The Paris Review

Henri Matisse, View of Notre Dame, 1914, oil on canvas, 58 x 37 ⅛ in, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here. The next three installments will appear weekly throughout May. 

As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced. 

Hal Foster is an art critic and art historian. He teaches at Princeton University. 

Edward P. Jones photographed by Jill Krementz at the Paris Review Revel on April 14, 2026.

Last week, at The Paris Review’s 2026 Revel, the writer Edward P. Jones accepted the Hadada Award, a prize presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Jones, whose 2004 novel The Known World won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has been a beloved contributor to the Review since 1992, when his short story “Marie” appeared in the Spring issue. Among the editors’ initial reactions to that story, we found a handwritten note (whose chicken scratch strongly resembles that of George Plimpton) which reads: “a formidable character … well-plotted … very well controlled … Hooray!” The note accompanies a letter from Jones, dated October 1991, in which he told the former editor James Linville that “it seems that I have been creating the people in the stories all my adult life.” This speech, however, takes us back to before that adult life, to when Jones was first falling in love with, as he puts it, “this fiction stuff.” We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Doing nonfiction stuff is not something I like very much, so I will not be standing here for very long, sparing you and sparing me. For some months—since I was told about this award—I have been trying to find the point in my life when this fiction stuff and I became friends. I cannot find it. It perhaps has something to do with a poor boy with a mother who could not read or write, who cleaned restaurant floors and made hotel beds to feed her babies—maybe it has to do with a boy who had no desire to write but who looked up one day from enjoying some book and began to understand that words matter, that words have magic and power and that with each word, each paragraph, each book, he was—without even knowing it—becoming a piece of that word-world. Admittance was possible because his mother could afford for him the price of Signet paperbacks. And because libraries were free.

My friend Steve Mears and his family managed a few years ago to find the first book I ever read as a boy, a book that had no pictures. I was thirteen years old and I, with my sister, was visiting family in South Boston, Virginia. I was used to reading funny books. The rest of the world calls them “comics’’ but in Washington, D.C., they were “funny books.” From Marvel superheroes to Archie and the gang to Little Lulu and Hot Stuff and Casper the Friendly Ghost, I had known only funny books, with all their colorful pictures. And books of folktales and fairy tales—all of them giving me picture after picture so that my brain did not have to do much work.

There were no funny books in 1964 in South Boston, Virginia, but my oldest cousin was married to a man who made part of his living by selling salvageable stuff he would find in a junkyard. One day he found in the junkyard a box of books, and one of those books was Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? It was a British mystery published decades before 1964. From my Superman funny books, I knew words like invulnerable, but I did not know bungalow, which occurred a lot in that book. I thought it some kind of special house and I just kept reading, because it was all about the people and the good and bad things they did to each other, not about the house where they did it. I saw the people in the book, saw them rise up off the pages of mostly plain words and go about their lives. And they did that without pages of pictures.

When I returned to Washington that summer, there was not any kind of big decision to never go back to funny books. I just did it, with no more thought than going from one room into another. I can’t remember reading much of anything after South Boston, Virginia. But the next year, the first of high school, my English teacher, Miss Crawford, gave us copies of Black Boy, a treasure populated with people I knew because, though I was a child of the city, I was the product of country people who had been born and hammered into being in the South. And so I began a life of reading Black authors and then white Southern authors because they, too, wrote of a land I felt I knew. That was it for a while and then I discovered other writing folks who opened their doors and said I was welcome.

One wondrously vivid memory is of a scene in James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, a book I read long before I saw the movie. Early on, James Jones has the army man, Prewitt, go up a plain old hill, not a mountain, and lose himself in playing his horn. I do not know many musical instruments—I know a piano and a violin when I hear them, but beyond a saxophone, I am lost when it comes to the horn. But that day, when I read what Jones did with his Prewitt and that horn and that hill, I could see him and I could hear him. Of the millions of pages I have read in my life, that scene lives as one of my most lasting word experiences. It might have something to do with the kind of man Prewitt was portrayed as, even in the first pages of the novel. In the movie, Prewitt is played by Montgomery Clift, a man with a perpetually sad face.

A free writing course was offered on Saturday mornings when I was in high school, a course taught by white men who were professional journalists working in Washington, D.C. My school did not offer such courses and I do not know why I took the course. I had no real interest in writing—nothing at that time spoke to me. I might have taken it because an English teacher told me it would be a good idea. One thing I wrote for that course was about a boy who got on a Trailways bus in D.C., going I don’t recall where. [It was a] Trailways bus because my mother told me Greyhound bus did not treat Black people very well. The boy went to sleep on the bus and when he woke, he was in East Berlin. For no other reason then that I did not know any better.

As I tried to find the point where fiction-writing and I became friends, I worked hard to recall an Isaac Singer quote about when writers decide to become writers, when you walk around one particular corner of your life and cease being just a reader. I used to know Singer’s quote by heart, but time has done something to memory. I want to say that the quote might have something to do with emulation, but I don’t think Singer would have limited it to that. I can say that I have never emulated any writer, never wanted to write any way someone else has done it. It might simply be my own individual need to express what flows in the blood, what lives in imagination. And to do that, you don’t need to look to the fellow to the right or to the left. You don’t sculpt, you don’t dance, you don’t grow splendid roses, but you have discovered words and you decide you may want to try stringing them together. Humble because that’s the way you were raised. And the words are free to use, with only a pencil and the back of some used pieces of paper found in the trash. And the words–on your better days—make you happy as you use them. And on your worse days, when the words do not obey, you try to remember a mother who did not have that many good days. You simply get up the next day and start again. “Once upon a time, there was this and then there was that …”

So there may never be any knowing where this writing stuff and I became friends. In the end, though, it may not matter. It is all just about the lovely surrender to words—yours and everyone else’s—this lovely surrender to words and what they give you.

Grahamdubya, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the introduction to a four-part series by the art critic and historian Hal Foster, resulting from a kind of ritual he devised with a friend during their regular visits to museums. Here, he explains the premise of this game and its parameters. The next four installments are short studies, each centered around a single artwork. The first will be published next week, with the other three to follow over the course of May. 

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free.  

Hal Foster is an art critic and art historian. He teaches at Princeton University. 

Photograph courtesy of Zenith Richards / Met Opera.

In May, the opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego will open at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera centers on the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—but not exactly as themselves. On the Day of the Dead, after Rivera prays for Kahlo’s return, she travels back from the underworld to visit the land of the living. There she finds Rivera, about whom she feels ambivalent; in life, their relationship had been characterized by his infidelity and emotional turmoil. The one rule: she can’t touch anyone, not even him. What happens between them when she exists only in spirit form? And what is it like for one of the great painters of the body to be back in the world without one? This opera explores mortality, pain, and the afterlife of a difficult love. It also manages to be sometimes funny and surprising, with a dynamic cast of other characters, including a feisty keeper of the underworld named Catrina and a young actor named Leonardo, who is enamored with Greta Garbo.

For our Art of the Libretto series, I spoke to the playwright and librettist Nilo Cruz, who wrote the words to the composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s score. Cruz is a Cuban American playwright and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his play Anna in the Tropics. In recent years, he’s delved into Spanish-language opera and orchestral songs in collaboration with Frank. The libretto for Frida y Diego was in progress for fifteen years before the first performance in San Diego in 2022. After I read the libretto, we spoke about the formal challenges of writing an opera about historical figures, the role of visual art in the piece, and big questions like, What happens to love after death?

INTERVIEWER

How did this libretto start for you? Was it with an image, or a scene, or a story?

NILO CRUZ

The composer Gabriela Lena Frank and I were at a coffee shop, and she talked to me about the idea of writing an opera about Frida Kahlo. I said, “Ah, I really don’t want to write a biopic.” It had been done. And then she played me a piece of music—very quietly, almost as if she were opening a small door—which had to do with the Day of the Dead. What struck me was not only the sound but the atmosphere. There was something ritualistic in it, almost circular. You could feel the presence of the living and the dead coexisting in the same musical space. It wasn’t mournful. It was luminous. I thought, Let’s start the opera with the Day of the Dead. Frida is dead, and Diego wants her to come back to the world. And suddenly it became clear to me—this is the world of the piece.

INTERVIEWER

How did you approach these two artists and their relationships to each other and their lives through a less literal lens? Were there pieces of their biographies you wanted to dive into?

CRUZ

I read something about Diego that confirmed to me that the opera should take place on the Day of the Dead. When Diego was at the end of his life, he decided he wanted his ashes to be united with Frida’s, even though he had married again. I thought, This is the center of the story. It’s about love after death. Their love was so tumultuous in actual life. I was intrigued by the idea of taking away the body—taking away the flesh—and having them meet in spirit.

INTERVIEWER

The underworld, limbo, and purgatory appear often in myth and the classics. Were there any tales that were on your mind as you were writing?

CRUZ

I started to think about what the rules of this liminal world should be, so I thought of the Greek myth “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and the rules in that story. In “Orpheus and Eurydice,” it is Orpheus who goes into the underworld—by charming the gods with his music—and when he is guiding Eurydice out of the world of the dead, one of the rules is that he cannot turn back. I thought, Well, it could be interesting in this world of Frida and Diego if the dead could not touch the living—if Frida is touched by Diego, she has to relive the pain she experienced in life, not only physically but emotionally. I thought that would be an interesting law to have in the opera, and of course, that it would be interesting for that law to be broken, which then causes the tragedy of the piece. I loved discovering, little by little, the complexities of this unfamiliar world. For me, opera should embrace the mythical, or grand themes.

INTERVIEWER

The character of Catrina, who determines who gets to return to the land of the living, seems to enforce or set these rules. How did you see her role in the opera?

CRUZ

She’s the keeper of the infra-world. She’s the one who really holds the keys. She’s a little bit of a classic trickster, or like that feisty man or woman we encounter, if we’re at an airport or customs, who makes it difficult for us to enter another country. There’s some corruption to her power. But also, there’s something wise in what she says to Frida—if you go back to the world, you’re going to be tempted to embrace Diego. You’re going to be tempted to paint again. Frida used to paint her body, but that body is no longer pulsing with life, no longer within her reach. One of the questions the opera poses in the second act is, How do I paint my absence? That question is not posed for the sake of seeking an answer.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me a little bit about your collaboration with Gabriela Lena Frank on this libretto? How did the interplay between the music, the story, and the words look for you?

