The end: In the latest addition to The Harper Review’s missive debate over whether we should still believe in progress, assistant editor Sarah Peter asks: when will we have finally had enough? Citing German sociologist Max Weber, Peter cautions that progress has grown untethered from purpose and turned into its own justification. We are “condemned to endless work—seized by the hope that others will advance beyond us.” Where amidst our endless striving is our endpoint, our telos? And who will we find that we’ve become when we get there?
Declan Rexer, managing editor
I write to you, then, from the outside. Watch a squirrel bounce around the muddy earth looking for nuts. Stare at the sky from the Midway as fat clouds bask in the moody light of sunset. Civilization has and will continue to build upon itself. Your consumption will prove worth their toil, but only if you let yourself breathe in between the lines, essays, albums, and conversations you scurry to keep up with, head down, frowning.
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Past prologue: “Reunion” by Richard Ford sags under the weight of wasted years. I came across this piece in Sharon Pomerantz’s creative writing class on narrative influence, accompanied by John Cheever’s one-page story of the same name published 38 years prior. Cheever’s is minimalist, almost exclusively dialogue; Ford responds with a long, rambling past of crisis leading up to an anticlimactic interaction and, in doing so, provides a far more powerful story by reeling us into the confused head of an aging man, as opposed to the silent young narrator of Cheever.
‘You can’t change the past’ is a trite statement, but to what extent is your past you? For our narrator, it’s all he sees: he runs into Mack Folger, whose ex-wife the narrator had a sordid affair with over a year prior. Before Folger even speaks, the narrator recounts the long story leading up to this encounter, full of lists of events once lived and now gone. Even during their brief, meaningless conversation, the narrator can’t help but recall those moments between the hazy stream of exhausted words the two men exchange. He belatedly tells himself, after Folger leaves this lonely old man to be with his daughter, that “None of this was a good thing to have done.”
Is it impossible to change yourself, then? Carried on, this spirals into the existential question: what is the self? I am not sure if I should anticipate or dread the day when I have an answer.
Reilly Pryma, assistant digital editor
Disappearing act: There is never a dull moment in Paris, which makes one a bit nostalgic for Chicago. On the docket this week, France’s political sphere has taken a breather from chaos and is spending its fall break gazing into the black hole recently made into the facade of the Louvre (for other news from the galactic empire of France, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s classics collection par excellence, anticipating an escapist rush, has decided the country needs a couple of good puffs on the opium pipe and reissued Alice in Wonderland).
The past couple of weeks have looked bleak for Macron and his allies, with a former prime minister saying the current administration practices a “negation of politics,” high praise for a cabinet elsewhere described as “intellectually running on fumes.” Compared to Macron, even former president Nicolas Sarkozy has it relatively well, with state protection and a guaranteed residence for the next five years (in the Santé prison). For everyone in the new-ish government, the theft of €88 million worth of Napoleonic jewels must be a relieving distraction from their shambolic attempts to compromise on a (much pricier) budget—everyone except Rachida Dati, political foghorn and minister of culture. Dati, oddly enough, has been rather quiet and diplomatic about the break-in. One paper accused her of “hiding behind a smokescreen” which, frankly, anyone could do if they walked a block down a Paris sidewalk.
In light of such disappearances, it’s a good time to revisit Georges Perec, a writer from the Oulipo school who mastered the art of omission. His detective novel La Disparition (The Disappearance) contains no es and deals with the loss of his family in the Second War World through the blatant symbolism of its protagonist, “Anton Voyl”, investigating a missing companion. Its companion piece, Les Revenentes (The Returners or The Undead), contains only the e vowel and coincidentally revolves around a jewel heist. Both explore morality and criminality through critical lexical constraints—La Disparition, by Perec’s rules, cannot contain the word “I” (je) while Les Revenentes can barely contain anything else. Through these dizzying yet melancholic exercises in absence, Perec evidences the mania that follows disappearance and the absurdity of contemporary society, both well reflected in our own.
Brady Santoro, senior editor