Can studying about different folks’s lives inform how we dwell our personal? This query arose as I learn, or moderately inhaled, Megan Marshall’s memoir “After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Coronary heart.”
Marshall is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who makes a speciality of trailblazing American ladies, together with Nineteenth-century journalist Margaret Fuller and midcentury poet Elizabeth Bishop.
In “After Lives,” Marshall turns the lens on her personal life. In a single poignant essay, for instance, Marshall recollects spending three months in Japan on a fellowship in 2017, throughout which she spent a lot time taking solitary walks.
She is drawn to the work of “the Thoreau of Japan,” a Twelfth-century poet turned Buddhist hermit. Kamo no Chōmei’s traditional ebook “Hōjō-ki” (“The Ten Foot Sq. Hut”) consists of the phrases, “And so the query / the place ought to we dwell? / and the way?” The hermit’s writings convey not solely the peace he present in nature, but in addition the struggling he witnessed earlier than retreating to his mountain hut. Chōmei’s verses later tackle larger resonance in Marshall’s life, when her beloved associate, Scott, dies in 2019 and the pandemic takes maintain.
She attracts sustenance from the ladies in her biographies, all of whose lives had been bordered with calamity and loss. And she or he displays on what it means to stay open and curious and hopeful concerning the future. She writes, “My season of introspection was receding, and as soon as once more I used to be wanting to be taught what I may from others: how one can dwell, how to not dwell, what it means to dwell. … It was time to start out in once more.”
