January 2026

In this novel, Kavenna weaves together four tales on motherhood. The weaving of the four is both explicit and implicit. The first tale is a semi-fictional account of the last days of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th century Viennese doctor who theorized that the deaths of many women just after giving birth was caused by an infection introduced by doctors who moved directly from performing autopsies on women who had died to assisting other women in the birth of their children. The women were dying of postpartum infection introduced by the doctors’ unwashed hands. Semmelweis conducted his own experiment, washing his hands in a chlorinated lime solution before assisting in a birth, and lowered the mortality rate of his patients dramatically. However, he had no explanation for why hand washing was effective — germ theory came later — and his medical colleagues refused to follow his advice. They ridiculed him and said he had no business instructing them about personal hygiene. Semmelweis didn’t deal with this rejection very well — he suffered a nervous breakdown, and died in an asylum after his colleagues had him committed.

In order to avoid spoliers, I’ll describe the other threads in this novel much more briefly. One describes the experience of an early 21st century woman giving birth to her second child. The birth is complicated, the woman’s husband and mother, though well intentioned, aren’t fully there. Another is a description of a contemporary author’s release of his book about Semmelweis. The author struggles both with the expectations placed on him by his publicist and also with his estrangement from his dying mother. Finally, there’s an account of life in post-apocalyptic world in which giving birth and almost other elements of life have been “cleansed” of all emotional content. Here young women are sterilized after their eggs are harvested. Everyone lives — actually, is interred — in high-rise buildings in densely populated cities so that remaining land can be mechanically cultivated for food. Survival is not just the ultimate value — it’s the only value.

These stories together had me thinking not only about my own relationship with my parents (both as a child and as an adult), and also about my relationships with my wife and our adult son. Even more, I’ve been contemplating the medicalization of the birthing process, with both its benefits (lower mortality rates) and its drawbacks. I wouldn’t say that this is a great novel, but it’s definitely a thought-provoking one.

I’ll begin with a note I wrote as I began to read this book: “I’m fascinated by the quotation from Henry James from which Smith takes her title: ‘True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. … Do you know I sometimes think I am a man of genius half-finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door‘ (p. 22). Like James’s character, I’m looking for my absorbing errand.”

There were moments while reading this book when I felt like I was in a very productive therapy session. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that — after all, Smith is a practicing psychotherapist. But I want to emphasize the “very procuctive” qualifier in the previous sentence. This is not a superficial self-help book for writers and other creative types. It’s a solid discussion not only of creative work but also of the mental and emotional challenges aspiring creatives face. I, for one, find it to be very helpful, in large part because I’m challenged.

In her introduction, Smith introduces a metaphor built on the practice of gardening. I don’t remember her using the term “digital garden” (and the term isn’t in the index). Maggie Appleton suggests that this term was in use before 2012, when Smith’s book was published. Appleton includes a screenshot from Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay called “Hypertext Gardens” that includes the observation that “Gardens are farmland that delights the senses; parks are wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. large hypertexts and Web sites must often contain both parks and gardens.” Appleton also links to the long and rich The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield, which is worth reading (he says, having only skimmed the very long essay rather quickly).

What I find really helpful in Smith’s book is her emphasis in the metaphor on the life and work of the gardener rather than on the garden itself. This take is implicit and occasionally explicit in Appleton’s piece; it’s the main show in Smith’s book.

The good life is lived best by those with gardens — a truth that was already a gnarled old vine in ancient Rome, but a sturdy one that still bears fruit. I don’t mean one must garden qua garden …. I mean rather the moral equivalent of a garden — the virtual garden. I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create — and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own. … As with the literal act of gardening, pursuing any practice seriously is a generative, hardy way to live in the world. You are in charge (as much as we can ever pretend to be — sometimes like a sea captain hugging the rail in a hurricane); you plan; you design; you labor; you struggle. And your reward is that in some seasons you create a gratifying bounty (p. 3).

The work of the gardener — and the artist or writer — is challenging, but can also be very rewarding.