CRUZ

As a librettist, I’m always aware that I’m serving the music. It’s a humbling experience. Coming from the world of theater is a good thing, because theater is all about collaboration and interpretation—you place the work in the hands of others, and it begins to transform. Here it’s a little bit different, because you provide the words and then the words should diffuse in the music.

INTERVIEWER

What are some of the formal challenges of writing a libretto versus a play?

CRUZ

A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music. I find the composer becomes an editor of the piece as well. The written words—the lyrics—aren’t the only thing establishing the dramaturgy. The sound of a flute can also be part of the storytelling. The entrance of a clarinet can guide us through an emotional moment. Do you actually need that phrase, or can it be given to an instrument?

INTERVIEWER

My understanding is that you worked on this opera for a very long time—fifteen years. How did it develop in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise, because it was such a long creative process?

CRUZ

I started writing, and I turned in the first act to Gabriela, but nothing was happening. Part of it was practical. We couldn’t secure the commission money to move the piece forward, so it entered a kind of suspension. And that period was difficult, but it was also deeply productive.

Gabriela and I continued working together on other projects. I wrote an oratorio for her, Santos: The Powers That She, which was commissioned and performed by the San Francisco Girls Chorus. We worked on a song cycle called La centinela y la paloma (The keeper and the dove), an early sketch of Frida and Catrina on the Day of the Dead—a piece for soprano and chamber orchestra. We also worked on the Conquest Requiem, which was a commissioned piece as well, and on a piece for the Los Angeles Opera called Las cinco lunas de Lorca (The five moons of Lorca). All throughout that time, Frida y Diego remained in a process of gestation. We were getting to know each other more deeply as collaborators.

INTERVIEWER

I was interested in the role that painting and art and color play in the opera. How did you approach translating this visual medium into a musical one?

CRUZ

I thought that art could be a bridge between the worlds. I was thinking about Frida’s painting The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl, which also depicts a liminal space. She’s holding Diego like a child. You can see cracks in the earth in that painting, which suggest a kind of threshold between one world and another—it’s a mythical landscape. That painting became an inspiration for me. And then Diego’s painting Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park was also instrumental, because there you see characters from different periods in time mingling with one another. In our version of El último sueño, these time frames also converge.

INTERVIEWER

In the opera, there’s a moment when you can really see the power dynamics that played out in their lives. How did you think about their relationship, about whether or not it could transcend death as they moved between the worlds?

CRUZ

Especially in the second act, many of their unresolved conflicts return to haunt them. These tensions begin to resolve because the body is no longer fully present for either of them—he is sickly, and she is pure spirit. The body remembers through pain. It isn’t just physical pain but emotional pain. Outside their bodies, they’re both able to revisit memories, and somehow there’s a moment of redemption and forgiveness. What adds a final layer to the relationship between these two beings is art. Through art, they find transformation—a metamorphosis from the carnal to the emotional. For me, that is love after death.

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of El último sueño de Frida y Diego opens on May 14 and is directed by Deborah Colker and stars Isabel Leonard and Carlos Álvarez. Tickets and schedule can be found here.

Sophie Haigney is a writer working on a book about collecting. She is an advisory editor of The Paris Review.

The Egg under construction circa 1976., via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Entering Albany by highway from the south, as a fleet of buses did in late February, requires weaving through a nest of interchanges between the city and its waterfront, then shuttling west along a series of dingy arteries, before emerging onto a plaza the New York Times once said looked more like “the planet Krypton than the capital of the state of New York.” The Empire State Plaza, as it’s called, does indeed seem like something from another world, or perhaps from several others. The Capitol building, a hulking castle of rough, gray stone capped with ruddy terra-cotta, sits at the north end of the square; the other three sides are lined with eleven anonymous, modern structures, a mix of squat blocks and slim vertical slabs, all sheathed in shining white marble, over forty thousand tons in total. This odd assemblage of vaguely sinister buildings looks down on three reflecting pools and one enormous oblong entity—a bizarre, six-story Brutalist construction known simply as the Egg, which officially serves as a performing arts center but resembles nothing so much as a newly landed UFO.

This Brasília on the Hudson, first opened to regular use fifty years ago this summer, was commissioned in the early sixties by the then governor Nelson Rockefeller, the philandering scion of the robber baron family, who funneled some two billion tax dollars into what he hoped would “symbolize the vitality of the state and its government.” In a way, it does—though primarily as a monument to Albany’s imperial power and baffling, byzantine inner workings. I’d arrived by bus that February morning for what was dubbed the Albany Takeover, the kickoff public event in a prolonged battle between New York’s various stakeholders over government revenue and where it would come from. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, had just cruised into office on a bold platform to expand public services, which he planned to fund primarily by raising taxes on large corporations and the ultra-rich. But the new mayor’s inauguration also marked the start of the state budget season—an arcane, monthslong process involving countless preliminary proposals, innumerable delays, and an annual begging ritual, evocatively known as Tin Cup Day, on which mayors from across the state schlep to Empire State Plaza to ask for funds. 

Photograph by Jessica from Albany, New York, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Though New Yorkers ostensibly elect hundreds of legislators to make these sorts of decisions, the negotiations themselves are notoriously secretive—New York ranked dead last among all states for accountability and transparency in its budget process, according to a 2015 analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. Ultimately, all major decisions are made by a group known as the Three Men in a Room: the governor, Senate majority leader and Assembly speaker, the former two of whom are now, for the first time, women. One of those women, Governor Kathy Hochul, has been stalwart in her opposition to raising taxes—despite the hole that the Trump administration’s cuts has blown in the state’s finances—not least because she faces reelection this fall. The event that morning, a march and rally at Empire State Plaza, was the first in a series of efforts aimed at reminding the governor that polling consistently shows a majority of her constituents disagree. Much of the media seemed to take Hochul’s refusal as a foregone conclusion. But if nothing else, the site was a well-chosen locale for registering dissent. The Plaza—which has been called the most expensive government complex in American history—is a case study in the lengths to which New York’s leaders have gone to find gargantuan sums of money to enact wild new visions for the state.

Photograph by Dan Borden, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Albany is a strange, dissonant city, whose architecture has long reflected its incoherence. It took nearly the entire second half of the nineteenth century to build the Capitol. One governor would spend a few years erecting a few stories in a particular architectural style before running out of money or being voted out of office. Then the next would choose a new approach for the subsequent few floors before himself being thwarted or replaced. The process repeated for decades before the gaudy monument to poor organization was finally cut off by Teddy Roosevelt in 1899. This left the building without a once-planned central tower and preserved it as an unusually disconnected design. Stained-glass skylights pierce the ceilings at odd intervals; palatial sandstone staircases spiral into apparent oblivion. One of them is carved with hundreds of faces, from U.S. presidents to the building’s own architects—a costly feat that earned it the nickname the Million Dollar Staircase.

After World War II, the thriving manufacturing hub of Albany’s golden years gave way to what the journalist Paul Grondahl described as “a shabby, dank and crumbling backwater … with about as much pizzazz as a Dutch wooden shoe.” Elected in 1958, Rockefeller must have been jarred by his move to the governor’s mansion at the heart of this sorry city—a far cry from Kykuit, his family’s decadent Hudson Valley estate. The surroundings would prove anathema to aspiring sovereigns. As the (perhaps apocryphal) story goes, when Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands came to visit the new governor, he took her on a convertible tour of the city. But he was so embarrassed for her to gaze upon an ethnic enclave known as the Pastures that he vowed to transform the neighborhood into a monument of grandeur that would rival even Versailles. 

Albany Takeover, February 25, 2026. Photograph courtesy of Charlie Dulik.

But as the musician and historian Lo Faber theorized in his treatise on the plaza, “Rocky’s Last Erection,” Rockefeller had likely been planning the overhaul long before then. The dilettante had once thought “seriously of becoming an architect—possibly a fine one,” per a letter he’d written to his family during college. But in practice, this interest became what “Rocky” called his “edifice complex”: an obsession with building, which had already yielded Rockefeller Center, the United Nations headquarters, and five new campuses for the new state university system. Not long after Rocky began reimagining Albany’s central plaza, he would join up with his brother, David, to raise the World Trade Center.

The project he had in mind for Albany was going to be a massive expense, at least two hundred and fifty million on the low end—a sum that, per state law, required both legislative approval and a ballot referendum. The public, however, was unlikely to get on board for an undertaking that would seize several neighborhoods’ worth of land, evict its residents, and lay waste to more than a thousand buildings. The city’s longstanding mayor (and Rockefeller’s boyhood yacht-club rival), Erastus Corning 2nd (his preference over “II”), slammed the project as “something that might be expected of a dictatorship,” that would “look most spectacular on postcards” but “in fact, hurt the people of Albany.” Unable to convince the state’s electorate to approve the necessary funding, Rockefeller instead managed to get the legislature to sign off on a smaller sum in the name of “slum clearance.” They gave him just a fraction of the cost—twenty million dollars to seize some hundred acres of land at the center of the city and begin razing the area.

Almost overnight, more than seven thousand residents found themselves with neither homes nor community institutions; three hundred and fifty businesses, four churches, and twenty-nine bars were shuttered. As evicted Albanians scattered across the metro area (Rockefeller vetoed a housing project for displaced residents), the state struggled to make progress. The twenty million dollars it had allocated was barely enough to cover the demolition and groundbreaking. To fund the rest, Rockefeller finagled a financing scheme through Albany County and its political machine, a patronage mill tightly controlled by Corning. The county, less responsive to democratic input, would issue bonds far beyond state debt limits, and lease the land back to the state. In return, for the next forty years, the state paid the county rent on the new buildings in an amount equal to the cost of retiring the bonds, before finally assuming control of the Plaza in 2001. Corning, once a stalwart opponent of the development, flipped upon realizing an opportunity for historic graft. He insured the property through his own company, deposited the bonds in a bank at which he served as director, and arranged a process by which excavated land was used to fill a ravine he owned, leveling it out for development. On his deathbed, the tallest tower in the complex—and in the state, outside of New York City—was renamed for him.

