the more we be able to rise will meet the challenge. 

Maritime History Archival Research Paper

Eva Legge

This is a research piece I wrote for my Marine Ecology course using the archives at Mystic Seaport’s Collections and Research Center.

Before Her Deepness

The Long-Forgotten Predecessors of Sylvia Earle

In 1979, Sylvia Earle was the first person to walk, untethered, on the ocean floor. If she looked up, she could see the faint glow of the surface – 1,250 feet above her head. Despite years as a pioneering oceanographer and explorer, what she saw in the twilight zone was unlike anything she had seen before: spiraling corals pulsed with a firey, blue bioluminescence; pink, yellow, and red crabs weaved themselves inside of giant sea-fans; eels wrapped around the base of corals. “There’s heaven on Earth,” she said matter-of-factly in an On Being interview. “It just happens to be in the ocean.” There is no doubt that Earle forged the path for the next half-century of female explorers. In 1970, she led the first group of all-female “aquanauts” on an underwater living experiment called the Tektite II, a long awaited successor of all-male trips of the same nature. In 1992, she served as the first female chief scientist for NOAA, and became the first female explorer-in-residence for National Geographic.

However, it is vital to consider that women like Earle did not elbow their way into the male-dominated realm of oceanographic exploration. They had a head start. Their efforts were buoyed by over a century of adventurous women who came before her, women whose lives are equally — or perhaps even more — fascinating than Earle, but whose endeavours are oft-overlooked. In the mid-1800’s, women’s environmental imagination swiftly migrated from inland to the coast, and from an ethos of nurturing botany to one of brazen marine exploration. This is a celebration of the women who paved the way for “her Deepness,” as Earle is affectionately name, specifically the inquiries of upper-class american women vacationing on the New England coast, and the voyages of the upper-upper-upper class English explorer, Lady Brassey.

Part 1: The Sea-Garden

Over the 18th century, upper-class American women’s curiosity about natural processes migrated from one of an inland, botany-memorizing dilettante, to a coastal, specimen-examining woman who could almost call herself a naturalist. This phenomenon was entirely due to the rise to popularity of the marine aquarium. “Nothing is more easily missed yet more bizarre, than the continuing propensity of Americans for bringing home seashore animals and plants,” writes Stilgoe in Alongshore. Over the course of a decade, the trend of families cultivating a freshwater ecosystem dipped out of vogue, and in its wake slid the “sea-garden.” The marine aquarium craze peaked in the mid-1800’s, but to fully understand this phenomenon, we must travel back to the turn of the century. The Embargo Act and the War of 1812 worked to depress coastal New England towns, and the rise of steamships to power was the last nail in the coffin. By 1840, the United States had an established practice of building and boating steamships. Towns that once had a vibrant economy based upon the trade of more traditional sailing vessels were now eerily quiet. By the 1830’s, coastal villages became revitalized from the influx of “boarding” city-slickers seeking quiet and cheap vacation spots. In 1845, only 15 years after tourists began to trickle into coastal towns, the marine aquarium craze began. All sorts of marine specimens began to make mysterious disappearances from their homes (sea lavender, rockweed, seaweed, coral, shells, along with many others) finding themselves transported, steel-hulled, back to their owner’s houses. 

This phenomenon was in part driven by the encouragement of writers at the time for sea-goers to explore the coast, but even more weightily, it was spurred by the mere fact that women were bored. “Many well-educated women,” writes Stilgoe, “having mastered the classification of terrestrial plants and inland birds, had determined to demonstrate their intellectual capabilities by making sense of inshore ecosystems.” However, an important distinction must be made — in this time, women largely didn’t want to explore the littoral realm because they were bored of gardening and thus wanted to try out a summer as a marine ecologist (they left that to the next century of pioneers); instead, they left their coastal cottages to rummage through the intertidal because they were bored of gardening on land and instead wanted to garden by the sea. Women on the coast and at sea seem to have been stopped by another class ceiling; they allowed themselves to learn previously outlined taxonomy, but they did not think themselves qualified to initiate any schemes of original scientific inquiry. 

Women pictured in LIFE Magazine, in a 1895 issue. They lean into the waves, intrigued by the mystical woman who lives at depths in the ocean. Little did they know that, in a century, that mermaid would be them. 

 

By setting out to learn of the world where sea meets coast, these women, perhaps unwittingly, were elbowing their way into a new set of gendered assumptions. Women used their broadened scope knowledge to prove to their husbands that they had the ability to be an expert in more than just what time of year is the best to plant an azalea. Henry Butler’s 1858 book The Family Aquarium clues readers into how the marine aquarium became a phenomenon: “Its tempting peculiarity, to thoughtful minds, is an introduction to the study of nobler and more recondite pages,” writes Butler. The byline of the book is “New Pleasure for the Domestic Circle.” So, the ‘thoughtful minds’ about which he speaks must be women. Women also used the act of collecting as an intellectual excuse to exert themselves in the outdoors. In Ausugsta Foote Arnold’s The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide, she encourages her readers to not shy away from ocean spray; instead, she encourages them to get their petticoats soaked. She writes that readers should go adventuring “at the height of great storms to see what deep-water specimens are washing shoreward, and to venture “as deep as one cares to wade” off sandy beaches before collecting . The “New Woman” of 1880, then, described the fearless women who “used marine biology as an irreprochable reason for hiring or borrowing a skiff or another small boat and rowing out into the estuaries, or hiking out into the marshes.”

Part II: The Lady’s Sunbeam

Lady Brassey, writing Our Voyage in the Sunbeam: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months. 

