Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

  Take a moment to recall everything you know about René Descartes. “I think therefore I am” and all that. Did his means of death make your list? That he was poisoned by a Catholic priest who laced the communion wafer with arsenic? …What?! This is one of the surprising details that emerges in Robert Chapman’s impressive historical analysis Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism.

This nonfiction text essentially posits the thesis that the rise of capitalism created a normalizing framework that produces out-groups of disability that it subsequently exploits for its own wealth-generated ends. The book then champions the idea of reshaping society in a way that is more accessible for the neurodiversity inherent in our society. Ultimately, when we consider “disability,” or discuss ill mental health, the questions are: on what grounds? according to whom? They give the example of autism, which is seen as a disability because the world is not structured to respond to it. The fault lies with our structures, not the individuals who have been excluded from them.

The argument of the book is persuasive in its own right, but what I thought was most fascinating about the text were the historical parallels and the extraordinarily clear articulation of the central points.

In this history, Chapman describes the relationship of people in feudal society to work and disability. The thesis here is that people with disabilities were accommodated in the early days of feudalism—if you had mobility issues, you were given work in the home like sewing, while if you had difficulty in thinking clearly you might still be able to complete the menial tasks of farm life. The conception is probably a little idyllic, but nonetheless effectively establishes that each person had their place irrespective of disabilities.

Chapman then proceeds to explore the transition into a more capitalist and exclusionary mode. Returning to Descartes, for example, we see a concise and precise discussion of the philosopher’s contributions to conceptions of identity. Chapman outlines how Descartes initiated a conception of the human body which is mechanistic. (Chapman makes reference to Descartes’ interest in creating an automaton version of his daughter, though this anecdote appears to be debunked.) In any case, Descartes saw the body as animated not by a soul but by its own machinery. This emerges alongside increasing mechanization of work (and therefore the workforce). When the human body is nothing special, it becomes a machine that can be exploited for the ends of capitalism. 

The problem then becomes one of standardization. Again, the historical backdrop is pretty interesting. They describe how statistics emerged as a discipline from astronomers and astrologers trying to account for the variable appearance of astral bodies. They were searching for regularity and predictability. With the emergence of statistics as a field of study, it also led to the idea of standardization. It became a quest for the average. Capitalist logics adopted the idealism of the ‘average’ in order to increase its profitability: you produce products that appeal to the ‘average’ person. Some people argue that capitalism breeds innovation, but really it breeds the most easily sellable products on a mass-scale, meaning that the consumers which deviate from a conception of the ‘average’ user of product are left out of capitalism’s priorities. Capitalism looked for the ‘average’ needs of consumers and used statistics to render brains and consumers ‘normal’ in their consumption. This becomes even worse following Fordism and the standardized production process.

The trajectory Chapman sets out has a kind of clarity in its logic, and the byproduct is that capitalism creates in-groups and out-groups. The in-groups are people who are neurotypical and able to operate within capitalism’s structures—that is, until they burnout and enter the out-group neurodivergent class. The neurodivergent class is created as an outgroup that needs to access wellness through consumption. Capitalism wins its producers and consumers.

I appreciated that Chapman includes a chapter that addresses the nuances of mental illness. Seeing that capitalism benefits from broadening its conception of disability to create an excluded class, the temptation is to dismiss the psychiatry movement. Chapman, though, reserves a chapter for arguing against the anti-psychiatry movement. I have my own difficulties with the psychiatry movement; Foucault’s critique of the Power-Knowledge that informs the DSM always stuck with me. It does appear that psychiatry aims to normalize the human experience, which feels problematic. But, ignoring the real and authentic suffering of people with mental health concerns seems nearly as problematic as allowing capitalism to exploit them.

One interesting anecdote is Chapman’s account of the alliance between queer folk and the antipsychiatry movement. As many of you surely know, the DSM originally included homosexuality as a mental disorder and we see how antipsychiatry’s objection to the DSM formed an alliance with queer people who might otherwise want to access mental health supports but who object to the DSM’s construction of disorder. When the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, it should feel like a win, but it opened the question of how mental illness is distinct from other non normative ways of being. It created a conception of the psychiatry industry as arbitrary.

Chapman also looks at the intersection of race and neurodiversity. They provide some historical notes about how antislavery movements and civil rights movements have long been at the forefront of disability advocacy. I’m confident that an entire book could be written on the intersection of disability and antiracism advocacy; Chapman offers a brief but welcome glimpse into that story. There’s also a fair amount of commentary on the development of eugenics movements—even within supposedly liberal spaces—and different philosophies towards treating psychological afflictions (or ‘problems in living’). 

