an excerpt from ada palmer's "perhaps the stars"

One of my favorite recent book series from the past few years is Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, which begins with Too Like the Lightning and concludes with Perhaps the Stars. Though this excerpt is from the final novel, it contains no plot spoilers.

For context: in the imagined future world of the series, Terra the Moon Baby was the first child born on the moon, a historical figure who died from health complications due to the circumstances of her birth. Terra Ignota means "unknown lands", and was Latin text that was sometimes inscribed at the edge of maps.

The old United States of America remind me very much of Terra the Moon Baby. Both were crisis births, sudden necessities when too much damage made healing and homecoming impossible. Each era’s genius rose to the occasion, marshalling our newest guesses, how best to nurture human possibility amid such strange new problems. Old wisdom said of each that she would not live long, this birth unplanned, wracked in the womb by strange forces, so, as she survived, each month, each year became hope’s small defiance: Look, I stand on my own, and walk, and speak, and feed myself, and now the friends I leaned on in my frailty lean on me as I grow into my strength! As all Earth watched and listened, each fresh act of the toddler helped us plan our own sojourns beyond the old walls of the known and possible. And even in her later years, as one by one her organs failed her—judiciary, liver, senate, heart, all patched together in her infancy by scholar-surgeons who could only guess how this unprecedented body would develop under Earth’s long battering—as one by one these failed her, still we learned so much, so much from how they failed her as, smiling between her pains, this hope-child gifted us the infinite treasure of understanding what broke down. What killed her. That understanding which is bedrock now of how we don’t break down as we dare venture farther, out past monarchy, past Moon, these vast terrae ignotae on whose thresholds it was so hard to be firstborn.

This paragraph hit hard the first time I read it, and hits harder today, as the organs of the United States continue their path towards failure. There's a hopefulness there, that the world can learn something from the fall of the American empire, that, for all its failings, there is still some beauty to be found, if not in America itself, than in what it tried to be.

I've discussed here how I have been reading about the Enlightenment recently, in part because I was trying to understand better where America came from. And while I think it was flawed from its inception, I am coming to better appreciate that when America was founded, there was cause for the European intellectuals who dreamed of Enlightenment--of freedom from the church, from censorship, from a world governed by arbitrary whim rather than by scientific study and reason--to be hopeful when America won its independence. And I have to hope that we can learn, as we see this country falter, how to do better in the future.

None of which is to say that this is good. Fundamentalist Christians seizing power and launching their blitz on the rights of everyone who is not them, starting with criminalizing trans people and banning abortion but by no means stopping there, is a terrifying reality and showcases the depths to which humanity can sink when it allows itself to be governed by hate and fear. I hope for a better world; that does not mean I think this one is good, nor that I think a better world is inevitable. But I do think that a better world is possible if we work for it, and that when America falls, it will be possible to learn.

a prelude for may

I've always liked May. In years like this one, when the Spring is cold and Winter's tyranny is slow to fade, it is the month when we stagger blinking into the light, some part of us not quite willing to believe that it's really over, that Winter's grasp has really fallen slack. And then, when we finally realize that it's real, that it's here, we can finally celebrate. Such celebrations are always short-lived, of course: Summer is just around the corner, and she comes with the threat of heat and smoke, but for now, at least, the air is warm and vibrant and everything is flowers.

It's appropriate that May is the month when I am leaving this dreary apartment in the northern outskirts of the city and moving into a more vibrant neighborhood with people I like a whole lot better, and even more appropriate that our search for new housing seemed like it might be fruitless prior to this latest windfall. Sometimes the whims of the weather and seasons form an appropriate macrocosm to the microcosms of our lives; sometimes we can pretend there is some order to the universe.

I've been taking the train to and from work for almost two years now; yesterday I instead rode my bike home, to see what the new commute would be like. It was the perfect day, not too warm, not too bright, but warm enough and bright enough, with a sky full of shifting spring clouds, and afterwards I felt so much better than I had in a long time. Sometimes something as small as taking a bike ride for a few miles can make the whole world seem different.

And that, I think, is why I like Spring and her cousin Autumn so much: they are fleeting and ephemeral and still leave the whole world transformed.