Rockefeller, a son of near-infinite wealth, concerned himself less with accounting and more with aesthetics, where his influences were as diverse as his power was unchecked. It was Rockefeller who supposedly designed the Egg, inspired at breakfast one morning to place a half-grapefruit on top of a small pitcher of cream. (In another version of the story, per the Times Union, he was looking at an egg, which he “laid sideways in an egg cup.”) He pushed architects to design one of the office buildings as an International Style interpretation of Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s temple in Egypt. He draped the atrium of the Legislative Office Building, known as the Well, in green marble; he decorated one end with a sixty-foot abstract relief of writhing figures and the other with a shimmering waterfall. In a rare loss, his dream of a monumental arch across the plaza was scrapped. What connects these disparate designs more than any particular visual theme is an aesthetic language of domination, stripped to its barest elements.

The Egg, 2026. Photograph courtesy of Charlie Dulik.

The plaza is also connected in a less visible sense—by a network of underground tunnels spanning just under two miles. These interiors, like those of the Well, were where Rockefeller granted the otherwise spare complex some ornamentation. The governor had mandated that it serve as a showcase for modern art, and he funneled some $2.6 million into what art historians have called “the greatest collection of modern American art in any single public site that is not a museum.” The tunnels, which now hold McDonald’s and Auntie Anne’s in between Rothkos and Pollocks, provide such efficient paths for travel that the aboveground square lies mostly empty, barren but for days with large protests, like the one that brought me to town in February. 

At the time of publishing, the state’s budget is several weeks overdue. (Hochul has never passed a budget on time, and averages about a three-week delay each year.) Weeks after the Albany Takeover, however, the governor blinked in the face of public pressure and agreed to back a tax on second homes in New York City worth more than five million dollars. (In further architectural intrigue, the State Assembly is currently holding out for one million dollars to renovate their private lounge.) The pied-à-terre tax aims to raise half a billion dollars yearly—not an amount to sneeze at, but only a fraction of the city’s overall budgetary needs. The coming weeks (and years) will reveal if New York City’s young executive will be able to leverage an initial trickle of money into a flood of funding. As I left Albany, I looked out the bus window in the dwindling daylight and caught my final glimpses of Empire State Plaza and the Capitol. If the day’s journey imparted any lesson, it’s that in Albany, there’s always a way of finding money for what’s deemed important, no matter how much it clashes with what’s standing in the way.

The Egg, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Charlie Dulik.

Charlie Dulik is a tenant organizer in New York City.

Mount Everest. Photograph by Nir B. Gurung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Jan Morris rose to fame in 1953 as a reporter working for the Times when she carried the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest back to base camp, England, and the world on the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was arguably the British Empire’s last triumph. Over the course of the next seven decades, Morris—at that time publishing as James—traveled widely through the empire’s dwindling dominion, writing sumptuously about colonial decline and the rise of a new postwar global order. After changing her sex in 1972 at Georges Burou’s famous Casablanca clinic, she published the best-selling memoir Conundrum (1974), a finely tuned and deeply felt account of the perils and strange delights of self-creation. When the scandal of her transformation had settled, Morris resumed her literary career, writing on Venice, Hong Kong, Trieste, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, the history of Japanese battleships, and other geopolitical engrossments, until her death in 2020. Her life and work brought her into contact with many significant plot arcs of the twentieth century—not just the rearrangement of the world order but also the birth of LGBT civic consciousness. Despite this serendipitous proximity, she presents, in death, as a weak candidate for entry to any known saintly canon. Blithely humanistic, avowedly bourgeois, and often romantic to a point of equivocation, she’s suitable neither as a pride-month “trancestor” nor as a great literary firebrand. A new biography, Jan Morris: A Life—authorized by her children, who manage her estate—tries to figure out what to do with these loose ends. Its author, Sara Wheeler, is also a travel writer. She called me on Zoom with a shaky connection from “the ancient Atlantic Forest in central Paraguay,” where she was on assignment. We talked about Morris’s splintered legacy and the challenges of summing up a life.

INTERVIEWER

I know Morris mostly through the trans archive. I suspect this is true of most Americans, if they are aware of her at all. How does this compare with her legacy in the UK? Do people still read her?

SARA WHEELER

It’s no exaggeration to say that Morris became the most famous journalist in the world overnight when she brought back the story of the conquest of Mount Everest. After that, she went on to write fifty-eight books. She was always on television, laughing, tossing her cumulus of white hair, and all the rest of it. Today, few remember this, but “Morris of Everest” is still in the British public consciousness. When I meet people in the UK who are readers, they normally say, Oh gosh, yes, I remember Venice (1960) and I remember Pax Britannica (1968) and, hang on a minute—wasn’t it she who wrote Conundrum?

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to her as a biographical subject?

WHEELER

As a nonfiction writer specializing in travel, I’d always read and admired her. For a magazine profile I wrote of her in 2000, I went up to Wales, where she was living, and spent a day with her and her partner, Elizabeth. This was in the in-between years, after Elizabeth was her wife but before civil partnerships were allowed. [Interviewer’s note: Before same-sex marriage was legalized in Britain, Morris divorced Elizabeth to change her legal sex. In 2008, the pair renewed their vows as civil partners.] After Morris died in 2020, news got out that her estate was looking for an authorized biographer, and when I started looking into it—thinking, Shall I put my hat in the ring?—I just knew. She was at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She spent a year in the United States, from 1953 to 1954, when McCarthy was blaring through every speakeasy. She interviewed Che Guevara. And then right in the middle of all this, we have her transition—she was the twentieth century!

INTERVIEWER

Sort of a Forrest Gumpian figure.

WHEELER

All the glitter, and the darkness, and the glamour! What she liked most of all was going to the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, where the chef would come out to kiss her! And she was one of the greatest descriptive writers who ever lived.

INTERVIEWER

Fifty-eight books is a massive undertaking for a biographer. How did you approach the reading? Was it hard to track everything down?

WHEELER

Before I started even thinking about writing or going to the archives, I made my way through her books, taking copious notes. That probably took six months. I was doing it full time. Some of the fifty-eight were anthologies of pieces published in magazines and journals. For example, there’s one anthology, Destinations (1980), which is just the pieces she published in Rolling Stone magazine. Some of them were hard to source. There were three, in the end, that I had to get out of a private lending library. I stickered them all with the date of publication, and they snaked around my office. Then I went through them chronologically from the first, Coast to Coast (1962), which is her story of being in America, to the last, Allegorizings (2021), which was a posthumous book. Jan was determined to curate her image after her death, and she did.

INTERVIEWER

Most well-known trans people of the twentieth century were famous for being trans. Morris’s transition feels almost incidental to her fame as a writer. During your research, did you notice a split in her archive? Were you starting your day at, say, Bishopsgate [the largest LGBT archive in the UK], and then running across town to the British Library? I get the sense that her paper trail might be scattered across disparate worlds.

WHEELER

“Scattered across disparate worlds” is a very good way of putting it, and I had to go a lot farther afield than you’ve indicated. Jan’s trans journey was one of a number of other journeys, but all these are threaded together, as all our inner journeys are threaded together in all of us. You can’t separate one from the other, so I tried to show them all moving together through a very long life.

INTERVIEWER

Travel writing, as a genre, changed a lot during her career. She started writing in a time of declining empire, when fantasies about faraway places—colonial life and colonial subjects—were integral to British identity. Her early readers weren’t likely to have traveled much at all, but by her last book, it was the age of Ryanair, and the world order had shifted. I am curious if you have thoughts on the evolving mandates of the genre.

WHEELER

Morris had a similar feeling—that anyone can go anywhere now. In the eighties, she said, “Goodness, you can buy a ticket to Kathmandu from Cedar Falls, Iowa.” But really, travel writers have been saying that since the Odyssey. It’s true we’re not pioneers who aren’t sure what’s on the end of the map anymore. We’ve got Google Maps to tell us what’s everywhere, but the fact is, we’re still confronting the other—different situations, different people, different worldviews. I feel that it’s more valid than ever to listen to what the other is saying, although God knows, nobody seems to be.

INTERVIEWER

Was this political for her?

WHEELER

Morris wasn’t really an apologist for empire, but she made no bones about the fact that she loved its style. She loved the glitter of horses on parade, and the trill of a bugle, and all the rest of it. She began her career saying, This is the side of it I like, and it is incredibly interesting, and there’s lots of really interesting characters here, and I’m going to tell you about that, and then I’m going to describe all these places, and so on.

But when she started working on her Pax Britannica trilogy, and started transitioning, it became more personal. She discovered her Welsh roots and became more interested in nationalism. She said, Well, hang on a minute—this is exactly what [happened to] all those Indigenous peoples all around the world that the English went round duffing up!

For a while, she was a card-carrying Welsh nationalist, very keen on the idea of Wales seceding from the UK. She really banged that drum—wrote a lot of newspaper pieces about the terrible English tourists racing all over Wales and destroying everything. In the nineties and two thousands, she spent a lot of time in the Balkans—Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular—and that was when she looked around and said, I see what they’re doing to one another, and I wonder if that could be happening in Wales.

After that, she went off the boil with nationalism. She saw the perils and began to go beyond it.

INTERVIEWER

Toward what?

WHEELER

A more mystical quest for human unity. In the end, she realized she was looking for what we’re all looking for—an escape from the horrible reality of the human condition. She had a long time to think about it, and to a certain extent, she did make peace with all that at the end of her long life.

INTERVIEWER

Your book starts with an author’s note, explaining that Morris wrote about her pre-transition life using “he/him” pronouns and that you have done the same “out of respect.” This convention was common into the nineties, but today it’s considered deeply unfashionable and even disrespectful. I can’t say I’m a fan of your choice, but I am curious how you came to make it.

WHEELER

I put an author’s note at the front of my book because I wanted all readers to be prepared for what I’d done, which, I was aware, as you say, was not quite the standard. One of the most significant periods of Morris’s childhood was her time as a choirboy at Christ Church Cathedral School. I wanted to make the book readable, and it seemed to me, just from a purely practical point of view, that it was going to be difficult to say “she and the other choir boys,” and so on. She was in the army. She was an intelligence officer with a very posh regiment. I thought that changing her pronouns from that time would jar the reader. As you’ve said, some people will find this choice upsetting, but I appeal for the same respect that I tried to give everybody [in the book]. I tried to really show that Morris felt she’d become the person she should always have been.