Ultimately, Chapman finds a balance between a questioning of neuronormativity while still holding space for the genuine afflictions in peoples’ lives, especially those that have been exacerbated by capitalism (cf. Mark Fisher re: depression within capitalist structures). As the world becomes more reified, the notion is that minds also must become more reified. Championing neurodiversity means that we recognize a philosophy towards society: different kinds of minds are suited to different kinds of tasks.

The book was really insightful into the historical context for neurodiversity and presents a persuasive argument for the connection between the standardization of capitalism and the production of out-groups (potentially stretching the definition of mental health so far as to render everyone disabled and thus consumers within the capitalist models). I really appreciated how thoughtful Chapman is in his approach and how applicable the text feels for engaging in advocacy both against capitalism and in favour of a neurologically diverse population.

Happy reading!

Are You Mad At Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You by Meg Josephson

  It feels like most people I know would benefit from reading this book. Either that, or I overestimate how normal the feelings explored in this book are. How many times do we find ourselves asking the titular question of Meg Josephon’s Are You Mad At Me? The book is part self-help and part psychology book, outlining the unhealthy compulsions so many of us (am I projecting?) feel: perfectionism, self-doubt, overcommitment, and so on. The experience of reading the book was pretty wild because I started off taking a lot of notes and decided to stop suddenly when I realized there were too many relatable quotations to document them all.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze—but the central focus of Josephson’s work is on the fawn response. For some of us, when we face a threat, our nervous system compels us towards appeasement and Josephson challenges us to consider the question: “when did I learn this was helpful or protective?”. Something I appreciate about Josephson’s approach is that she does not reject the feelings that arise or send us into shame spirals over how we should behave. Instead, she reinforces a narrative in which we thank the part of our brain that is trying to protect us before considering next steps. 

When we consider fawning behaviours in adult life, Josephson identifies the following: -Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you -Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries, and then feeling resentful -Avoiding conflict at all costs -Constantly fearing getting in trouble or being seen as “bad” -Constantly fearing that you are bad and you’re just fooling everyone -Constantly seeking external approval or validation -Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else -Feeling hypervigilant of peoples’ emotions and moods -Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel heard or understood -Feeling like everything is your fault and then overapologizing -Being indecisive because you don’t want to disappoint anyone or because you genuinely don’t know what you like or prefer -Not trusting yourself to make decisions -Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them -Never feeling good enough -Feeling unworthy of your accomplishments -Constantly feeling like you’re performing and trying to impress others and prove yourself to them -Feeling like you’re a chameleon in relationships

You can treat this like a quiz in Cosmopolitan and I’ll let you check off your own cues while I add up the 13 I count for myself. Again, I think it’s worth noting that Josephson thanks the brain for its protective habits. They may be maladaptive, but the intention is to keep ourselves regulated.

Throughout the book, Josephson goes through some case studies from her clinical experience. She writes about “Sophie.” Sophie “spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.” She discusses being an adult that “overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful.” She “struggles to set boundaries and gets all of her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful.” I couldn’t help but think back to reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving, Homer’s desperate need to feel “useful,” and reflect on how I should probably not have identified so closely with his sentiment. Josephson then elaborates on Sophie being a parentified child—not everything is relatable directly to my experience. She talks about how Sophie “grew up to be a hyperindependent adult [who] feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens.” Josephson elaborates on how “Sophie got the message that she could receive love and attention by alleviating other people’s stress but now when she’s stressed or overwhelmed she feels like she needs to hide those feelings.” The passage continues, “No one ever thinks to check in on her because they assume she always is fine and has it together. She unconsciously seeks out romantic relationships in which she needs to mother her partner because that’s the dynamic that feels familiar to her but it leaves her resentful and exhausted.” She has a harsh inner critic that has been a stand-in for parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was caring for everyone else. Moreover, “she also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly.” Josephson’s list of descriptors is compelling as a kind of character study, but simultaneously hits a bit close to home in some of the mindsets of her clients. 

Carter is another compelling case study. Josephson talks about how Carter’s challenging emotions were discouraged or ridiculed by her parents and “she learned to believe that something was wrong with her for having such emotions.” In response, she “adapted by taking on the perfectionist role—she was the high achiever, the golden girl.” One detail in her story could have been lifted directly from my life: “She cried in middle school when she got an A on a history paper, instead of an A.” Just replace middle school with elementary school and history paper with presentation about classical composers. I haven’t engaged in enough self-reflection to really conceptualize this, but it felt true when I read that “she’s a charmer who morphs her personality to match that of whomever she’s with and wants to be liked by everyone, even if that means not always liking herself.” More apt for me is the sentence that follows it: “She’s terrified of making a mistake and of having people find out that she did.” For her, it was about heavy criticism while she was growing up, like when she accidentally broke a glass or missed a goal at soccer practice. Josephson continues: “She feels crippled by any sort of negative feedback because being seen as anything but perfect has felt entirely unsafe” and—here’s the really problematic stuff for me—”she needs people to think she’s always productive and if she hears someone walk through the door, she’ll quickly swap the TV remote for a book so they don’t think she was gasp relaxing. She’s very hard on herself and never feels like she’s doing enough. She walks around with a deep sense of shame for not being the perfect person she expects herself to be.” I think I’m revealing way too much of myself here, but I also bring it up because these characterizations felt like finding connection with these strangers. Josephson also considers the nuances of the catch-22 that Carter “often feels like she’s putting up a front so that people won’t see the messiness underneath” but that “as a result, she feels like people don’t know the real her.” Being flawless is an isolating place to be, but “she learned, ‘I need to be perfect to be loved.’” 