One must work hard to learn technique and form, and equally hard to learn how to bear the angst of creativity itself.… The effort brings with it a whole herd of psychological obstacles — rather like a wooly mass of obdurate sheep settled on the road blocking your car. For you to move forward, these creatures must be outwitted, dispersed, befriended, or herded, their impeding genius somehow overcome or co-opted. Otherwise the would-be art-maker gives up the outing without accruing enough skill, without staying with the effort long enough, to build a body of work and/or gain her own or a public’s esteem. These sheep are my subject. Perhaps you want to work at creating something challenging (something that may require a commitment of years for you to become technically adept, and that may often seem dreadfully difficult) like poems, ceramics, sculptures, photographs, paintings, performance art, or woven tapestries. But you find yourself putting off the attempt, or quitting as soon as you start, or midway through deciding you are talentless and it’s useless to try, or if you are actually working, feeling intermittently too discouraged and too alone. What is happening? Well, you may be asking the wrong questions or placing mistaken expectations on yourself. Particularly, you may be unaware of how the necessary struggles of your own unconscious mind, if misunderstood, will bruise your heart, arrest your efforts prematurely, and prevent your staying absorbed in your errand. Yet, the same struggles, appreciated, will enable your creativity and the larger processes of mastery (pp. 4f).

I don’t want to offer many details of the quasi therapy sessions I mentioned above, but I will say that I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Smith’s list of three sorts of tension, each grounded in one fear in opposition to another. First, there’s the fear that one will die without even attempting to realize a dream vs the fear of trying but failing to realize that dream. Second, there’s the fear of changing in a way that disrupts habits and surfaces new feelings vs the “fear of retreating into deadening custom.” Finally, there’s the fear of seeing one’s creative work, with all its risks, as expressive of the self that one is vs the fear of a life spent avoiding creative expression.

I’ll close with one more extensive quotation about the ruthlessness of time’s demands faced by anyone who wants both to invest significant time in creative activity while also living a life in rich relationships with family and friends. Smith is writing rather personally here about her experience with her father, the novelist Bernard Malamud:

Once he married, he felt responsible to support his family and so he taught full-time as well as wrote. Furthermore, he wanted to be a good family man, at least in his fashion, and a loving father. The resulting emotional conflict of where and how to spend his hours tested him sorely, particularly because, in order to achieve the quality to which he aspired, he had to put his writing first much of the time. And this priority created a predicament: How do you balance sacrifices? When do you give in to your wife’s admonitions and your children’s pleadings and join them for a Sunday at the beach? When do you abandon them again in order to spend the day in your office reworking a page of prose? How much time do you give to your students, or to colleagues and friends who ask for your help with their work? (Elena Delbanco, daughter of the great cellist Bernard Greenhouse, described on NPR how she used to erase the names of his cello students scheduled for a given day, and write in her own name, hoping, futilely, that he might grant her one of their hours) (pp. 168f).

I think this book is a very good read for anyone who wants to think more deeply about the challenges of making time for creative work. I’ve read more than a few pieces on the general topic of how to write — I’m really glad to have read this one. It came into my life at a good time.

I’ve already explained how I discovered (and then re-discovered) this book. I’ve also discussed some of what I learned by reading it — one important point: if you want to write, begin by reading, reading, and reading. He’s talking to aspiring novelists and writing novels, but I think the point holds for non-fiction and even blogging as well.

I’ve not read any of his fiction (yet), but I rather suspect that in his novels and short stories he employs some of the same story-telling practice evident in this book. Early on, he describes how he came to write his first novel. He was at a baseball game, sitting on the grass behind the outfield, watching his favorite team play. Just as one of the players hit a decisive fly ball into the outfield, Murakami thought to himself, “I could write a novel.” And so he did.

His approach to thinking mirrors the advice he offered to those who want to write: he insists that he can think only by writing:

The only way I can think about things in any kind of order is by putting them in writing. Physically moving my hand as I write, rereading what I write, over and over, and closely reworking it — only then am I finally able to gather my thoughts and grasp them like other people do. Because of this, through writing over time what’s been gathered in this volume, and rewriting it over and over, I’ve been able to think more systematically and take a broader view of myself, a novelist, and myself being a novelist (p. xi).

He takes this point even further, suggesting that as he’s creating a novel, the novel is creating him. He comes to be who he is in part by the stories that he tells. Moreover, story-telling can inform the nature of a society, especially as a society undergoes upheaval.

Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric system — by, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they utually modify each other — people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity

All in all, the book is an entertaining introduction to Murakami himself as a writer and thinker interspersed with anecdotes and advice regarding the craft of writing.