The writer in 1936. Nakahara family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255.

This is one of two poems you’ve translated for this issue by Nakahara Chuya. To start, could you tell us a little about Chuya and the poem’s backstory?       

Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) was a Japanese avant-garde Modernist poet. Although he had a short life and career, today he is one of the best-known twentieth-century poets, remembered for his intensely personal poems and unusual, striking diction. He is routinely included in Japanese-literature textbooks, and his poems have been set to music countless times. “Memory of a Three Year-Old” is a strange little poem that first appeared in the April 1936 issue of Bungei hanron (Literary counterarguments) and was included in Chuya’s second book of poetry, Arishi hi no uta (Songs of days that were, 1938), which was published not long after Chuya’s premature death from tuberculous meningitis.

The memory described in this poem seems to date from Chuya’s early childhood, shortly after he returned to Japan after a couple of months spent in Manchuria, where his father, a high-ranking military doctor, was stationed following the Russo-Japanese War. Whether or not he had a roundworm infection like the one described in this poem is a fact lost to history, but there was a persimmon tree in the courtyard of his home at that time. In a letter to a friend, dated April 12, 1936, Chuya comments that his son had recently turned eighteen months old. He fantasized about withdrawing to the countryside, where he could relax and play with his boy. It seems that thinking about playing with his son prompted Chuya to reflect on his own past. 

What struck you when you first sat down with this poem?

Unlike in much of Chuya’s poetry, the language of this poem, which is written in modern, colloquial Japanese, isn’t especially difficult to understand. Most of the images are concrete. The only lines that give the reader pause are the final ones, in which the neighbor’s house goes flying into the sky—an image that Chuya specifically repeats twice, as if to underline how important and surprising it was. What happened here? Was the young boy so surprised by the sight of the parasites that he became dizzy, making it appear that the house was flying upward? Did the house appear to drift into the sky as the narrator looked at it through teary eyes? Were there a bunch of birds on the roof that suddenly flew up into the air, giving the impression that the roof was coming off? The presence of this unexplained mystery in the text—along with the decidedly nonpoetic image of the parasites—helps to establish the poem’s quirky, modern, iconoclastic feel.

Some scholars speculate that the poem may have been partially inspired by “Sekichiku no omohide” (Memory of pinks) by the poet Kitahara Hakushu (1885–1942), which describes a childhood memory of urinating off the edge of a veranda that is brilliantly illuminated by the sun, just like in Chuya’s poem, while taking in a vision of a painfully bright bed of red flowers. 

What was the challenge of this particular translation?

When translating from Japanese to English, one is forced to make decisions that would probably never even occur to a Japanese speaker. Japanese does not typically distinguish between singular nouns and plural nouns. Unless the author specifies a number to say how many things they are talking about, the translator must decide whether to render the word as singular, one thing, or plural, multiple things. With this poem, this question of singular versus plural took on an unusually grotesque dimension. When the parasite slides from the narrator’s backside into the potty beneath, how many parasites are there? Is it just a single roundworm or many? I ended up looking at some pictures of roundworms on the internet that, frankly, I would have preferred never to have seen. Chuya mentions kaichu (蛔虫), which usually refers to Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of particularly large roundworm that, I learned, is the most common parasitic worm in humans around the world. I wondered if this type of roundworm would break into lots of little segments inside the body, like tapeworms—an utterly disgusting prospect!—thus necessitating a plural in the translation. My research yielded an even more awful truth—Ascaris lumbricoides are not segmented and are thus more likely to slide out whole and alive.

One website told me that the adults can grow to anywhere from six to twelve inches, depending on the worm’s gender. Another taught me that since they can often get as long and as thick as earthworms, they are relatively hard to miss. The Mayo Clinic finally concluded my trip down this stomach-turning rabbit hole by informing me that Ascaris lumbricoides often come out individually or in small numbers, but in cases of severe infection, they may appear in large, tangled masses. It is easy to imagine that even one of these thick, horrifying worms would be enough to terrify a child, but after looking at so many disturbing pictures on the internet, I personally couldn’t get the image of multiple worms out of my mind. In the end, I settled on the plural, concluding that even though it was possible the narrator passed only a single worm, using the plural roundworms would leave readers with an unforgettable image.

Orthography was another challenge here. Japanese has nothing like the difference between capital letters and lowercase letters, but one cannot avoid making choices regarding capitalization in English. Capitalizing the start of every line reminds readers of older, nineteenth-century poetry, whereas a more flexible approach toward capitalization can make the poem seem less bound by tradition. In translating this poem, I made the unusual decision to render the text in all-lowercase letters, hoping to put Chuya in conversation with poets like E. E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein, who disobeyed rules of capitalization and other orthographic traditions as part of their Modernist experiments. Interestingly, Chuya uses fairly conventional punctuation in his original, but the use of sentence-style verse in poetry was unusual for readers in the twenties and thirties, since a lot of Japanese poetry didn’t use punctuation at all. So, ironically, whereas Chuya included lots of punctuation to make his poem look new, fresh, and modern, I have removed all punctuation, hoping to give my translation a similar effect to the one it might have had on a Japanese reader of the time.

In one place, instead of the most common, standard Japanese phrase meaning “was shocked,” bikkuri shite shimatta, Chuya uses an alternative, colloquial variation, bikkuri shichimatta, that seems to reflect Chuya’s own speech habits, perhaps even his own southwestern Yamaguchi dialect. Unfortunately, no recordings exist of Chuya’s voice, so it is difficult to know how much the dialect of his hometown colored his everyday pronunciation. Colloquialisms come from specific places. I feared that using a specific regional variant—something like “I was gobsmacked,” which one is more likely to hear in England or Ireland, or “I was scunnered,” which one might hear in Scotland or northern England—might seem odd to readers in other parts of the world, especially since what is being described here, namely surprise, is such a straightforward notion. So I went with “shocked” after all.

What did the editing process look like for this poem? Were there any particular words or phrases that proved unexpectedly tricky?

The problem of the implied locality cropped up again when I submitted this poem to The Paris Review. To describe a type of toilet for children, Chuya uses the word okawa (稚厠), which is made up of two kanji characters meaning “infant, child” and “toilet, potty.” The editors, who grew up in different parts of the world, had different opinions about which words for such a seemingly universal thing sounded the most natural. In a flurry of emails, we debated the merits of various possibilities. Potty, a vernacular diminutive of the word pot, which has roots in nineteenth-century Britain but is also common in America, was suggested by one editor, but I rejected it because I thought it could invite misinterpretation—one might interpret it as a child’s word for the same toilet an adult might use, not a smaller, portable version for child use. Potty chair, which appears on some toilet-training websites, sounded unfamiliar to me, whereas another editor commented that it might have a note of “false cuteness,” like something a child, not an adult, would say. In the end, we concluded our amusing and slightly absurd email chain by settling on the more neutral training toilet. 

When did you know this translation was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

If the goal of translation is to approximate the original as best as one can, I’m not sure that a translation is ever completely finished. Every time I read from one of my translations in public performances, I find myself wishing I had used some other turn of phrase, and so I continue to edit, making editorial comments in my book right there on the spot. One can continue polishing any translation forever. The question, simply, is when one feels ready to release it into the world so that it can take on a life of its own. With this poem, that moment came when I realized I couldn’t spend another second thinking about parasitic roundworms.

Jeffrey Angles is a poet, a translator, and a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.

Reindeer herders’ house in Bystrinsky Nature Park, Kamchatka. Photograph by NadezhdaKhaustova, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Snowflakes whirl in the white daylight, and we advance with difficulty beneath the dense canopy. Dasho and Clint in front, me behind. Sweat drips down our foreheads. The snow crunches under our feet. Keep within the tracks! I think, every time I sink once more up to my thighs. After an hour’s trudging, bent over and with our shoulders hunched up to our ears, the landscape changes; the black spruce woods become sparser. The wind picks up as we lose the trees’ protection, and I muffle my face with my shapka’s earflaps. “Will you tell me where we’re going?” I shout to Dasho, trying to reach him over the wind’s bluster. “Nearly there,” he replies. “A little more patience and you’ll soon see.” We come out into a clearing, Dasho and Clint stop, and I follow suit. I look to the right and the left, and my gaze at last picks out a shape that’s blurry but discernible through the snowfall. Something large and white; something that is neither a house nor a tree. “Come,” Dasho says. “We’re here.” We walk towards the object, the contours of which become clear as we approach. It is a white, multifaceted sphere of imposing scale, perched on a metal structure that holds it suspended in the air. The structure must be between eight and ten meters high. At its foot, a ladder extends up towards a hatch in the sphere’s underside. I catch my breath and the boys light cigarettes, visibly pleased with themselves. “What is that?” They’re expecting my question; we have come all the way here precisely so I can ask it. “That,” Dasho says, “is America making sure the Russians can’t take Alaska back off them!”

My face must be quite a picture, as the pair of them are in stitches. Then Clint sucks on his cigarette and decides to enlighten me. I learn that the sphere is a surveillance radar trained straight at Russia. I soon observe that it is still live, or rather, “on hold”—as confirmed by the two American officials who briefly emerge from the hatch to greet us. “Hi. You’re the French anthropologist? Welcome to the end of the world!” They laugh, then disappear just as swiftly back into the sphere—“We have work to get on with in here”—and the hatch closes behind them. Clint says, with a wry smile, “Don’t worry, it isn’t only us they kick this kind of soccer ball at. There’s one in every indigenous village in Alaska.” My curiosity is piqued. I nod, encouraging him to go on. He says he knows from reliable sources that in Siberia the Russians are using the same sorts of rigs, all pointing straight at Alaska, and that they’re all in the native villages too. This radar and its siblings are remnants of the Cold War. “You want to know why they’re putting them with the natives?” he asks me, using the English word, but goes on before I can answer. “Because they’re better hidden this way. There’s no tourism here, no foreigners poking around to say it’s still going on, that the war isn’t really over, or at least that it could start up again anytime. It’s like fires in our sick, dried-up forests—a single spark is plenty.”