One of the fawning responses that I felt was most engrossing was the sense of chasing accomplishment and overextending. I hadn’t considered that drowning yourself in responsibilities is a protective experience, but one that doesn’t serve its victims long term. The fawn response, she says, “is about finding safety by doing more.” Josephson talks about the sense of accomplishment and the sense of relief and considers its implications. She starts off by talking about how “the inner critic, which is trying to protect you, tells you that no accomplishment is enough, because it’s stuck in a time when you had to constantly impress in order to achieve a sense of safety.” It’s a paradox. If you reached a point where you felt “good enough” the protective part would feel scared “because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.” Fawners often struggle with low self-esteem and so “no accomplishment is impressive.” If you are able to achieve it, then it couldn’t have been that hard, and this mindset leads you to “constantly undervalue your milestones.” There is no satisfying the inner critic, “who’s trying so hard to find safety through perfection.”

The reason I was initially drawn to this book is because I saw someone on TikTok post about the relationship between achievement and relief. It was this passage: “Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to complete to continue to prove yourself.” Ouch. Right in the heart. It seems so unfair that achievements can be so stripped of joy. It also creates contradictions for us in that when you receive compliments, it challenges our sense of unworthiness, and to maintain our sense of self, we push away such compliments. Another of Josephson’s figures, Ari, “wants to reject herself before others can reject her. She doesn’t think she’s enough, so it feels absolutely unbelievable to her when someone else thinks she is.” Yet, Ari also “desperately wants to be taken seriously” and “feels frustrated by her inability to accept praise.” The question remains: how can we learn to appreciate and celebrate our own achievements without that sense of guilt or unworthiness?

There’s another passage that feels true about ‘filling our cups.’ Josephson says, “Maybe it was impossible to receive nourishment without also receiving something that didn’t feel good, like being guilt-tripped or controlled.” The notion of receiving care and criticism in equal measure feels awful. Nourishment came with a price, and so we can’t resist nor fully absorb it, and no amount of reassurance or validation will feel like enough. External validation can never satisfy us, though: “True long term safety arises internally through validating our emotions, soothing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to receive validation from someone else.”

I can’t help but feel my review of Are You Mad at Me? has done little more than provide quotations and summarize some of the things I found relatable. I don’t think I’ve done very well considering the book as an aesthetic object. It was an informative one, for sure, and one that I connected with a lot.

Happy reading; happy healing!

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza

          When one of my nieces was really young, she, like many children, refused to eat certain foods. I forget which food it was, but one day my mom made it and my niece ate it. Surprised at the sudden change, my mom asked her why she ate it now all of a sudden and my niece responded with something like, “I just told my brain to like it.”

To me, that’s Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself in a nutshell. Subtitled How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One, the book is essentially a nonfiction guide to manifestation and the quantum field. If I got one thing out of the book it’s the idea that we should operate as though we have already become what we want to be and have what we want to have. Dispenza gives the example of his daughter wanting to work abroad for a summer and then giving her the advice to operate as if she had already been on that trip and become the person she wanted to be, gained the things she wanted to gain. So then it worked out. There’s another anecdote of a woman who won the lottery with the exact amount of money she had in debt, manifesting herself out of crisis.

Naturally, I’m a skeptic. If it were so easy to just get the things we want, there would be a whole lot less pain in the world. I think it’s hard for me to look past the material realities of our world and the systemic issues we face. Can we just manifest our way out of capitalism? Out of racism? The idea of there being a quantum field and we just have to claim a certain reality of many possibilities is spurious, and the evidence for such is primarily anecdotal and philosophical. There is one study that was fascinating but needed a more thorough justification to be fully persuasive. The study had people pray—another form of manifestation—for sick people or not. The participants didn’t know who they were praying for, and the twist was that it was people from the past. The researchers knew who recovered and who didn’t. When they compared results, they found that the people who were prayed for in the present recovered in the past; the people who weren’t prayed for didn’t. It’s a crazy interesting study, and supposedly it’s been replicated but Dispenza’s book does not really delve into the science.