Hester Kaplan says that she hardly knew her father while he was still alive. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy time with him, and it’s not that she knew nothing about him. It’s rather that he didn’t reveal much of himself to her. In this book she recounts her attempt to know him more deeply after he died. Her quest has her reading notes and papers in his collection, and also his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography of Mark Twain. Twice Born describes many things Kaplan found in her father’s writing, but she also more imaginatively steps inside his head, describing what he must have thought as he wrote his Twain biography. By reading, imagining, and, finally, by writing, she hopes to discover more about the man her father was. The writing is a crucial step here: “To write is to move between what you already know and what you still need to discover” (p. 125). Not surprisingly, the man she finds — her father — shares many life experiences with Mark Twain. Hester Kaplan wonders if these similarities helped to create Justin Kaplan’s relationship with Twain and helped him to write such a sensitive biography.

I was moved to read this book by hearing Kaplan speak at the Boston Book Festival last fall. I admit that I sensed a personal connection with her topic, as I’ve often thought that I really didn’t know my father. I had some hints of who he was, and I knew something of how his early experiences, some traumatic, shaped his position in the world. Of course my father wasn’t the writer that Justin Kaplan was, and there are no folders containing pages and pages of unpublished notes and letters, much less published and highly regarded biographies. Reading Twice Born leaves me wishing for more and deeper engagements with my father who died over 15 years ago.

However, this book is much more than an account of Kaplan’s father. There are stories of what it was like to grow up in such a literary family. (Kaplan’s mother, Anne Bernays, was a successful novelist and teacher of writing.) There are also explorations, some of them explicit and others below the surface, of the nature of memoir, and also about writing fiction. One interesting anecdote from her Boston Book Festival comments — when Hester Kaplan, herself a novelist and short story author, began to write fiction, she found it difficult to imagine and describe the jobs that her characters had — the only professionals she knew much about while growing up were writers.

Kaplan’s subtitle suggests that she found something of her father in her encounter with his writing after he died. Reading the book leads me to think she found something of herself as well. A good book, well worth reading.

Le Cunff pulls together insights from a wide body of research and from the experience of creative types including herself, and describes different strategies for developing one’s potential. The heart of the book is captured in the title: instead of setting lofty and linear goals (first I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, etc), one should take on tiny experiments.

And the context in which this advice makes the most sense to me is captured well in her discussion of how one responds to uncertainty, whether this uncertainty is so intense as to cause extreme anxiety or a lesser form in which one simply can’t decide whether one is ready to take on a task. She suggests that one can respond to such uncertainty either with uneasiness or with curiosity. The uneasiness can manifest in cynicism (“doomscrolling, passing up opportunities”), escapism (“retail therapy, binge watching”), or perfectionism (“self-coercion, information hoarding, toxic productivity”). A better response, she suggests, is the response of curiosity. What might happen here if I try this? And this is where the tiny experiment kicks in. “I will [action] for [duration].” The action here is well-defined and circumscribed. The duration is long enough for a true test but short enough so as not to be overwhelming. If I’m wondering if I might benefit from meditating, but I fear that I’m not capable of sitting still for long periods of time or of maintaining a commitment. I should try it out. “I will meditate every day for 15 minutes for a week.” This, she says, is a simple experiment to satisfy the curiosity.

Le Cunff has established a community she calls Ness Labs where people interested in working on such strategies in community can gather.

(In one of those strange coincidences, I happened to read about Joan Westenberg’s similar strategies while reading this book.)

The saga continues. Tara continues to repeat 18 November over and over, but she finds companionship in this repetition. Being in a relationship with another person, however that relationship is defined, introduces complications. Whose experience of the repetition is definitive? To what extent is a person’s identity changed when long-term relationships with almost all other people are impossible, and how does a connection with someone else change that identity?

This volume is more philosophical than the previous two, diving into questions of the nature of time and also ethical questions about responsibility. If I know that some tragedy is going to happen in the afternoon on a particular day, and I then relive that same day with the opportunity to intervene to stop the tragedy from happening, should I – can I – intervene? What does responsibility even mean here?

I completed my initial reading of this book several months ago. I thought then — and still think now — that it’s a very important work in the area of Arendt scholarship. I came away from it thinking that I had a much better understanding than I had before of the overall thrust of Arendt’s political philosophy. At the same time, I was – and I still am — unwilling to say that I understand Arendt’s position. Canovan offers good reason for this caution, saying in her introduction that “one cannot understand one part of her thought unless one is aware of its connections with all the rest” (p. 6).