We stand in silence for a moment. My head is spinning—this is the last thing I expected. Dasho is standing quite still, hands in his pockets, the steam of his breath curling up, over his head. I observe him looking at the radar and decide that in his head too, something’s spinning. “What is it?” I ask, right away. “Nothing,” he answers. “Only, every time I come here, I wonder what they’re thinking on the other side of the strait.” I catch his eye and he looks away, to stare at the radar once more. He speaks again, more softly: “When they pass one of them, when they’re out hunting.” He exhales and the steam clouds thickly. “Or perhaps over there the radars are right in the middle of the villages, not hidden away like they are here? Perhaps they can even see them from their windows?” He turns back, towards me. Dasho’s fine brown face, his dark eyes and long black hair, are haloed by the white glow of the sphere behind him. “Do you think they’re like us? That they live like us?”

***

There are occasionally—rarely—moments during fieldwork that are like lightning strikes. Brief instants; spots of time. They stand out from the regular rhythm of the experience. And they can effect a crucial turn in your life or your research focus—or both. Dasho’s musing quickly became my obsession.

***

“Not so very long ago, we Gwich’in”—Clarence liked to tell the story—“all in a single day, we learned that not only were we now American citizens, but also that we used to be Russians in the past.” He added, “The Aleut people to the south retained this knowledge in their bodies, the Tlingit people in the southeast valiantly fought against it, the Yupiks of the northwest didn’t oppose it, the Iñupiats in the north sold their whales; but the Russians never got as far as the Gwich’in, and if they had got to them, we would have remembered, because the Gwich’in are warriors, because we would never have let the Russians take our land away, because …” Clarence always broke off somewhere around this point. “In any case,” he’d go on, “the Russians didn’t get as far as us, because Gwich’in land was too far west, too far into the subarctic taiga, and also because they had too much going on along the coast.” Sometimes I would tell the old man he was rambling. To shut me up or, perhaps, to impress me, he would then take his story still further back in time. “Before, truly before, we surely came here from out there, over the great ice bridge. We let the Iñupiat cross it first, to test the ice over the strait.” He giggled. “We saw that it held for them, so we came over too.” “And you gave them a few thousand years before you followed, just to be sure?” I was teasing, but he was never deterred. “Of course—we keep our eye on the prize! The seashore and the blizzards, that’s all Eskimo stuff. We went straight to the forest.” I burst out laughing. “Just think about it,” he said. “Think about the journey we made to get here, about our decision to live among the trees, and all those we left behind.”

“Yes, Clarence,” I answered, “I do think about it.” In fact, that’s all I think about. As time has gone on, these ideas have become my obsession: I too cross the strait and travel back in time. I follow in the footsteps of my predecessors in 1897; I follow the intellectual paths taken by Boas, Jochelson, Brodsky, Bogoras, and the others with the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. My mission may have been rather desperate, but so was I: I wanted to bring the two sides of the Bering Strait into dialogue. I too would try to travel back to find the links between places and collectives before colonization broke them apart. Who could say? Perhaps somewhere between East and West, shadows would lift. And one day, I would return to Fort Yukon, and I would tell Dasho and his father. I’d tell them how it was, over there.

***

We’re here, at last. In the forest below the volcano, on the edge of the river, surrounded by faces very different from our own. After hours in buses, in vans, and on foot, we had finally reached the botany research base at the Bystrinsky Nature Park, in western Kamchatka. Here, in the foothills of the Ichinsky volcano, where the Icha River has its source, we had set up our temporary base camp, in this strange place where young “volunteers” inventory plants for the national park alongside Even reindeer herders, who stop here to replenish their supplies.

For the first time in my career in anthropology, something that had arisen from my own cogitations was becoming a reality before anyone could field-test it. My working hypothesis was turning out to be of at least some value. After several bruising failures in Alaska in regard to my theoretical preconceptions, which crumbled as soon as I began the fieldwork, I no longer had much confidence in my own notions, however deeply informed by history and theory. Yet, this time, things were happening differently. That free-floating picture that I had dreamed up, of a past world reborn from its own ashes in response to a great crisis, might, possibly, be a reality. I remember Dasho and me sitting beside the fire that evening in Fort Yukon, looking into the flames. “If an actual crisis were to happen,” he said, “we Gwich’in would go back to live in the forest. We’re trapped in a stagnant economy, and in a village that was ruined before it could ever thrive.”

“A village that makes us believe in some kind of ‘good life’—whatever that could possibly mean in this postcolonial taiga, where we believe in a semblance of comfort—of ‘civilization,’ ” he corrected himself, “assuming that, in Fort Yukon, civilization is the visible manifestation of the loss of everything that made us who we are as humans.”

I enjoyed our discussions. They fed the optimism I had felt all my life, a slightly naive optimism which has always made me believe that another life is possible. “When this whole smoke screen has evaporated,” Dasho said, “because it will—what will happen then?” He looked at me mischievously, teasing. “Where will we go?” I smiled, because I already knew what he would say. “Back to the woods, of course.”

I knew that some indigenous collectives in Russia had returned to the forest during or after the collapse of the USSR. But as for finding them in Kamchatka, that was another story. I could almost have kissed old Nikolai when, between two glasses of vodka, in the half darkness of his old wooden house in Esso, he assured us of the existence of this Even family clan, while also making no secret of his scorn for these people, who refused to do as other people did and who thought they were superior because they had withdrawn into the forest. “Traitors, that’s all they are. Backward people who reject progress and the march of history,” he said, again. I was listening and looking around me while mentally reviewing what I’d learned over the last few days. I couldn’t help but imagine the end of his sentence: “Who won’t share the fate of their comrades in Esso, this former kolkhoz, which now, over the last decade, is becoming a promising tourist destination, and which will need—already needs—brightening up and better facilities.” In his view, the indigenous people’s place is right here, and has been for some time. It’s their role to bring color to the dalni-vostok (the Far East, as Kamchatka’s inhabitants like to call it) with indigenous traditions and folklore, to please the tourists who are drawn to the wild even as its emptiness unsettles them.

Then, since he was quite a few drinks in that evening, Nikolai told us that those idiots had left all this—the village, its shops, the hot springs, the museum and its dance stage—left it all behind. They weren’t dancing anymore, they weren’t singing, they weren’t playing their part in supporting their heritage by making traditional objects. Later that night, he stopped attacking them. There was only a deep sadness in his eyes. “My family left the forest long ago. I’ve no more reindeer, no more hunting lands.” The pauses between his statements grew longer. “So that’s it—we dance.” He looked down to stare at the shabby brown floorboards. Then he muttered: “It’s better forgotten.”

***

Why Kamchatka? Why choose this peninsula to compare with my research field in Alaska and not the Chukchi territory, for example, a mere fifty kilometers away from Alaska, on the other side of what has since become the maritime strait of Bering? A volcanic, mountainous region of northern rainforest to compare and contrast with the broad, flat expanse of the subarctic taiga—why attempt that? And to compare the Even people, historically reindeer breeders and herders, with the Gwich’in and their hunter-gatherer traditions? At first glance, a comparison between Alaska and Kamchatka seems like a bridge too far.

Be that as it may, I enjoy some high-wire work, and I have a particular taste for historical contingencies, especially those which seem, over time, to become not simply contingent but meaningful. One of the stories behind my wish to make this ethnographic comparison began with this rather banal fact: the first colonizers of Alaska were not Americans but Russians. The enticing and terrifying “Wild West” of North American Alaska had first been a mysterious and compelling “Far East” for Russia. And its first “discoverers” departed not from Chukotka but from Kamchatka. In 1725, Vitus Bering led a first expedition intended to stake a claim to the fantastical uncharted bolshaya zemlya, or “great land,” which had been fueling navigators’ daydreams since 1648, when Cossack Semyon Dezhnev returned from the Kolyma River reporting Chukchi people’s vague stories about the existence of another world east of the sea. Bering and his company failed, discovering in 1725 “only” the Sea of Okhotsk and the strait to which the explorer would give his name, that ancient, submerged land bridge which in the twentieth century was to become one of the focal points of tension between the two great Western blocs. It was only in 1741, after establishing the first settlement at Petropavlovsk (today the peninsula’s capital), that Bering launched a second expedition out of Kamchatka, and this time succeeded in landing in Alaska, on the Aleutian Islands. Alaska remained Russian until 1867, when it was purchased by the United States for the modest sum of seven million dollars.

As in Alaska, the geopolitical drive to claim “uninhabited lands” lay at the root of Kamchatka’s isolation until the nineties. From being a heavily controlled military zone, serving as storehouse for Russian submarines and site for heavy-arms testing until the implosion of the USSR in 1991, by the end of the twentieth century, like its American cousin, Kamchatka had been transformed into an exemplar of untamed nature in government discourse and in the Russian national imagination. Simultaneously, it was also recognized as a gigantic stockpile of natural resources awaiting exploitation, even while retaining its status as a strategic location for surveillance of the other bloc. In many ways, the Kamchatkan Far East is to Russians what the Alaskan Wild West is to Americans: its mirror image, with all the inversions that entails. The current and widely accepted media image of these territories confirms this view: both Russian and American politicians regularly present themselves as passionate defenders of the wilderness, because the symbolic heft of the concept of wildness attached to their respective iconic regions confers an automatic legitimacy they can lean on while also pursuing programs of resource extraction—targeting oil, natural gas, and metals, but also woodland and fishery resources—perceived as essential to their national economies.