In turn, I’d say that Dispenza’s research is more valuable in terms of perspective. If you take him on trust, then I think you can explain the positive effects of shifting your mindset. We are already what we want to be; we already have everything we want and need. If we operate that way, it can allow us to be better people. For example, if I operate with the assumption that I’m already the person I want to be, it forces me now to be kinder because I want to be kind; I can choose to be happier now because I want to be happy later. It’s a shift in mindset that lets us feel more at peace with ourselves today, and I appreciate that.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a step-by-step guide to meditation. I have to admit that I didn’t actively follow the meditation practices; it was more theoretical for me. I would say, though, that Dispenza’s guide for meditation isn’t as clearly delineated as it could be. It was broken down into steps but also into days, so on Day 1 you might do 4 steps, Day 2 you might do steps 5 and 6, Day 3 you’re only doing step 7, etc. I couldn’t help but think there was a more straightforward way of building the practice.

I’ll try to live as the person I want to be and overcome my skepticism at the full power of manifestation. I’ll try to be the kind of guy that meditates and feels more connected to the quantum field of possibilities. I know, at some level, it’s true: quantum physics is a thing where both possibilities are true until one isn’t. If we extrapolate to the greater context of all matter, it stands to reason that we could decide how each particle should behave—but whether I have the brain power and meditative expertise to make all things behave as I want is another question.

Happy reading!

The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play by Alexander Kriss

  In 2023, I read Getting Gamers by Jamie Madigan, which uses psychological principles and experiments to explain why people who play video games play the way they do and how they engage with one another. I found it a really illuminating text and I’ve been looking for other texts that delve into analysis of video games, their impacts on player behaviour, and so on. To that end, I decided to read The Gaming Mind by Alexander Kriss. Kriss is a clinical psychology with an interest in video games, but his approach is largely the inverse of how Madigan approaches interpretations of gamer behaviour.

Rather than taking a look at how games influence our behaviour, Alexander Kriss holds up the mirror: how do our gaming behaviours reflect our other habits of mind? For instance, how does a woman’s obsession with Candy Crush speak to the lack of control she feels over her life? How does our relationship with violence impact how we engage with games?

The best part of the book—or at least the part I found most engaging—was the opening chapter: “Me, You, and Silent Hill 2.” The opening chapter establishes Kriss’ experience as a psychoanalyst and how he is made responsible for the “gamer kid” who needed help, and whose therapist-group-assigned moniker required deconstruction. Running parallel, Kriss establishes his own coming to terms with the “gamer” label for himself, beginning with his experience of playing Mist with his father, his coming into the Tomb Raider series and Ape Escape. While playing games, Kriss developed a friendship with another boy—one less interested in gaming—who later took his own life.

From there, the chapter discusses Silent Hill 2, which I already find deeply engrossing and rife with possibility for analysis. Kriss provides a beautiful account of the game’s haunting premise and analysis of the characters. What is really most compelling is Kriss’ discussion of the eight multiple endings of the game. To unlock different endings, there are different conditions, including inconsequential actions like how many times you inspect the photo of your deceased wife in your inventory. One of the endings is James, the main character, killing himself. To unlock that ending, you have to play the majority of the game at low health. Kriss explains how he could never play the game that way and never cope with the prospect of the central character killing himself at the end. It’s a stunning and sincere discussion of our relationship to depression and mental illness and the way our game behaviours can give a window into the player.

That first chapter wowed me. From there, the rest of the book was good but didn’t quite hit the same highs for me. Perhaps because the case studies are more focused on the patient rather than critique of games, or perhaps because the games referenced haven’t been part of my gaming repertoire. The chapters deal with violence, addiction, health, treatment of others in multiplayer games, and so on. There’s a lot to work with, but your enjoyment of the book will probably depend on what resonates with you at the personal level.

Either way: happy reading. Happy gaming!

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

        Funnily enough, my experience of reading Flights by Olga Tokarczuk is a meandering tale of fits, starts, and coincidences. Flights fell into my lap, in the first place, by coincidence. One of my grade 12 English students opted to read Tokarczuk’s novel-esque book, noting that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. At the time, I hadn’t heard of her, but was pleased to see a student taking on something that was, presumably, intellectually rigorous and challenging. A few weeks later, the author’s name had slipped from my mind but when I was in the bookstore Type in Toronto, a bright yellow spine caught my attention and when I picked it up, I found it was the book my student had talked about weeks earlier. I decided to buy it then and there due to my serendipitous encounter.