 

Given the option, I’d wager that many of these women, if they could, would trade their small skiffs and rowboats for a full-fledged steam-powered yacht in a heartbeat. One such woman who did have the means was Lady Brassey of England. By recording her experiences in male-dominated realms, she sets a precedent for generations to come. She climbs aloft when sailing to Tatatorka, and feels the sublime exhilaration that proportionately few women have experienced to this day. When sailing around Patagonia, she saw “truly ‘virgin peaks,’ on which the eye of man has rarely rested, and which his foot has never touched.” She even muses about entering the male-dominated field of cartography. “I believe that in these seas there are many islands marked that have no existence, and that several that do exist are not marked,” she writes around Tatartoka. “How much I would like to be one of those officers appointed to the service!” 

Brassey’s penchant to reduce the sea into a collectible item dwarfed that of the sea-coast explorers. When looking at botanical specimens of a coastal Japanese tea-garden, she exclaims, “If only some fairy could, with the touch of her wand, preserve it all intact until a few months hence, what a delight it would be in the hot summer weather.” When her ship is being fumigated, she is astonished at the amount of items she had collected over the months. “There were forty-eight birds, four monkeys, two cockatoos, and a tortoise,” she exclaims, “besides Japanese cabinets and boxes of clothes, books, china, coral, shells, and all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable things.” In addition, her writing illuminates the fact that collecting was a global phenomenon. She wrote of her visits to a museum in Oahu with all sorts of curiosities, and a market in China that sells caged, wild birds.   

Lady Brassey’s collection of corals. 

Her writings are resplendent with observations of natural processes. She writes of the ways in which Martyna proboscidea spreads its seeds. In sailing by the island of Chiloe, she indicates that she is familiar with the works of Darwin and Byron. When observing an atoll from aloft, she writes that “it was moreover possible to better understand the theory of the formation of these islands.” Though not expressly put, this passage seems to hint that an observation she makes could make a significant contribution to the world’s bank of scientific knowledge. When she sees an albatross, she asks, “where do these birds rest? How far and how fast do they really fly?” These are the exact kind of questions, I am sure, that Darwin and Cuvier and Lyell would ask if they were in her position. 

How Frought With Sorrows and Heartpangs 

However, Brassey knew all-too-well that she was not Darwin, nor could she wish to be. Immediately succeeding her questions about the albatross, she writes that these are “questions for the naturalist,” but not for her. She asks many scientific questions about the sea, and even mentions that a theory could be formed, but she never proposes a theory herself. Along the same vein, shoreside women could not yet cross the threshold between collector and naturalist. Even if they did regard themselves as ‘female naturalists,’ ‘male naturalists,” did not acknowledge them as such. In Shirley Hibbard’s Book of the Marine Aquarium, he looks down upon women that ventured too far into the sea. “The naturalist must encounter a few perils, and he does encounter them boldly… but it is not to be expected that all who commence the study of nature at the sea-side, will care to encounter the perils which an experienced student thinks lightly of.” According to him, man is a “naturalist,” whereas women are simply among the many “who commence the study of nature.” 

It is essential, also, to return to the point that these coastal pioneers are all upper or middle class urban dwellers. Women who actually lived in those coastal villages that so many visited only ephemerally,  conducted their lives much differently. Women whose husbands were off on extended voyages were concerned with keeping up the family finances and maintaining the household. They were concerned with the “community disorder” that was linked to the swift evolution of the maritime industry. And, of course, they occupied themselves while waiting for their husbands to come home. They simply may have not had the mindspace to concern themselves with differences between Fucus and Ascophyllum. 

Part III: Beginnings

Even with all of the 19th-century strides that were made from ‘women as the almost-naturalist,” a large gap still exists between the world of women who wait at home for their husbands to come home from a whaling voyage, and the world in which husbands wait at home for their wives to get back from a deep-sea oceanographic dive. The key to this shift is two-fold. The first vital element is the ways in which these women inspired their peers through their words, and second is the ways in which women at the turn of the 20th-century raised their children. According to Stilgoe, the sea-garden phenomenon cascaded among the classes. “When wealthy women began to collect and classify littoral wildlife, they provided models for middle-class women,” he wrote, “using their growing knowledge of marine biology… to demonstrate to men that their minds could handle exceedingly complex issues.” Over the years, this legacy of proving their intellectual capacity became more and more magnified, and reached a bigger audience, until it caused a remarkable shift in public consciousness. Women like Brassey proved to the world that women could write intelligently and curiously about natural processes, and set a precedent for future female communicators of the sciences. 

What was even more potent was the lessons these women taught their children. “At the seashore in 1908, young children might discover not only the strangeness of the shores but the strangeness of their mothers, the mothers suddenly unrestrained, suddenly secure in marine knowledge,” writes Stilgoe. Earle, though raised a bit later than 1908, speaks of the way in which she was brought up in the exact same way that Stilgoe does. While other parents restrained their children from crouching down next to an insect or a shoreline critter, her parents always encouraged her to do just that. “So often, the adults around [their children] will say, “Oh, don’t touch that beetle,” or, “Ugh, an earthworm,” or, “Caterpillars, yuck.” And my parents were different.” For Earle, that made all the difference. “I have always wanted to be a scientist,” he said. “Early on I discovered that the greatest diversity and abundance of life on Earth are in the ocean, so it was natural that I would make choices that led to being a marine scientist, an oceanographer who uses the living ocean as the ultimate laboratory,” she mused. 

