in All things

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that for a long time, this was what our family clung to—the hope that everything would return to how it once had been. And yet, I think by now we’ve all accepted that it never will.

I am not equipped for this. Covid, George Floyd, a string of wild fires, the deadly explosion in Beirut, a locust swarm in East Africa, protests in Hong Kong, a derecho in my own backyard…not to mention murder hornets, meth-gators, and nunchuck bears, oh my! I quite literally cannot keep up with the constant stream of bad news and heartbreak that seems poised to crush us all.

How we’ve worked has changed immensely in the last century, but Covid has forced us to see an arsenal of ordinary people with whom, literally, we couldn’t live without.

Zena Hitz’s book comes at a moment when two different trajectories are set to overwhelm any retrieval of the joys of an intellectual life.