Flash forward a couple of weeks and I’m reading Flights. I devour the first hundred pages, finding the prose style poetic and riveting in all the ways I would hope of a Nobel winner. But then, for whatever reason, I stop. Then a month or two goes by, I get back into it and read the rest. I take pages and pages of notes that I can use to refer back to for this review—so many notes that, indeed, this review is even a few more months after I finished reading the book.

But all this seems oddly appropriate for a book about travel, about living in fits and starts and escaping to new terrain. The novel is rhizomatic in that way, with resonances popping up in unexpected places. And, as if the Nobel Prize committee has a type, and history a way of remedying itself, it’s easy to draw comparisons between would-be Nobel winner W. G. Sebald, had it not been for his tragic death, and Tokarczuk—Sebald’s successor. The comparison is, I think, warranted, given that both novelists trace the echoes between histories and phenomena, heavily rooted in the notion of place as integral to experience.

For the uninitiated, W. G. Sebald’s novels often centre on unlikely parallels. There’s a subtlety to his narratives that intimates connections, guiding readers to their own discoveries with an understated style interspersed with seemingly unrelated photos. Contemplation builds the connections. Tokarczuk’s Flights takes a similar approach, including photos of maps, but the fragmentary nature of her novel is somewhat more unified, in my mind, than Sebald, who operates more sequentially.

The more time you spend with the book, the more you see how well-wrought and unified it is. The primacy of motion is explored through various avenues, but even in the first few pages Tokarczuk presents a sort of manifesto of motion:

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that — in spite of all the risks involved — a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly stage and stable surroundings, the landscape composed of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss. (4)

What a tour-de-force on page four! The phrase “a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence” is, essentially, the thesis for Tokarczuk’s project. While drawing on an aphoristic style, Flights is nonetheless replete with elevating imagery and metaphor. The image of a river being “like a needle inserted into [her] formerly stage and stable surroundings” is striking in its penetrative quality. It reminds me, almost, of Margaret Atwood’s poem “you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye.” Here, though, the idea of a needle also takes on the resonance of an inoculation. The needle stabs, but simultaneously protects. The quaint imagery of childhood with “vegetables that grew in sad little rows” and children playing hopscotch is a idyllic notion and the needle “went all the way through.” It’s aggressive, piercing, and the turn at the end of the passage of childhood being a “toy made of rubber from which all the air was escape, with a hiss” is such a powerful rendition of that sentiment that it’s hard to ignore. The fact that the final metaphor draws on an even earlier stage of life to dismantle childhood (I can’t help but imagine a rubber duckie in a baby’s bath) is such a great turn of temporal play. The fact that this needle “went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension,” also hints at Tokarczuk’s geometry of time, which I’ll return to, as the book does, much later.

Throughout Flights, Tokarczuk’s various sub-topics often orbit around the idea of stasis and, well, flight. The motifs that crop up throughout the text often address bodies in motion in relief against bodies rendered motionless. For instance, substantial parts of the book deal with the development of embalming practices, the ultimate stasis: dead and not decomposing. It’s that fixity the book seems to grapple with, whether through travelogues or historical documents.

Tokarczuk does not relegate these documents to a static past, however. In fact, she challenges the idea that these serve as representative of reality. In a nearly Baudrillardian move, Flights notes that “we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be made public—if possible with the aid of diagrams” (11). The notion of clear and simple documentation is presented not as a revelation, but an illusion, a sham. The passage continues that “We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world—that ninety percent is more significant than five” (11). In one paragraph, Tokarczuk levels critiques against so many of our meta-narratives that we use to explain things: physics, statistics, mathematics, and all those discourses that are used to render the world certain create a deadening effect, rendering the world “inert.”

Hence, the novel is framed around the notion of travel. The central character is on planes, travelling to various countries for various purposes. The conversations and stories about others are also, generally, people in motion (or, in the latter half of the book, people being rendered fixed, willingly or not). A central conceit of the book is around the idea of “travel psychology.” Presented somewhat ironically, but not without merit, is a young woman in an airport touting the new wave of psychology. When she is introduced, she is presented as “a young woman, nervously adjusting her colorful scarf while her companion, a man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, prepared the screen that was hanging on the wall’ (74). The duo is presented in a satirical light, one full of hesitation and the other a kind of old-world bumbling professor. I can’t help but imagine the two as grifters selling timeshares (which would also be appropriate for this novel). But, they have a point. Traditional psychology aims to fix people in place, suggesting that their psyche is reasonably fixed (even the depths of the unconscious have a single origin point, presumably—we don’t have unconsciouses in common parlance). By contrast, the two present: “Travel psychology [which] studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness—for example, through the prism of his or her biological constitution, family relationships, social situations, and so forth. In travel psychology, these factors are of secondary, not primary importance” (74). It’s kind of a radical notion, actually, and whether or not it is satirical is secondary to the possibilities it opens up: we are different people at different times, and the motion is what counts.