Since the end of the Cold War, Alaska and Kamchatka have continued to reproduce the deep tensions coursing through modern industrial society, from the political conflicts of rival states eyeballing each other, to the challenges of securing access to and exploiting resources, and the ecological turmoil now undermining the very wilderness ecosystems they were meant to be preserving. Lastly, and it’s ultimately because of this that my comparative project has been possible: Kamchatka too harbors indigenous collectives still living according to systems other than our occidental norms, keepers of a different history, even though they’ve been compelled to share ours, too, for the last three centuries. There are three significant indigenous collectives based in Kamchatka: the Koryak, Itelmen, and Even peoples. Historically, the coastal Koryaks were hunters of the large marine mammals, while those who lived inland bred reindeer. These days there are roughly seven thousand of them in the whole peninsula. Their language is related to the Chukchi-Kamchadal language family, as is that of the Itelmen. The latter, traditionally hunter-gatherers, are considered to be the very first inhabitants of Kamchatka. Most Itelmens have many generations of genetic mixing with Russians, and there are now very few native speakers left. In the eighteenth century, both Koryaks and Itelmen were decimated by the arrival of Russian Cossacks, their populations drastically reduced by the combined effects of epidemics and deliberate extermination. As for the Evens, whose language belongs to the Manchu-Tungus family, they are traditionally reindeer breeders who traveled as nomads with their animals from the Altai region in southern Siberia. While widely used by both Russians and Evens, the ethnonym Even (which replaced the earlier ethnonym Lamut—“people of the sea”) bears little relation to their own terms for themselves: Oročel or Oroč, meaning “people of the reindeer.” Like the Cossacks and sometimes even alongside them, serving as their guides, the Evens made their way down the Kamchatka Peninsula over the nineteenth century. Around nineteen thousand Even people are thought to be living in Siberia as a whole, of which some three thousand are in Kamchatka and a bare thousand in the Bystrinsky region.

***

Time went by, slowly. Then, one morning, Andrey got up, opened the cabin door, and said simply: “Let’s go.” Just that, no explanation. “Pack your bags.” The three of us set off on his red quad ATV, through the seventy kilometers of mud and rain that separated us from Ublakachchan, the first hunting base on the Icha River. Somewhere along the way, while chewing on smoked baluk, he laughed. “Where you live in France, to go to someone’s house, you need to be invited, right?” I nodded, yes. “It’s no good trying to do things the way you do them at home,” he said. “In the forest, you just go.”

Night descended abruptly on us, out on the tundra. A fine, icy rain had us shivering by the time we got off after several-hour travel through the night. A faint glimmer shone through the wooden slats of the summer kitchen. “Andrura!” Andrey called, through the darkness. We heard a grunt. “Come on in,” Andrey said. I noticed two soaking-wet brown bearskins lying over a wooden rail on my right. We stepped into a dark, smoky cabin. Two Russians were sitting at the low table over glasses of vodka. Black bearskins insulated their limbs from the chill of the beaten-earth floor. Beside the fire in one corner, an Even woman was preparing a soup of salmon heads. Our welcome was somewhat frosty, but at least we were invited in. We emptied our glasses, gulped down our soup, and collapsed onto some pungent bearskins in the loft space they set aside for people passing through.

In the morning, Andrey told us he had to go back. He added that “they” would certainly come, for of course “they” knew, now, that we were here. We had only to wait for something to happen—for someone to come. A few days later, a man ducked his head through the rickety latticed doorway: our wait was temporarily over. About fifty years old, he was tall, agile, and sinewy, and his face was enigmatic, with no hint of a smile, though his eyes, perched above high cheekbones, showed nothing but gentleness. This was Ilo, here against the advice of his elder brother, Artyom, to take us from the Russian hunting base and help us cross the river, that frontier flowing peacefully between two worlds that knew nothing of each other.

***

Every morning, Ilo disappears into the driving rain to take in his fishing lines from the river, a twenty-minute walk. At midday he returns, his arms laden with salmon which he prepares straightaway, reserving half for the dog apana and the other half for us, to be fried or made into a soup over the fire. Ilo tells us about the French singers he likes, some Edith Piaf, a lot of Joe Dassin. Skillfully shearing off scales, he asks if there are lions in France. And we talk about the Earth, how it is turning even though we can’t feel it, and about the sun that “sets” although we’re the ones who sink below the horizon. It’s still raining, and how strange this is, being trapped here, even in the field, and discussing existential questions, which my pathological impatience makes me relegate to the category of small talk.

In the morning we’re woken by voices crackling through an old radio. Ilo is lying on a reindeer skin in a corner, holding the transmitter in one hand and listening intently, his ear pressed up against the speaker. “Ten packs of Klassicheskiy Belyy Tigr black tea, five bags of Maxim’s coffee, twenty kilos of flour, ten kilos of sugar.” Another voice answers: “Got it.” “Take a bag of sweets, too, for the children. And two boxes of smokes.”

At this point, I don’t yet know who’s speaking or where from; all I know is that this radio is the medium by which the Evens of Icha communicate with the outside world, how they send their orders to those traveling into the forest; that all or almost all the hunting bases are linked by this radio, and that the reindeer herders who move through the region are linked by it too. Ilo waits for the voices to stop, then asks again if anyone has news of the weather. Someone speaking from the village of Esso answers yes, they’ve seen the weather report and this bad weather will go on for several more days. “Igna,” Ilo says in Even. “Okay.” He disconnects the radio, lies there for a moment, thinking, then gets up, pulls his boots on, and vanishes into the rain again.

Translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis.

An adapted excerpt from East of Dreams, forthcoming from New York Review Books in May.

Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist. Her books include In the Eye of the Wild, Les Ames sauvages: Face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska (winner of the Prix Louis Castex of the Académie Française), and, most recently, Lamont des sources. In 2023 she became professor of Habitabilité de la Terre et transitions justes at the University of Paris 1/Sorbonne, and she is the director of Tvaian, a documentary based on the experiences of Daria, one of the subjects of East of Dreams.

Sophie R. Lewis is an editor and a translator from the French and Portuguese. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait was short-listed for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, and her translation of In the Eye of the Wild was a winner of the nonfiction translation prize from the French-American Foundation in 2022.

Alessandra Lopez in Antigone in Analysis, March 19, 2026. Photograph by Marina Levitskaya.

For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. 

It’s not hard to hazard the reasons for the renewed popularity of the Theban protestor who challenges the authoritarian rule of her uncle, King Creon, and is subsequently put to death. (One production titled its director’s note “Caution to the Resistance …”) But it is curious that, among the many iterations of Antigone now at hand, each has striven so forcefully to recast and reimagine her for the modern era. Virginia Woolf once wrote that Electra, another famous Sophocles ingenue, perpetually “stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that.” And yet contemporary theater seems to see Antigone as a character who can be moved quite freely—in the case of the Flea’s recently closed production, doubly so. The director, Alex Pepperman, based his adaptation not on the original text but on a script by Jean Anouilh, first staged in Nazi-occupied France in 1942. Where Anouilh’s Creon subtly echoed the spineless authority of the Vichy regime (so subtly that the play eluded the Nazi censors), Pepperman’s updated references are somewhat less oblique. “The time is 2030, and the neo-fascist Regime 47 has entered its Third Term in The United States,” his director’s note reads. “The 47th President continues to rule over all, now hailed as Supreme Leader.”

The other modern Antigones have perambulated nearly as far from their Greek eponym. The Public Theater’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) makes an unmistakable bid for contemporary relevance with its subtitle. The “I” of the parenthetical is not Antigone but the Chorus, voiced by a diffident cardigan-wearing woman (Celia Keenan-Bolger) who stands in, at once, for the classical Greek chorus; Creon’s wife, Eurydice; and, implicitly, the playwright. In an early scene, the Chorus confesses that when she first read the play in the titular English class, she had been put off by Antigone, recalling a girl who spoke too freely, too absolutely. (“I wasn’t feeling it,” she tells the audience, “I mean, here was this girl who says whatever she wants, whenever she wants, even on pain of death.”) And yet she was prompted to revisit the story after seeing it in the hands of a twitchy teenager on a plane, who didn’t “seem to like it very much.” The teen confirms: “Is it even about her? It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.”  

The desire for a play “about” Antigone and her body is ostensibly the catalyst for this one, but when Antigone (Susannah Perkins) appears, she is quick to clarify that she is not the Antigone from Greek myth—despite inheriting the name, the family, and the foreboding sense of family cursedness. This Antigone is much more impulsive than her forebear: we find her, in an early scene, drunk and chatting up a bartender named Achilles (Ethan Dubin)—not the Greek hero; he just happens to share the name—about the coronation of her uncle, which she missed. The Thebes around her is an abstraction refracted through present-day anxieties: a nervous polity, a sense of civic unraveling, and this newly crowned ruler, anxious to make his mark as an orator. (His coronation speech, as Achilles tells Antigone, went on into the evening). Creon (Tony Shalhoub) is something of a straw-man dictator, set on reviving Thebes with a return to family values. He believes he has “been appointed to do no less than resanctify the value of life itself,” a commitment which proves rather literal. He bans abortions—an unfortunate twist for Antigone, who, we learn, is pregnant with his grandchild. 

Tony Shalhoub in the world premiere production of ANTIGONE (THIS PLAY I READ IN HIGH SCHOOL) by Anna Ziegler and directed by Tyne Rafaeli. Photograph by Joan Marcus.

This protagonist, in other words, becomes a rebel not because she chooses to give her brother a proper burial against her uncle’s orders but because she chooses to terminate her pregnancy—a crime now punishable by death. The playwright, Anna Ziegler, is clearly drawn to the etymological pun embedded in Antigone’s name—as the script notes, the word “can mean against (anti) procreation (gone).” The shift is conceptually intriguing but dramatically vexing. The more the play departs from the outlines of Sophocles’s tragedy, the more the classical scaffolding begins to feel ornamental, even arbitrary. A drama in which a woman wrestles with an unplanned pregnancy is very different from a play in which she weighs her duties to one dead sibling over a living one. In the Sophocles, Antigone’s action is anchored in both a bond with her brother and a stark calculus about what is owed to the dead. Ziegler’s version replaces that reckoning with one oriented toward autonomy and the ethics of bringing a child into a damaged world. As Antigone sputteringly tells her sister, Ismene (Haley Wong), “To be a mother—right now. To bring a child into … After everything that … It just doesn’t feel…” 

The motivations of Ziegler’s Antigone seem intermittently unmoored, even glib. When Ismene urges her to keep the child and, by extension, her life, she nonchalantly likens having a baby to passing along “a joint at a dimly lit party.” The character’s tonal volatility is compounded by that of the play, where scenes of high-stakes deliberation are interspersed with sketch-like comic interludes—often involving three policemen who speak in overlapping dialogue with exaggerated Boston accents. When one of them remarks that “it’s like we walked into someone else’s book,” the observation lands with unintended precision. At its core, Ziegler’s play is concerned with a question about inheritance—what it means to receive a story already saturated with meaning and to attempt to live differently within it. While Ziegler’s Antigone resists the script she has been given, the play itself seems less certain about how to rewrite it.