Part IV Endings

As the interview wraps up, Tippett and Earle widen the scope of their discussion from Earle’s ocean exploration to how the ocean – and our planet – has transformed in Earle’s lifetime. Earle brings up what she calls the ‘irony of fossil fuels.’ If it weren’t for the miraculous energy that came from fossil fuels, our world would never have developed to the point where’re at now — a world in which where we can understand, down to the minute detail, just how detrimental fossil fuel is. The same idea can be applied to collecting. The phenomenon that catalyzed the transformation of women from gardeners to botanists to naturalists to scientists has now grown to a point that women who rose to because of that act of collecting, now speak eloquently about the harm of it. 

This issue stems from a mindset transformation that occurred between in the century preceding Earle, one that debunks the myth that the ocean is too vast to be affected by humans. In the 1800’s many fishermen believed the sea to be limitless in mystery, treasure, and power. Nothing could come in its way, especially a few measly humans. Two centuries later, this is not the case. In Earle’s all-female underwater living experiment by the British Virgin Islands, Earle saw coral reefs crumbling before her eyes. A major driver of coral reef decline is extraction, or the removal of coral. We learned this tidbit in a recent ecology class. Befuddled, one student asked our professor  why so much coral was extracted. 

“It gets put in gift shops for tourists,” he said. “People like to collect souvenirs from the places they go.” 

 

Works Cited

Arnold, Augusta Foote. The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide: A Guide to the Study of Seaweeds and the 

lower animal life found between the tide-marks” (1901). 

Bolster, Jeffrey W. “The Sea Serpent and the Mackerel Jig,” The Mortal Sea (2012).

Brassey, Anne, Our Voyage in the Sunbeam: our home on the ocean for eleven months, 1881. New York, 

John Wurtele Lovell. Collections Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

Butler, Henry D. Family Aquarium; New Pleasure for the Domestic Circle, 1858. New York: Dick & 

Fitzgerald. Natural and Physical Sciences; Aquariums, Smithsonian Libraries. 

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Web. November 22 2019.

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Domesticity in New England, 1790-1880,” New England Quarterly (1992).

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London: Yale University Press, 1982. 

A Virtual Versailles

Eva Legge

The overseer let them in. He was moving orange trees in or out of the property; Baba couldn’t remember. But she did remember it was fall, and that bright orange leaves blew into the Hall of Mirrors when the overseer opened the balcony doors. The Hall of Mirrors was the only room without white canvas thrown over the red plush furniture — Versailles was closed for renovations, Baba said. He took them out to the gardens (he was the gardener, after all), even though it was boarded up from the public’s eye. 

“It was completely wild and overgrown,” my grandmother, Baba, told me. “So much more beautiful than it is now.” 

***

“You have to have a bit of wildness in your garden,” Baba went on to tell me. “For the birds, the mice, the squirrels, and the toads.” She told me the story of her hollyhocks, the flowers with tall stems that burst into blush pink and pastel yellow and wine red at the top of the flower. They were annuals, which meant they died with the first frost, and, if they were re-planted, sprouted again with the first spring melt. Baba didn’t plant the hollyhocks each year. Instead, she let the birds eat the seeds and scatter them on their own. But one year, the birds stopped spreading the hollyhock seeds. She tried, for years, planting engineered hybrids. But once they grew tall enough to bloom, a fungus began to brown the leaves until they shriveled and flew away with the wind. The hollyhocks were telling Baba that they didn’t want to be in her garden anymore. And Baba always listens.

In the grand scheme of things, the browning of the hollyhocks wasn’t a big sacrifice. Baba’s garden, located where Wilson avenue meets a sliver of forest in suburban Ontario, was vast. Hundreds of wildflowers and vegetables and trees and berries rise from her front yard. Roses and root vegetables grow in an annex garden next to her house. Pots of sunflowers line her walkway. Peonies fill hanging pots on her porch, and bright orange, edible flowers tumble out of her windowsill. Orchids fill her sunroom. At 85, she built a water garden smaller than a kiddie pool with koi fish and blooming water lilies that skim the green film lining the water’s surface. 

***

When I was young enough to justify wearing a white fairy costume, I thought Baba’s garden was endless. The wildflowers rose above just above my head, and the vegetation grew so thick that my family couldn’t find me in the mass. I could spend hours finding new pathways in her jungle, or concocting a make-believe magic serum from poisonous berries. If I stood on the edge of her whitewashed front porch, it seemed like the crabapple tree at the far end of her garden, the one with the Buddha leaning placid on the bottom bough — was a lifetime away from where I stood. It was at least a football field away, which is what I told my friend when I bragged about my grandmother. Which was often. 

***

Baba moved to this dead end by the forest as soon as all of her three children left their home in downtown Toronto. My father was the last to leave, having lived at home when he went to the University of Ontario for two years. But when he moved to New York City to attend Cooper Union, a school his girlfriend had dared him to apply to, Baba moved out of the city as soon as she could. For her, gardening has always been the first thing, and the most important thing. She told me that she had the need, deep in her bones, to move out of the city and to move somewhere wild, a place where she could cultivate life. “Gardening is in my genes, and yours,” Baba said. “My father was a great gardener — did you know that?” 

***

Baba’s father — my great grandfather — escaped the Ukraine during the first world war. Four His father could afford to send him and three of his siblings to safety. My great-grandfather became the gardener, and eventually the overseer, of a wealthy man’s estate in Cuba. He took my great-grandmother with him. Growing up in a poor family, she was set to marry an older man, who was an alcoholic and an abuser. Baba’s dad stepped in, and soon they were married. When he’d saved up enough, the couple moved from Cuba to Toronto, where he knew there was a small, but healthy, community of Ukranians. 