In turn, “travel psychology” offers an alternative episteme for conceptualizing identity and conceptualizing the world. They note, “constellation, not sequencing, carries truth” (77), explaining Tokarczuk’s valuing of resonance, rather than linear stories. She continues, “travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any—even approximate—continuity. Life is made up of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination toward the repetition of behaviours. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole” (77). The passage is once again like the book itself. There are a number of “situations” presented, some with and some without resolution. Moreover, there is the “repetition of behaviours.” Various characters, especially in the first half of the book, are looking to escape their situations. As such, the book has “the appearance” of a consistent whole, even when it is not truly there; each situation is unique in its own way.

As such, meaning is never fixed, but ever-present. Again, referring to the travel psychologists, synchronicity is “evidence of the world making sense” (85). She specifies it is “evidence that throughout this beautiful chaos threads of meaning spread in every direction, networks of strange logic, all bearing, if one were to believe in God, the contorted imprints of His fingers” (85). The idea “threads of meaning” in “networks of strange logic” nonetheless being connected to one central force (in this case God), creates a tension of significance, allowing each moment to be both meaningful and not, each moment being a new discovery. Towards the end of the novel, Tokarczuk comments on “A mind that seemed to be aware of everything, even things it didn’t really understand, but that moved fast—a quick, intelligent electric impulse without limits, linking everything with everything, convinced that all of it together must mean something, even if we couldn’t yet know that” (380). It’s sort of a poststructuralist move, in a sense, to see everything in the world as connected. Yet, she notes the central problem: if everything is connected to everything, there is no end-point. There can be no fixity, and thus the very notion of meaning is in trouble.

The narrator of the story seems to embody this tension. She redirects her attention to that which is commonly not the focus, but is unclear to what end: “Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps—toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious” (23). In attempting to find another angle for examining the threads that connect us, she looks instead towards feet—again, focusing on motion. Yet, there’s a skepticism that there is an actual destination. There’s a kind of purposelessness to the motion and even when she wants to “graze the dust in search of a mystery,” it is “stripped of anything serious.” The great unifying force is not a capitalized Significance. Another narrator has a similar issue, though in reverse. Rather than thinking of destinations as end-points, he reflects on destinations as past experience: “Lost in thought, he gazed out the window at the landscape that seemed to hurry off somewhere. Didn’t ever think: What does ‘We were there’ really even mean? Where did those two weeks in France go? Those weeks that today can squeeze into just a couple of memories” (22). This compression of time is here inversed; distance has been travelled, locations have been reached, but their lasting impact is ambiguous. Again, she speculates what he might be thinking when she notes what the remaining memories actually are: “the sudden onset of hunger by the city’s medieval walls and the twinkling of evening at a café where the roof was covered in grapevines. What happened to Norway? All that’s left is the chill of the water in the lake that endless day, and then the delight of the beer bought just before the shop shut, or the arresting first glimpse of the fjord” (22). There is a mix, it seems, of the glorious and the banal. We often think about the first glimpse of the fjord as a stunning moment, but the chill of the water, or buying a beer, a minor detail. The interplay between the small and the large is critical to the text as a whole.

The coincidences in my own reading continue—or perhaps Tokarczuk simply trains the reader to see parallels. For instance, I finished Flights on the back of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, and towards the end of Tokarczuk’s novel, there is an extended meditation on the word. A character reads a definition of the word, “written in Polish, in the Latin alphabet”—which in itself is an odd unfixed doubling, two languages at once—and there are three definitions (347), each of which seems to have its own resonance for Erpenbeck’s novel. The definition for measure is that kairos is “Due measure, appropriateness, moderation; difference; meaning” while on place it is “a vital, sensitive place in the body” (347). Both of these resonate for Erpenbeck’s Kairos, where the central characters’ calculated behaviour fits with measure, and the broken hearts and prodding of wounds is critical to the narrative.

While the third definition, on time, is useful for Erpenbeck’s project as well, it serves as the most salient definition for Tokarczuk’s purposes:

Critical moment, right time, appropriateness, opportunity, nick of time, the propitious time is fleeting; those who turned up unexpectedly; miss the moment; when the right time comes, help in the event of a storm, on time, when the opportunity arises, prematurely, critical moments, periodic states, the chronological sequence of facts, situation, state of things, placement, ultimate danger, benefit, use, to what aim?, what will help you?, where would be convenient? (347).

The novel’s vignettes all hover around the idea of time, whether it’s a disappearance where time is critical, or a static time where no change occurs, or the illusion of chronology—characters trying to place events into a logical sequence that is forever illusory, and ultimately, as implied by the questions at the end of the definition, not all that useful. The sequence of the vignettes provides no consolation, either. Tokarczuk will begin a narrative, stop it partway for a seemingly unrelated and potentially banal discussion of everyday phenomena, and then switch back to a different narrative. The idea of telling one story start to finish gives way to an ever-fragmentary recollection, a history penetrated by glimpses of the present.