This caution is why I’ve not posted these notes until now. It’s also why I’ve not yet written and posted summary notes on several of Arendt’s books that I read last year. I’ve finally decided, however, that I need to do something to move forward in my understanding of her political philosophy. I see this as necessary in large part because the understanding that I have so far convinces me that her work is crucial to my understanding and responding effectively to the political challenges we face today. And so I begin here the heavy task of thinking with Arendt. In this beginning, I take some comfort from Arendt herself. I shouldn’t wait for or expect a definitive understanding of her position. The practice of good thinking never ends: “the need to think … can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew” (The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 88). So what I offer here is a first take. What I have here, then, is more like a program for my continued reading of and thinking about Arendt than a straightforward summary of Canovan’s book.

Canovan calls her work here a reinterpretation of Arendt’s thought. It’s new and different — different from that of other scholars, and also different from what Canovan said in her first book on Arendt, published 20 years before. She developed this reinterpretation on the basis of her reading of much of Arendt’s work that was unpublished at the time, which she accessed in the Arendt archives in the Library of Congress. Many — perhaps most — of those previously unpublished writings have been published in the 30-plus years after the publication of this book.

The central point of Canovan’s reinterpretation is that her early work in The Origins of Totalitarianism sets the context for everything that follows. This runs counter earlier interpretations, which relied more heavily on her later book The Human Condition. (And I admit here that The Human Condition was the only Arendt book I had read before returning to her a few years ago.) And the central, organizing insight that Canovan finds in Origins is her definition of the two defining characteristics of totalitarianism:

… what made Nazism and Stalinism ‘totalitarian’ in her sense was not the scale of their cruelties but something quite different, namely a uniquely modern combination of determinism and hubris. Totalitarians simultaneously committed two errors that might on the face of it seem to be incompatible: on the one hand they were determinists, surrendering human freedom to the march of forces they believed to be irresistible; on the other hand they were, in their restless activism, convinced that ‘everything is possible.’ The point (as Arendt sees it) is that modern men are tempted to purchase unlimited power at the cost of siding with inhuman forces and giving necessity a helping hand. To do this, however, is to betray all that is most characteristic of humanity. Human freedom and civilization are at the best of times vulnerable islands threatened by the raging tides of nature, but the great danger of modernity, in her view, is that human beings are continually letting loose further torrents, setting in motion pseudo-natural forces that can sweep away civilisation. Totalitarianism is the culmination of such tendencies, the ultimate hubris of finding that ‘everything is possible’ by moving with and accelerating these forces and sacrificing to them stability, spontaneity, plurality — everything that is genuinely human (pp. 12f).

Arendt sees both Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian movements, though in Origins she focuses much more on Nazism than on Stalinism. The Nazis’s camps were central to their project of sacrificing “everything that is genuinely human” to their project. In these camps, the Nazis sought to destroy the individuality of those imprisoned there and to treat the occupants as brutes without any rights at all — indeed, Arendt says, without even the right to have rights. People imprisoned in the camps were removed from the realm of political freedom. As Arendt put it in a lecture first published in 1961, “if one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing, and producing, because all of these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political” (Thinking Without a Banister, p. 223).

Responding effectively to totalitarianism requires that we acknowledge the plurality and spontaneity of human beings in the community of humankind. Arendt develops these related notions of plurality and spontaneity in later writings including The Human Condition. Recognizing this plurality — seeing that though we are all human, each of us is human in our own way — allows freedom to emerge. Each of us, she says, can act spontaneously, but this spontaneity is a form of pre-freedom, coming to full blossom only in politics, which is “the place where freedom can manifest itself and become a reality.”

It’s important to note Arendt’s insistence that politics is in the realm of action rather than the realm of work. She developed this distinction between work and action most systematically in The Human Condition. One distinction between work and action is that work implies the production of an object, and in this productive process the raw materials that make up the object become something else — e.g., the production of a wooden table requires the destruction of a tree as a living organism. Arendt would say that totalitarianism depends on seeing politics as being in the realm of work, requiring the destruction of the humanity of many people, which justifies the denial of rights to these people. She insisted that we should instead see politics as being in the realm of action, a coming together of human beings that provides for the spontaneous actions — thoughts, speech, art, etc. — of these people in community.