Celia Keenan-Bolger and Susannah Perkins in the world premiere production of ANTIGONE (THIS PLAY I READ IN HIGH SCHOOL) by Anna Ziegler and directed by Tyne Rafaeli. Photograph by Joan Marcus.

On the other side of the spectrum sits Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place, a work putatively inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone and yet so slight and self-contained that its kinship with the Greek play can scarcely be felt. There are no overt invocations of Thebes, no would-be suitors for Antigone, no sweeping gestures toward myth, only faint structural echoes: a fractured household, the specter of incest, an obstinate uncle, a young woman whose attachment to a family member resists the prescriptions of others. In this production—whose spring run at the Shed can now be streamed on the National Theatre at Home platform—Zeldin’s Antigone analogue, Annie (Emma D’Arcy), returns to her childhood home for the first time in years. Her father had committed suicide when she was a teen; Annie, who had discovered his body, has been estranged from her family ever since. Her return now has been prompted by her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies), who has decided to inter her father’s ashes. Chris, who has assumed ownership of his deceased brother’s house and has overseen its renovation, feels that a burial would settle the dead into the earth and allow the living to move on.

For her part, Annie, not yet ready to move on, wants her father’s ashes to remain within the house. The circumstances of his suicide introduce a psychic rupture that the play circles without fully exploring. No motive for the suicide is supplied and no mention is made of Annie’s mother. The family tension instead revolves around the taboo of incest, which Zeldin relocates from Oedipus and Jocasta onto the dyad of Annie and Chris. Their interactions veer into territory that feels deliberately disquieting. In one scene, Annie spits into Chris’s open mouth as he kneels before her; in another, he searches her by stuffing his hands into her pants.

But it is hard to know what to make of these moments, or how they fit into the play’s broader emotional logic. In an early scene, Annie insists “that more people are harmed from within the family than outside of it,” and, in its suggestion is that Annie has been groomed or preyed upon by her uncle, The Other Place has the whiff of a #MeToo drama. Yet the contours of Annie’s relationship with Chris are far from clear—is it coercion, misplaced longing, or some unstable mixture of both? In one moment of apparent passion, she and her uncle kiss under a red tea cloth that he has draped over his head, as if to hide their shame from the gods. The stage directions note that this “is the live consummation of what has been for years a secret,” though in the play that remains unsaid. This Annie is a far cry from Sophocles’s heroine, whose clarity of purpose burns through every prohibition; with Annie, one gets the perverse sense of someone burning through prohibitions in order to find a clearer sense of purpose. By the end, however, her desires seem to remain opaque even to herself. Where the classical Antigone strides toward her living tomb with a kind of terrible lucidity, this one recoils and finally vanishes by her own hand, after Chris’s partner, Erica (Lorna Brown), an underwritten Eurydice figure, catches Annie and Chris necking in the kitchen. Her suicide arrives not as an act of principled resistance but as something closer to emotional collapse.

Like Ziegler’s Antigone, Barbara Barclay’s Antigone in Analysis carries with it the baggage of all the inherited ideas about the Greek princess. Ziegler’s script includes a page of paratextual quotations from the likes of Albert Camus, Václav Havel, and Helen Morales. The play, produced by Peculiar Works Project and recently staged at La MaMa, invites us into a metaphysical salon where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Judith Butler, Søren Kierkegaard, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan circle Antigone like disputatious vultures, pecking at the play’s meanings while intermittently donning its various roles.

The production’s most conspicuous deviation is to elevate Jocasta into Creon’s place—she’s crowned queen and escorted to a throne by Butler and Irigaray—reframing the conflict as one between mother and daughter as well as ruler and dissident subject. (Barclay has said that the work began as a way for her to explore her own relationship with her mother, before blooming into a larger play about blindness in Sophocles.) The tension here derives from Antigone’s open antagonism toward her mother’s complicity in committing incest with her son turned husband (Antigone Agonistes could be an alternate title). Her bluntness is characteristic of this hourlong play, which also makes the mystifying choice to stuff lines from Hamlet into the mouth of its titular character. “O shame, where is thy blush?” Antigone asks her mother; Jocasta, in turn, spouts lines from Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech.

Arrayed like tennis doubles partners at the corners of a rectangle, the philosophers bat their claims across the stage with competitive zeal. Kierkegaard’s belief that “women should stay at home and bear children—as many male children as possible” collides with Butler’s insistence on gender as performance (an idea the play implicitly endorses), while Irigaray presses for a specifically feminine language that resists absorption into male frameworks. I was too distracted by the gray mass that fails to pass for hair on top of Hegel’s head to make much sense of his musings. At one point, she is subjected to a mock clinical examination, as though the play were literalizing centuries of theoretical scrutiny. The kindest thing one could say about this work is that it has, to quote Bernard Williams, “one thought too many.”

On the question of Antigone’s motivations, the philosophers and psychoanalysts never converge; her rebellion is alternately framed as ethical necessity, psychological compulsion, gendered performance, and overdetermined resistance. What remains palpable, despite the din, is a sense of Antigone as a perennial provocation: not so much a peerless as a peerful figure containing multitudes, to judge by all the recent adaptations featuring a teen refusing to adapt to the times. In his forthcoming book Antigone as Political Philosophy, the philosopher Gregor Moder suggests that what appeals most to contemporary audiences about the Greek noblewoman is her ethical rectitude, or “attitude,” even as her determination to bury her dead brother perplexes and leaves some people cold. “Maybe Antigone sets an example precisely with the substantive emptiness of her deed, with the absence of any comprehensible intention, with a hiatus or gap in which we can set our own stake and our own potential subjectivity,” he writes. If Barclay’s play buckles under the weight of its relentless philosophizing, it nonetheless testifies to the fact that Sophocles’s heroine refuses to stay buried, no matter how many layers of theory are piled atop her. Butler speaks for all four playwrights when they note that “Antigone haunts us, a hungry whispering that our past is still with us.”

Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. She has covered books and theater for 4Columns, Artforum, frieze, the Nation, the Boston Globe, and the New Republic.

Courtesy of Jake Lancaster.

When Alex Pretti was shot ten times in South Minneapolis on a cold but sunny Saturday morning in front of a doughnut shop, I was likely three or four miles away, speeding down I-94 to make it to the airport before my wife’s flight to Florida. She was surprising her sister, who was turning fifty. It was well below zero and we were all very cranky, and running late. My son and daughter were in the back seat. We passed the Basilica of Saint Mary on the left, the Walker Art Center on the right. From the freeway you can see Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. I told the kids to look, but the novelty had worn off over the years: it was just a big cherry in a spoon, decorative and somewhat obscene. We passed under a pedestrian bridge designed by an architect who commissioned John Ashbery to write a poem for it. The poem is called “untitled bridge poem” and is stenciled across the structure’s steel girders and ends with the line (in what I’ve always thought to be a satisfying anti-epiphany) “And then it got very cool.” There’s a tunnel after the bridge, and everyone holds their breath until we make it through.

I know my way around Minneapolis. I’ve lived here for two decades, in North Minneapolis, in Uptown, Downtown, Northeast, and South Minneapolis, and now in a near north suburb, but I still use Google Maps because there’s more than one way to the airport and there’s always road construction and unforeseen traffic and, for the past couple of weeks, the possibility of a protest or march or ICE activity blocking a major thoroughfare. Machine learning can predict these things. Most human citizens who aren’t on Signal chats or ICE watch group text threads cannot.

The Hiawatha Avenue route is a relative shortcut if it’s not jammed up. It wasn’t exactly flowing. I turned down the volume on the radio, which had been playing Sabrina Carpenter.

We bought our first house east of here, four blocks before the Mississippi River bisects historically Protestant Minneapolis and historically Catholic Saint Paul. I’ve always thought of the cities this way. Purgatory to the east, no purgatory to the west.

The Maps route I started to question. We dipped through the VA hospital grounds and ended up following the light-rail on a service road. A brown Suburban full of sheriffs appeared to be on the lookout at a railroad crossing. It felt filmic, neowestern, Sam Peckinpah somewhere in the snowfields trying to figure out how to shoot in Netflix-approved 4K with a Sony FX3. A man in a camouflage hunting jacket, perched behind an electrical box covered in silver graffiti, filmed the sheriffs with his phone. Where are we? my wife said. Yeah, Dad, where are we, my son asked. Yeah, Dad. It appeared we’d wound up behind the Whipple Federal Building. Shit, I said. Sorry. I have no idea how we ended up here.

There wasn’t much in the way of passion or violence. There were a lot of people standing around, trying to stay warm in their canvas overalls and Sorel boots and fur-trimmed parkas. There was a card table with Dunkin’ coffees and Dunkin’ boxes. The Whipple building is a drab imposition of an edifice, architecturally similar to the courthouse Josef K. is remanded to in Orson Welles’s film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Not far away are well-maintained softball fields. The news of another person killed at the hands of ICE had not yet reached the internet.

On a sign that said EMPLOYEE PARKING ONLY, someone had markered a line through the word EMPLOYEE and written PIG above it in thick pink Sharpie, in a penmanship I can describe only as well refined. We were flanked, a family of four in a Jeep with a cracked windshield, by the fascists and the resistance. The street was dirty with salt and sand. Minneapolis in the dead of winter, without the cover of fresh snow, is an ugly, pitiless city. Who are all these people? my daughter asked. They’re people protesting the federal agents who are arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants and people who look like immigrants, and the woman they shot and killed a while back, I said. Are the protests legal? she said. Yeah, I said, they’re legal and encouraged. Everyone has the right to speak up in this country, no matter what you believe.

I made eye contact with a young woman standing on the curb. She wore red-framed glasses beneath one of those fur hats with the ear flaps, the kind Lenin and Gorbachev wore. I didn’t know what to do other than smile timidly. A plane lifted off the tarmac in the distance and the dusty snow whipped up, then settled back down.