They settled into a fifteen-acre property in the outskirts of Toronto. My great-grandfather got a job as a factory worker and his wife got a job as a hairdresser. In the space between sleep and labor, her father grew plants, like he learned to do during his many years in Cuba. He grew rye in ten acres of the property, vegetables and orchards in the other five, and he raised two children, my grandmother Baba, and my great-aunt Edith. As Baba grew up, she became her father’s helper, and aided her father with daily gardening chores. Baba remembered, with a chuckle, that one of her daily tasks was to take a large jug of DDT and coat the round juicy flesh of her father’s tomato plants with the fluid. 

Baba’s mother was a terrible gardener, Baba added, but she was a great flower arranger. Baba’s cottage was filled with fragrant blooms in the warm months.

“My father came from a very wealthy family, but my mother’s family was very poor,” she told me. “She had a rough upbringing, which, I guess, accounted for what she was like as a mother. But that’s a story for another time.” 

***

One of my first tasks as Baba’s helper was to water the pots of flowers that dotted her front porch. I would take the green, plastic watering can from next to the trellis that my father built. I had to dip the watering can into the rain reservoir, and carry the heavy vessel to the front porch. Baba showed me how to nuzzle the watering spout under the peony blooms, because they became unhappy when wet, closing at the touch of moisture. She taught me how to keep the plants happy by removing shriveled flowers and browned leaves. She taught me to transplant sunflowers to bigger pots once they became adolescents, so that they would have room to breathe. 

***

When Baba first bought her half-acre in Owen Sound, it was a mess. The paint was peeling on the house. The porch was rotten. Car parts scattered the front yard. But it was cheap, and she could see the potential. My dad rebuilt the porch and the upstairs cabinets. He and Baba planted ivy that crawled its way up to the second story windows. She got a job as a nurse in a regional hospital, to pay the bills. It was the perfect balance between city and country, she told me. Her kids came up and visited every Christmas to be together, and every summer to see the flowers. And when they had children of their own, the tradition continued.

***

I was eight years old when I insisted that I have a garden of my own. My dad is an architect, and together we built a 5×7 plot made of interlocking pine. We smoothed the bottom of the bed with a fabric that would keep out the weeds. I sketched out my first garden plot on some of my father’s architect paper: sweet peas (my mother’s favorite) would crawl up a metal grid in the center of the garden. Each cosmos seed would be placed one inch apart. Two inches for the sunflowers. Morning glories would grow up the sides. For the first few weeks, everything grew as planned. I took turns each day between watering and weeding my garden. The wildflowers formed identical sprouts in identical lines, like a miniature army marching into battle. It was the time of order, and perfection, just as I liked. 

And then, it was the time of the morning glories. The placid flowers I’d planted on the side of my bed began to grow at a rapid pace. At first, I tried to trim them down. But eventually, the plant took over. It grew in a great, gnarled, vibrant mass. Everything underneath soon died in its shadow. A few days ago, I called my mom to ask her if it was all a rosy, childhood memory. She assured me that it wasn’t. “It was just so alive, and it grew to a size beyond what everyone imagined it to be,” she said. “Everyone who walked by stopped to look at it. You became known as the girl who planted the morning glory. It never ceased to be magical” 

Flowers soon covered the  green beast — huge, cornflower blue flowers that opened in the morning and closed at night. “It was hard to believe that anything in nature had these colors,” my mom said. 

“My garden is so alive,” Baba would always tell me. “Every day, when I enter it, there are new surprises. It never ceases to bring me joy. It is unexpected because it is orderless.”

That Thanksgiving, a neighbor from Westmister senior living slipped a letter into my mailbox. “Dear Garden Girl,” it read, “I go for a walk every day and the hill at the end of your street is usually something I avoid, but I can credit you for making me walk longer, because I always go to see your morning glories. Thank you for bringing so much joy to my day.” 

It was around Thanksgiving that the first cold snap happened, and the great organism began shriveling to brown. Soon, all that was left were two gnarled vines that rose from the earth on either side of the pine frame. My mom always called these remnants the “umbilical cord,” because according to her, it looked just like one. For many years the umbilical cord hung from a pushpin on our wall. Finally, my mom just told me, she threw it “like a ceremony” in the compost bin in the back of the house. After all, it had been more than ten years since I started my garden, and a lot can change in a decade.  

***

“As you know, Eva,” Baba said in our call, “I have had a really hard time walking recently. But even so, my garden is more vibrant than ever. I have adapted to my garden, and my garden has adapted to me.” Mostly, she means that she now knows how to communicate with her plants. “I know this sounds crazy,” she said, but it is mostly about the spirits that are in the ground. 

“If a plant is suffering, I will pay special attention to it for a day,” Baba told me. “And the next day when I come to it, it will always tell me what it needs.” 

***

I was a freshman in high school the first (and last) time that plants talked to me. My dad picked me up from the dark nurse’s room in my public high school building, where I lay, curled into a ball and fighting the onset of my panic attack. I shook so hard that I could barely walk. When I reached home, I collapsed into the long weeds that grew on the border of my garden. I can’t tell you what they told me, but I can tell you this: that summer, I went backpacking for two weeks in the forest, my first wilderness experience. When I made it back to my grandmother’s garden, I was symptom-free. But that’s a story for another time. 

***

I don’t know much about my grandfather, except for the fact that he was a pilot, and that his name was the same as my father’s. I also know that I met him when I was a newborn, because my father once told me it was one of the happiest moments of his father’s life. I think my grandfather was an alcoholic, and that’s why Baba never has wine anymore. I also think that that’s what killed him, but I’ll never ask. His ashes are scattered around my grandmother’s crabapple tree, the one with the Buddha resting on its roots. This isn’t the only plant that is sown with memory. Most of the perennials Baba owns were given to her by friends over the years. Some of those friends have passed away, but their flowers still bloom every year. 