The continued discussion of kairos (which, incidentally, takes place forty pages later), notes that Kairos “always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time. And at the intersection between place and time, at that moment that opens up for just a little while, to situate that single, right unrepeatable possibility. The point where the straight line that runs from nowhere to nowhere makes—for one moment—contact with the circle” (387). Tokarczuk creates a new geometry, or more appropriately a new map, of time. The particularity of the moment is described as an “unrepeatable possibility,” fleeting and “open[ed] up for just a little while.” It’s those precise moments of meaning that Tokarczuk seems to strive for.

And yet, amid all this discussion of fixity and permanence, there is the counter-current, that none of these moments really exist. In her deconstruction of time, Tokarczuk notes, “if the future and the past are infinite, then in reality there can be no ‘once upon,’ no ‘back when.’ Different moments in time hang in space like sheets, like screens lit up by one moment; the world is made up of these frozen moments, great meta-images, and we just hop from one to the next” (385). I love the way Tokarczuk addresses paradox through metaphor. The idea of these moments hanging in space like sheets is such a cosmic vision of the world with “great meta-images” where “we just hop from one to the next.” The notion of transitions, that non-time between moments, is addressed beautifully here, offering commentary on her fragmentary vignette style. It is a book of meta-images, rather than a cohesive story, because, in the philosophy of the book, it is impossible to tell stories when their very foundation (the concept of time) has eroded away from us.

It’s hard to grapple with time and its implications. I’m striving to find some optimism in Tokarczuk’s method for examining time. She presents linear time as a problem to be solved earlier in the text: “That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things. This is why you’ll never hear them utter words like ‘futile’ or ‘empty’” (53). It’s a pretty dark idea, but maybe there’s an optimism underneath: if time is linear and that inscribes every moment with loss and mourning, if we reconsider time into a less linear geometry, that would perhaps open our minds to a more rich and rounded discussion of human experience. Linear time is quantifiable; circular time could never be.

  At this point, you’re probably getting the impression that Flights is an intellectually rigorous book, and it is. That said, it isn’t without a heart. There are some powerful moments relayed through the vignettes, inspiring sympathy and joy. Early on, Tokarczuk’s narrator, precariously situated in relation to the author herself, comments on being a writer. There’s a mournful quality, if a little ironic from a Nobel Prize winner, in the statement: “But I never became a real writer. Life always eluded me” (13). Her description of where she finds meaning then follows: “I’d only ever find its tracks, the skin it sloughed off. By the time I had determined its location, it had already gone somewhere else. And all I’d find were signs that it had been there, like those scrawlings on the trunks of trees in parks that merely mark a person’s passing presence” (13). This notion of her writing being the discarded, the wound that remains behind in a tree or “the skin it sloughed off” feels like loss for sure. Instead of a novel being written after life, her life takes on the shape of this novel: “life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections—and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as a whole” (13). Though presented in a mournful tone, a purposelessness that casts her adrift, there is a kind of freedom in the incomplete and dreamlike: a sense of possibility continues on. 

Of course, the non-linearity of the novel is the perfect accompaniment, thematically, to the notions of time. Tokarczuk writes that “Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself” (13). It’s a bitterly amusing and relatable statement, but she extends the conversation once more to the notion of stasis: “You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand” (13). See what I mean about the language? Tokarczuk’s style is extraordinary. From there, she echoes the motif of feet and faces: 

you can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passerby, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self for the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person being described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. (13)

I find the passage compelling for a number of reasons, not least of all because of its internal coherence with the rest of the novel. The idea of seeing a fragment of a human body passing by is an effective echo, but also this link of feet and faces and hardly seeing faces comes back; there’s a circularity to the text that comes across effectively. The interplay of the singular and the multiple also returns; the author is simultaneously one and many, characters popping up all over the place, but then also the multiplicity of faces is amalgamated into the singular experience of writing a novel. It’s a cerebral experience that all comes together beautifully.

But I’ve drifted away once more from the ‘heart’ of the book to focus instead on its brain. There’s a relatability to the characters in the text, who all feel they have lost something. There are some deeply human stories, like the one of a woman and child who disappear while on vacation and her husband desperately trying to find her. In another series of vignettes, Tokarczuk offers an epistolary story in which a man tries to reclaim his father’s corpse from the king who he had served and for whom he is now on public display. There’s also a love-esque story between a corpse-preserving scientist researching methods with the widow of a renowned colleague.