We made it to the departures area. We did our hugs. We said our goodbyes. We all loved one another. I turned the volume on the radio back up and we all sang along to Chappell Roan as we drove back home, carefully, through a snowstorm that had arrived without warning.

I watched the footage of the shooting that night, over and over. I remembered the first video like this I’d seen, in college: a grainy tableau of ISIS soldiers beheading a journalist with a machete.

***

Six days after the shooting, I took the dog for a walk around the block. It was, again, way below zero. One of our neighbors is a hoarder. Once or twice a year, men in hazmat suits from some kind of toxic-waste-abatement company descend upon his bungalow and fill up a couple of rollaway dumpsters with all the junk of his life. He’s somewhat friendly. When I came upon his corner house, I saw that his Toyota Camry had gotten stuck in a snowbank while he was trying to access his mailbox. The wheels were spinning out, worsening the impasse. The sound was awful, high-pitched and violently impotent. He rolled down his window, spit, then asked if I could push him out. I wanted to be of assistance but found myself in a jam: the dog, freaked out by the hellish sounds of the engine, wouldn’t go near the car, and if I let him off his leash, I’d likely spend the rest of the afternoon tracking him down. I told him to go back and forth from forward to reverse, but gingerly. His lead foot couldn’t translate “gingerly.” Smoke came off the tires. My dog’s flipping out, I shouted—he’d partially freed himself from his harness—you’ll have to find someone else to help. Or I can come back in a bit. He said he understood. His face was wan, his hair white.

Fifteen miles away, fifty thousand people marched through downtown Minneapolis in a display of solidarity against ICE and Trump, gathered to defend the preservation of long-held democratic norms, to stand together for truth and freedom. The images shot from drones were seen all around the world.

I didn’t make it back to help the man free himself from the snowbank. But the next day I saw that the car wasn’t there.

***

With my wife in Florida, I thought I’d take the kids to Matt’s Bar, a local haunt famous for its cheese-stuffed burgers, but all the news stories, which I guess I trusted in their veracity to some degree, were indicating that the area was in distress. Road blockades erected by activists, et cetera. We drove south into Saint Paul instead, the fuel light on. I made it to a Marathon station with less than a gallon in the tank. As I pumped gas, I watched two men in front of an Ethiopian restaurant smoke and argue and stick their cigarettes into each other’s chests.

The Nook’s Jucy Lucy (the colloquial term for the aforementioned cheese-stuffed burger) is second-class, but the restaurant has comforting booths and the kind of light all good dive bars have, golden and sparse. The hostess asked if we wanted to sit upstairs or downstairs and I said, Upstairs is fine, and she said, Have you ever been downstairs, keening in on the bummed-out body language of my kids, who were shivering and hungry and missing their mother. There’s bowling and video games, she said.

It was a dingy kind of heaven downstairs, no windows, no sunlight, eight uneven lanes of blond hardwood, Naugahyde booths and Naugahyde chairs, the arcade annex cold and lit with bluish light, dollar bills defaced by diners and drunks plastered to the walls and hanging from the low ceiling. I don’t know the history of the lanes or the building, but it’s old. The scent of the memory of cigarette smoke lingered.

We sat and ordered and played Uno and ate our cheeseburgers and onion rings and everyone around us did approximately the same. A man bowled by himself with exemplary form. Behind us, a young couple, possibly on a date, went on about the First and Second Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, how they were just words on paper, They’re just words and language and shit, and, Yeah, I thought, pretty flimsy stuff. They moved from the U.S. Constitution to discussing their favorite places for boba tea.

I didn’t know what size shoes my kids wore and they didn’t either so when we were renting shoes I just held up their feet and asked the kid behind the counter for something about that size. The lanes didn’t have digital scorekeeping technology and I’d forgotten how to keep score with a pencil. I marked each frame by how many pins fell. I figured I’d add everything up when we were done, or just declare my daughter the winner because she’s the youngest and a bit of a sore loser. The man bowling alone was joined by what I presumed was his family. His wife kept her jacket on and sucked down a daiquiri. The kids were teenagers, sullen, in drab sweaters. The boy wore a Slipknot beanie over his long hair. They didn’t seem to have much to say to one another. They just bowled. They all had their own idiosyncratic styles, and they were all pretty good. There were TVs here and there, but none of them played the news. Sports flickered across the screens, soccer and basketball, a game from Germany and a Timberwolves replay. My phone didn’t get reception and I didn’t ask the bartender for the Wi-Fi password. A yellow sign hung above our lane, two red lightning bolts on the sides: DANGER: DO NOT WALK ON BOWLING LANES: DEATH MAY OCCUR: YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE. I drank two Miller High Lifes. Bowling is essentially a parlor game, slightly more effortful than darts or pool, but the effect is the same, a sort of lostness in a low-stakes challenge to obliterate time. The afternoon went by. Five dollars a game is a great deal on forgetting.

***

When ICE agents first arrived in Minneapolis, a few weeks before Christmas, when I was still working as a bartender at a restaurant that has since been sold to developers so that it can be razed and transformed into a parking lot, I asked the head chef, who is my friend, and Mexican American, if, you know, he was all good, and he said, Yeah, man, all good (not entirely convincingly), just praying for this fucking country.

The kids asked me if he was okay (he hooked them up with chicken tenders and ice cream whenever they visited), because they knew he was from Mexico. I told them he was okay, because he’d told me he was okay.

***

Toward the end of the first week of February, after I’d read about the possibility of a “potential drawdown of troops if certain conditions are met,” and some person’s account of not being able to walk outside their home without inhaling tear gas, and how six students had chained themselves to a University of Minnesota building and had some demands re ICE, I went out into the world to take care of the kinds of things that fatherhood necessitates.

First, I drove my son fifteen miles to the indoor soccer facility where he trains, most of the drive spent trying to reconnect my phone to the Jeep’s Bluetooth so we could continue to listen to Terry Allen’s “The Wolfman of Del Rio.” My son thinks it’s a song about the supernatural. I didn’t tell him the Wolfman of Del Rio is a disc jockey, and the song is about “some disease of the dreams” that’s been going around.

After dropping him off, I drove twelve miles to Menards to buy dog food, paper towels, and hand soap. I got all that in addition to a pair of leather work gloves. Inside Menards some skater kid appeared to be passed out on a display of outdoor patio furniture, like overdosed out, fentanyled out, but then his buddy rolled up and punched him in the arm and they shared hits off a pink vape pen. I was exhausted so I bought a Monster Energy drink at the checkout. In a drive-through automatic car wash, deprived of phone service, floating, as it were, through a bath of pink-smelling soap and the sound of pulsing water, no music, no NPR, I wondered if everyone in America could use a quick voyage like this, the sounds and aromas, a distilling bath.

I picked my son up from soccer before heading into the nearby countryside to retrieve my daughter from a playdate. We have friends who live in the country, who keep horses and shoot guns and fish from their riverbank and believe in God. My daughter’s friend’s dad texted and told me to go into the garage when we got there. All the cross streets before their house are named after Native American tribes, Kiowa, Makah, Quapaw. There are no streetlights. In the propane-heated garage, I was instructed to lift up the back of a snowmobile. I held the ass end aloft as he jammed in two-by-fours to hold it up. I’d been unwillingly drafted into helping him install some new springs. My son and one of his daughters, still wearing her Catholic school uniform, played Ping-Pong on a crooked table. I turned some wrenches and clamped some things with a vise grip and floated a few unsound theories as to why a certain bolt kept spinning but not coming out. I’ll figure it out, he said, picking up on the fact that we had to be on our way. But first he wanted me to take a look at his bathroom—the toilet had backed up after a pipe to the septic tank froze. He told me he’d filled four Shop-Vacs with shit, then banged his head on the wall hard enough that he saw stars.

We saw a deer on the drive out, and a tall man in a reflective vest walking his two Afghan hounds. Everyone was hungry, for Dairy Queen specifically, though there were at least seven or eight different fast-food restaurants on the most direct route home. I thought I knew where a Dairy Queen was but I didn’t. We live in the kind of place where commercial intersections all look exactly the same. We went way the hell out of our way for Dairy Queen. Everyone was happy. While crossing the Rum River my daughter asked where we were. I said, I’m not sure. I think Andover (a Minneapolis exurb) is to our right and Anoka (another exurb) is to our left. You mean we’re in the middle of nowhere, she asked. We’re somewhere, I said, just maybe a kind of unnamed place. So the middle of nowhere, she said, fatally. When we got home and unloaded the Dairy Queen, the order was missing a cheeseburger.

***

It was Saturday, late January, and a national economic blackout was taking place. I didn’t exactly participate: from Amazon I ordered a used copy of The Occupation Trilogy, a collection of three novellas by Patrick Modiano. It was supposed to arrive in a week. And we got some groceries at Aldi.

***

We’d procured a whistle, the new symbol of antifascist resistance, Woody Guthrie’s Martin guitar for the masses, 3-D printed and algae green, and my daughter found the kitchen to be the best place to summon forth its disharmonious song, despite knowing it was intended for emergencies: if there were strange men on the street, if our neighbors appeared to be in some kind of trouble, our neighbors who aren’t white.

***

On the flight to Florida to reunite with my wife, who’d been gone for a week, as the kids watched sitcoms on their Kindles for three straight hours, I started to feel feverish. It took me half the flight to get through a single passage in the second novella in The Occupation Trilogy, called The Night Watch, which I’d picked up hoping for something like a historical account, lessons, moral guidance, et cetera. I was pleased to discover that it offered none of these things, only portraits of men and women living through their own unfathomable epoch, the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, resisting, collaborating, arranging orgies, shooting dope, raging, giving up Jews, hiding Jews, reading, writing, fleeing, staying, singing.

At the pool later that day, my wife, clutching her phone and a can of High Noon, announced that Operation Metro Surge was winding down. Reggae music dripped from outdoor speakers made to look like rocks under the hot sun, far away from the gray filth of midwinter Minneapolis. After some Marco Polo, some cannonballs, an episode of choking on the warm salt water, we all four of us raced one another from the shallow end to the deep end.