“I have a gorgeous red bud tree because of you and the times we spent together in Texas,” she told me. 

***

In our phone call, I made the mistake of telling her that I was hoping to start a garden this summer. I’d forgotten about what would happen when she’d come to visit my garden in Texas. “Oh really?” Baba exclaimed. “Where are you going to stay? What will you plant? Front yard or backyard? Will there be boys in the house with you? Good, I’m glad there will be boys. That makes things more interesting.” I told her that I was planning to live in an off-campus house with other biologists and earth scientists and lovers of the outdoors. I told her that we should have a big kitchen, and I hoped I’d be able to cook food that grew just meters away. I told her about the plum tree in the front yard, and how we would probably let thru-hikers of the Appalachian trail stay there, if they weren’t too stinky or creepy. As for the rest of the garden logistics, I told her that I was in control. “I’ve been doing this for a while too, remember?”

“It’s funny how your experience hiking and backpacking and whatnot has really made you such a good gardener,” Baba replied. “There’s something about being in the forest, having that wild around you, that makes a gardener, if not just for the sake of the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.” And not just for the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees — for myself, as well, I thought. 

“If I had known all of this when I was your age, Baba said, “my garden would be a virtual Versailles.” I wondered what she meant by that — whether she was talking about the the manicured one filled with throngs of tourists, like she saw in pictures, or the one that she went to with her husband in secret, the one filled with a kind of wild magic, where the birds came and nestled in the branches of the pine, and where even the fairies and spirits had a chance to wiggle their wings in the golden light. I hoped it was the latter. 

Monica Gagliano

Eva Legge

 

“That afternoon, I went back and killed them all. And that was the last time.” 

When she began her dives off the coast of eastern Australia, she knew little about botany. By training, she was a marine animal ecologist. In 2008, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at James Cook university, completing her research on the soft-scaled fish of the Great Barrier reef. Twelve years ago, Monica Gagliano spent four months breathing under the waters’ surface at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – “when there was still a reef to dive in,” she added. Below, Pomacentrus amboinensis, the Ambon damselfish, wove around the textured coral bodies like yellow confetti. The females laid eggs in small coral pockets. The males hovered around the pocket, protecting the eggs from predators. Under a full moon the baby damselfish escaped from their thick yolk sack and swam to the open ocean. Those that survived returned as juveniles to the reef that gave them life, and began the cycle again. 

At first her subjects remained, objects, data points, and the soon-to-be-dead. She thought of them like that because she had to. She was a soon-to-be-scientist in the system, and as Monica puts it, “the system wanted bodies.” 

What happened was inevitable, Monica thought. Every day, she hovered near the damselfish, observing their personal life. After a week, she knew each of them personally, and they knew her. Each had the smallest alteration in color or scale or temperament. “It got to the point where I would extend my hand” – she extended her hand – “and they would sit, sit on my hand. I could curl, curl my fingers” – she curled her fingers – “and they wouldn’t move. But even then, I knew what I had to do.” There was one Buddhist in her program that studied eelgrass because she couldn’t kill an animal. Monica, and everyone else “laughed, laughed!” at her. 

“Love and death are much closer than you may think,” she said as she curled her cupped fingers into a fist. 

At the end of her four months of data collection, the morning before she was to “collect her wild specimens for lab use,” Monica went out to say goodbye. 

“I knew it was crazy as I did it, but I also knew that things were changing for me.” That morning, none of the fish came out. She could see them peeking out from under the corals – she rested her chin on her curled fingers as she said this – but none came out to rest on her hand. 

“It was then that I knew that they knew,” she said. “They knew I was going to kill them.” And that afternoon, she killed them all. And that was the last time. 

“As a marine scientist, the animals served me. As a botanist, I serve the plants.” “My garden spoke to me,” she continued. According to her, all you have to do is listen. 

***

Monica was sprawled out at the bar in Still North Books when I saw her. I had emailed her a few nights prior after watching her talk with fiction writer Richard Powers on plant intelligence. The two had been paired, the audience learned, because Gagliano bore an uncanny resemblance to the female scientist in Powers’ The Overstory: Patricia Westerford. Early in her career, Westerford published a groundbreaking paper about the ability of trees to communicate with one another, a move that led her findings, and herself to be mocked by her (male) colleagues. Gagliano, like Westerford, was subject to ridicule by her assertion that plants posess intelligence. In the end, though, both broke through: Westerford entered back into the professional work with accolades, and Gagliano pioneered the new field of plant bioacoustics and cognition. After reading The Overstory, Gagliano sent Powers an email out of the ether. They were meant to be friends, she thought. And they have been ever since.

I followed her lead. In an email titled: “Praise for Plants,” I told her, in so many words, how much our interests aligned. (I, too, like to talk to trees.) She replied quickly and casually, saying she would be delighted to meet me. It was the kind of email you smile while you write. 

 The day we met was a warm March afternoon in New Hampshire. I had just spent the afternoon sitting under a tree in the college park with my creative writing class, trying to draw inspiration from the tree on whose trunk my back pressed. Once class got out, I hurried over to the local cafe and bookshop, where we had decided to meet. She was new in town, so I described how to get there, walk a few blocks down main street, and turn right at the first alley. I arrived at the bookshop, nervous and out of breath. 

Judging from the arc of books and documents surrounding her, Monica had been at the bar for some time. She was hunched over her laptop, so fixated on the screen it looked like she was trying to decipher encrypted code, typing with such intent that her fingers flew in the air with every tap. Her short hair was tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail at her neck. 

“Just one sec!” she said to me, not taking her eyes away from the computer screen. I puttered around the store, pretending to read the spines of books on the shelf. The atmosphere in the bookstore was strange. People seemed more nervous and reserved as they navigated the shelves. They made a point not to stay close for too long. Coronavirus was just beginning to reach the region: a task force had just been formed by the college, and we received an email that someone in our county was sick. For all we knew, anyone could be. 

Monica, though, didn’t seem to notice. When she emerged from her laptop, she flashed a wide smile. Before I knew it, she was wrapping me up in her spindly arms. 

“Please, please, sit down!” she said with a wave of her hand. She unzipped her fuzzy white Patagonia vest, revealing a spiraled jade necklace, and then zipped it up again. She then spread her arms wide. “I spread out to occupy this half of the table,” she said with a sly smile, planting her fingers on the wide reaches of the bar.

“So, what goes it?” She asked. 

“Pardon me?”

She asked again. “What goes it?” 

For a few seconds, we both looked at eachother, wondering how the other person couldn’t comprehend a simple question.

“Oh, my apologies!” Monica giggled. “In Italian, the phrase for, ‘how’s it going?’ comes out a bit differently.”

“Oh, so you’re from Italy?” I asked her. I already knew she was from Italy, but this was where I wanted our story to begin. I wanted to know how a woman growing up in an inland town in northern Italy ended up with a PhD in marine zoology, and finally, how she ended up in Australia, as one of the most groundbreaking researchers on plant intelligence today. I wanted to know how she got here, because her passions were uncannily entangled with mine. 

***

Monica grew up in Turin, a city in northern Italy, just a few miles away from the border with France, as she described it. At the time we spoke, though, it was just beginning to take on a new identity: the epicenter of outbreak. A few weeks later, she may have used a different description for the town: that it had the second-highest number of coronavirus cases in Italy. Sixteen thousand sick, months of lockdown. Innumerable deaths from overburdened hospitals. But when we spoke, we had no idea what was in store for Northern Italy. 

She grew up in a cabin with her mom, and grandmother, who was a nurse. By day, her grandmother took care of patients in an overcrowded hospital, making sure to comply with the hospital’s ‘modern’ care policies. By night, her real work began. For many of the patients that were turned down by the hospital, her grandmother would give them her home address, and care for them in her own way. As a young girl, Monica remembers seeing a constant stream of the ill knocking on her grandmother’s door. Her grandma would be standing at the stove as they knocked, stirring a big cauldron of an herbal concoction “like one of the witches in Macbeth,” Monica added with a chuckle. She remembers that the night patients would come once, or twice, more, but they would soon be healed. Monica could always tell when it was their last time to visit her grandmother, because they would come with a basket of fresh salami, or chicken, or other goods. Her grandmother wouldn’t allow them to pay her for her services, so instead, they showed their gratitude with food. 

When Monica was older, her grandmother explained to her why she refused to accept payment. She believed that she was just “the vessel through which the plants do their work.” The plants, not her, were doing the generous part by healing the sick. Her grandmother wanted to pass on this herbal practice to Mocica’s mother, but her mom refused to learn. Early into Monica’s scientific career, she asked her mother if her memories were true – if her grandmother indeed brought the sick to their home and healed them with leaves and roots. Monica wanted to know what she did, what plants she used, how they worked. 

“Oh you mean that witchy stuff?” her mother asked her. 

“Yes,” Monica replied. “That witchy stuff.”

Her mom then told her that her grandmother tried to pass on the knowledge, but her mother refused.

“You see,” Monica told me, “witches are still being burned, not at the stake, but in our minds.” 

But Monica didn’t take no for an answer. She began experimenting with medicinal remedies. She took willow bark instead of neurophane when she was sick. She began having dreams about plants, and about places where she’s never been. The dreams would take place halfway across the world, but they would be so vivid that she would recognize that place when she’s finally returned, in a material form, to her memory. Around the time of her marine zoology crisis, a tree in her garden spoke to her, and told her that it was time to study plants. Unlike animals, they told her, she could study them without causing them pain. Driven by these spiritual experiences, Monica switched her field of study from the traditional field of marine zoology to the much-questioned field of plant intelligence. Because a plant spoke to her in her garden, she set off on her way to become one of the most influential, and one of the most mocked, ecologists of our time.  

As she said this, I thought about my own path to the world of flora. Just like her, her interest in the surprising power of plants had skipped a generation. For me, it had been through my grandmother on my dad’s side, who was also a nurse for many years. Now, her patients were her plants, I was her student.  and my annual summer trips to her house and garden in southern Ontario. I was so young when she began instilling her knowledge that many of my memories have begun to fade into warm, rosy myth. I remember picking bright pink zinnias in a white fairy costume. I remember the first time I saw a peony crumple at the touch of water. 

“You have to water beneath the flower” my grandmother tells me in my mind. “They like it better that way.” 

One day, she told me the story of her hollyhocks, the flowers with tall stems that burst into blush pink and pastel yellow and wine red at the top of the flower. They were annuals, which meant they died with the first frost, and, if they were re-planted, sprouted again with the first spring melt. Baba didn’t plant the hollyhocks each year. Instead, she let the birds eat the seeds and scatter them on their own. But one year, the birds stopped spreading the hollyhock seeds. She tried, for years, planting engineered hybrids. But once they grew tall enough to bloom, a fungus began to brown the leaves until they shriveled and flew away with the wind. The hollyhocks were telling Baba that they didn’t want to be in her garden anymore. And Baba always listens.

I think about weeding around rose thorns, and scaring a snake from the rain reservoir with my watering can. I would dig my long nails through green bean stems and the night’s dinner in a wicker basket. I think about the first time my eight year old body laid down a 5×7 pine frame with my father in which I meticulously planted the first of ten years of gardens, each one more expansive. I remember my first microscope, and the first time I sketched out thin leaf veins on paper. My grandmother taught me how to keep a gardener’s notebook, and how to keep soil under my fingernails for weeks. She taught me, for the first time, to love something as someone. She taught me to care for plants like she cared for patients, and how she cared for me. 

When I was young I remember grew yarrow and rosemary and sagebrush, and learned  their medicinal properties. I dried the leaves of rosemary and sagebrush and the petal of the yarrow flower to steep into tea. 

There’s a Buddha statue sitting cross-legged under my grandmother’s crabapple tree that guards my grandfather’s ashes. The garden, for me, was not just a place to heal the living. It was a cradle for the dead. 

***

I told Monica this, in so many words. In response, she banged her cup onto her saucer. “You see, those experiences that you’ve had with plants, with your grandmother and with your garden are just as valuable, if not more, than anything you could learn in a classroom. To say that gardening is any less valuable to science than those other things is another form of colonization.”

“What I think about your generation,” she said with a kind smile, “and why I have so much hope, is that you can weave these discourses together.” She widened her ocean-blue eyes and interlaced her fingers. “People like you will be able to bring the humanities and the different disciplines together, whereas some people in my generation are desperately trying to jam them together where it won’t work. And other people are trying to tear it apart.” 

***

“Without acknowledging the subjectivity of your work, you’re missing out,” she told me. “If you can’t read ‘the other,’ you’re gonna be in trouble.” Especially, she said, if the other isn’t human. “The main difference is that I used to live in a world of objects, and now I live in a world of subjects,” she said at the World Science Festival. “And so, I am never alone.” 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘the other,’ too,” I responded. “Especially with my travel plans. With my biology program next winter, you don’t even need to know any Spanish to go.” She nodded with her wide eyes. She lifted her mug from her saucer, and pointed down at the disk. “If this is local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, whatever you want to call it, this is us.” And with that, she plopped her mug back in the saucer. “We occupy.” What scientists don’t realize, she began to say, is that a cultural connection usually leads to stories –like “those trees were once there” or something like that, “those stories are data points.” 

“The subjective scientist,” that’s what we need, I said. 

She chuckled. “The subjective scientist – I like that. You should write a book.” 

***

At the end of our conversation, I told her I was sending my love to her friends and family in Turin, and that I was so sorry they were at the center of it all. She said she wasn’t worried — for herself, or for her family. Maybe it was because she had so much faith in my generation.  Maybe it was because, in Hanover, she could easily escape into the trees if there was trouble. I wondered if the trees were telling me something I didn’t know. From everything she’d said, it seems the natural world will tell me what you need in order to heal. All I must do is listen. 

the mancanza

Eva Legge

 

It looks like Davide and Gabriella are sitting on the same chair when they answer my Skype call. Their bodies are so closely pressed, it must be the same chair. He probably has his arm around her. Their cheeks hover close enough to touch. They can feel each other’s breath. They answer each others’ sentences. Davide would pause and turn his head almost imperceptibly, and she would rush in with the correct English translation. They’d gotten to know each others’ rhythms after two months of isolation. 

Davide and Gabriella live in Brentonico, a town in Northeastern Italy with a population of 4,000 people. But now they are in a tiny vacation village high in the mountains that is practically empty now. They came to their vacation cabin because two months was enough of living with their parents. The weather was bad, but improving, so now they can hike up in the Dolomites. 

In March, the local authorities informed them that their university would be closed for one week, but after that they would be able to restart school. (Davide and Gabriella both go to the University of Trento. Davide is Studying mechanical engineering, and Gabriella is studying to become a nurse.) So, Davide and Gabriella treated quarantine like a vacation. They went hiking and began practicing sports, but soon after the initial announcement was made, it was reversed: Schools would close indefinitely, along with all other nonessential businesses. 

“We started to realize the coronavirus is not a fluke, but is more serious,” Davide says.  “We thought it was so far from here, but it was here,” Gabriella adds.  

Gabriella and Davide spent the first few weeks of lockdown studying and taking online classes. They felt like little had changed, save for the fact that they didn’t have to take a 30 kilometer commute by train from their home in Brentonico to Trento anymore. It all seemed temporary. By April 1st, everything was set to open up again, but instead (April Fools!) they kept everything closed for another month. 

This decision was particularly difficult for Gabriella, she told me, because she was separated from her sister, and couldn’t see her for two months. Davide chimes in. “The primary feel is loneliness.” It felt like an “invisible monster” was on their doorstep, waiting to capture them, the moment he or his family stepped outside. 

The invisible monster caught them at the end of March. His mother is a nurse, so she caught it first. Fortunately, her only symptoms were a fever and a headache.  A week later, Davide got sick. “When my fever got high,” he said, “I was a little bit scared, but I say, I can’t do nothing, so I just [have to] keep home by  myself and keep quiet.”

In early April, things began to shift for Davide and his family. The elusive, faraway creature was now not just a part of their community, but it was a part of them, first, as a virus, and then as antibodies. The invisible monster was real, and, for them at least, conquerable, but it was there to stay. Once they had recovered, Davide tells me, “we are sunny. We are good.” It was time, they realized, to learn to live with the virus, instead of living in spite of it.

They began to meet each other out of the window. Every evening they would clap their hands for the healthcare workers. “As events evolve,” Davide tells me, “we start to play music, not only for the healthcare workers, but to support ourselves, and the family around us, and the people who had, who has…” he looks over at Gabriella. “Coronavirus,” she says to finish his thought. 

People with the big stereos began to haul their contraptions out to their balcony. “And it was really, really beautiful — all the people go on their balcony and start singing.” Italy doesn’t usually feel like a united place to Davide. In the United States, he says, we have the American anthem. “Here in Italy, there aren’t things like that.” They have an Italian anthem, “but we don’t sing it all morning, so we aren’t so united like you. And these events, this music on the balcony unites us, and makes us feel not that we are alone, but that we are a team.”

They sang all sorts of songs from the balcony. They would sing pop, classic songs, and sometimes, they would even sing the Italian anthem. Their favorites were the Italian pop songs, the ones that remind them of past, sunnier days. Rino Gaetano’s hit, Ma Il Cielo è Sempre Più Blu, (but the sky is always bluer), and Domenico Modugno’s Volare (to fly) comes to mind. 

“And then this famous singer, the famous Italian singer, started to [sing] on their Instagram account and on their balcony,” Stefano says. He and all of his friends came together virtually to listen to this man sing on instagram…. and this was another way,”

“To feel, um” Gabriella adds.

“The unity.” Stefano finishes. 

Others began offering up voluntary services. “Like when an old man needs some food or medicines,” volunteers began going to the grocery store to buy and deliver groceries and medicine to those in need. Children began making posters to hang on their balconies, all with the same lettering: “Andrà tutto bene” (Everything will be okay.) Chiara Ferrani, a famous Italian Influencer who lives in Milan, raised four million euros to fund a new field hospital in Lombardy. And my personal favorite: the pizzerias. “The pizzerias start to cook, make food for the hospital because it is a kind of support that they do…” Davide begins. “A way to say thank you to the doctors and the nurses,” finishes Gabriella.

*** 

Every weekday, Davide and Chiara spend one hour by train on their way to the University of Trento, and one hour riding back. “So these two hours are two hours I can use for other things,” Davide says. Both still have to take online classes, but without their commute, they can devote their time to other activities. Davide leaves the Skype frame and Gabrilella tells me what she has been doing with her free time. “I love paint, in general,” she says. “I started to paint with watercolors. And I try to read more, cook, sleep, cook a bit more.” 

Davide returns with two square canvases in his hands. They’re big for watercolors — probably about one square foot each. On each canvas was a mushroom, the most intricately detailed, beautiful mushroom I have ever seen. The mushroom cap yawned open, red-brown and white. Small, grass-shoots grew at the base. Gabriella smiled bashfully. 

“Oh, wow!” I say. “That’s so beautiful. Oh my goodness! Oh, wow! You must love mushrooms. Wow, that’s so beautiful.” 

“Thank you,” she says. 

“Did you ever want to be an artist when you grew up?” I ask. 

I don’t know if my question got lost in translation, or if it was too ridiculous for her to take seriously. Either way, she laughed, and didn’t respond. 

“For me,” Davide chimes in, “It is different for me because I love to practice sports and activities outside. So for this, spiritually, is a bit different.” he says with a smile. 

Fortunately, Davide keeps bees. He has a set of bee-hives near his house, and during quarantine he tended them. 

“I love to do that,” he says. “Without my bees, I’m not good…. I need to practice that because,”

“You don’t feel so good,” Gabriella adds. 

“I don’t feel so good without that.”

 

***

On June 1st, Davide and Gabriella will be able to go outside without any major restrictions. For now, restrictions are light. They can see their friends outside, as long as everyone is wearing a face mask and complying to social distancing measures. They can only see a few people at once, though, which is difficult for Davide because his group of friends numbers at over twenty. 

“But when you stay home for two months, and then you can only go out for a walk or to…” 

“Breathe,” Gabriella adds. 

“Yeah! Only to go out is really incredible, and it is really really good, because you can say, ‘Oh, wow!’ we can finally go out and breathe air like before. But when you go out, you see, you don’t see people, because everybody is in their home, and if you see them you see with a face mask, so it is a strange feeling, you… think you are in an apocalypse film. But you say, ‘Oh, wow, this is really life for now… this will be normality for some months. But I mean it is good only to go out from home and breathe new air.” 

“It must be really nice to be up in the mountains now so you can go on hikes,” I say.

“Yeah,” Stefano replies, “I always lived in the mountain country, so the mountains for me are really important. When I go on flat lands, I can’t orient myself, because I usually say “mountain, north is there.” He points to one side. “I have to go there.” He moves his fingers over. And when I go into a flat land I go, I walk around and say, where I have to go? It’s a strange feeling, but I need mountains to live.” 

“Yeah, I really like going on hikes, too,” I say. “I love being in the mountains, but sadly I don’t live in them.”

“Where do you live? In which part of America?” Stefano asks. 

I live in Texas, so it’s the big… yeah, yeah. Um, so, it’s pretty flat here. I live in the center of Texas, it’s the capitol, um, and it’s a cool town. There’s lots of great music. It’s a really fun place to be. Really good food, but yeah, there are no mountains sadly.”

“Are you worried about the situation?” Gabriella asks.

“I’m not very worried,” I say. “It’s more, I guess, trying to figure out how worried I should be. I’m trying to figure out what to do this summer, and a lot of friends are going to be living together in New Hampshire, but I don’t think it’s wise to leave my house right now. So I’ve been staying home mostly… it’s nice to be home.” 

“Yeah,” says Stefano. “Sometimes we need to stay home with our parents and I think that this situation can help us to think [about] a lot of things, and select the more important things because often we practice, or we see some people, that we don’t…”

“That we don’t really love,” says Gabriella.

“In this situation you can understand which are really the things that you need, because you feel the… mancanza? The miss, the missing. You see, you can feel the missed with them.”