When the man is looking for his lost wife, the despair in his search is quite wrenching. There is a “sound [...] long, mournful, like the voice of an animal. Then it stops, shattered into cicadas’ small echoes. They move through the olive brush. Bellowing out from time to time” (30). The search continues across the vineyard and “they scour rows half in shadowing, calling out for the missing woman: ‘Jagoda, Jagoda!’” (30). Every private sorrow takes on a deeper significance, another resonance: “It occurs to Kunicki that his wife’s name means ‘berry’ in their native Polish. It is such a common name that he had forgotten about that until now. Suddenly it seems to him that he is taking part in some sort of ancient ritual, blurry, grotesque. From the bushes there hang grapes in swollen, deep violet bunches, perverse, multiplied nipples, and he wanders the leafy labyrinths, shouting, ‘Jagoda! Jagoda!’ Who is he saying that to? Who is he looking for? (30). Several layers emerge at once: there’s the linguistic angle, seen elsewhere in the discussion of the word ‘Kairos’, there’s the historic layer in which he feels like he’s part of some ancient ritual, a sexual layer in the “perverse, multiplied nipples” of the berries, and there’s the dissociative quality of the experience: it is no longer clear who the woman they’re actually looking for is. The recipient of the message is a ghost.

In one of the most moving vignettes, the narrator of the book reconnects with an old flame over Facebook. She had not seen him for years, but he is now dying. His sister cares for him day-to-day and the narrator goes to see him. When she arrives, he reveals to her that he wants to die, but cannot ask his sister to do it for him. The implication is that the narrator needs to take his life for him. After visiting several times—all of this unbeknownst to her husband—she fulfils his request in a haunting and bittersweet scene:

She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smooths out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves. (305)

The scene itself is pretty powerful but Tokarczuk twists the knife in the final interaction between the narrator and her friend’s sister. The sister is on the porch smoking and offers the narrator a cigarette: “This time she says no” (305). The sister then asks, “Do you think you’ll be able to visit him again? [...] It’s been so important to him that you come.” The narrator responds, “‘I’m leaving today’ [...] as she goes down the stairs, she adds ‘Yout ake care of yourself’” (305). It’s such a cold moment, a depressing goodbye. We are left to imagine what happens when the sister discovers her brother has passed, and it produces such a chilling effect where the narrator’s emotional response is muted, despite the weight of her act.

There’s a morose thoughtfulness that lingers over the novel in a number of passages and scenes. The first pages of the book should serve as an indication of that, when the narrator gives an account of her childhood:

I’m a few years old. I’m sitting on the windowsill, surrounded by strewn toys and toppled-over block towers and dolls with bulging eyes. It’s dark in the house, and the air in the rooms slowly cools, dims. There’s no one else here; they’ve left, they’re gone, though you can still hear their voices dying down, that shuffling, the echoes of their footsteps, some distant laughter. Out the window the courtyard is empty. Darkness spreads softly from the sky, settling one everything like black dew.
        The worst part is the stillness, visible, dense---a chilly dusk and the sodium-vapor lamps’ frail light already mired in darkness just a few feet from its source. (1)

First of all, the imagery here is highly evocative. Everything points towards darkness: “strewn toys” and “toppled-over block towers,” no longer standing as they once were. The dolls have “bulging eyes,” like bugs or dead things. The rest of the house is “dark”, “cool”, and “dim.” There’s an emptiness to the scene and the solitude of the scene is given a tragic air. The scene continues on to discuss the “darkness” and the “black dew,” tainting even the gentle greeting of morning. It’s interesting that there’s a kind of jealousy towards movement; the narrator notes that “the worst part is the stillness,” being static while “the echoes of their footsteps, some distant laughter” happen right outside. 

Meanwhile, inside, “Nothing happens” (1). Although, darkness is in motion: “the march of darkness halts at the door to the house, and all the clamor of fading falls silent, makes a thick skin like on hot milk cooling” (1). There’s a play of size and intensity here, too, as “The contours of the buildings against the backdrop of the sky stretch out into infinity, slowly lose their sharp angles, corners, edges” (1). The immensity of the world outside takes shape in the narrator’s mind from her early years, but it provides the effect of the world escaping her: “the dimming light takes the air with it — there’s nothing left to breathe” (1). The existential and metaphysical horror rounds out the scene: “Now the dark soaks into my skin. Sounds have curled up inside themselves, withdrawn their snail’s eyes; the orchestra of the world has departed, vanishing into the park” (1). There’s a kind of horror in the shifting world.

The fact that this is framed in the mind of a young girl is even more wild. At just a few years old, she recognizes “that evening is the limit of the world, and I’ve just happened upon it, by accident, while playing, not in search of anything” (2). She continues, “I’ve discovered it because I was left unsupervised for a bit. I realize I’ve fallen into a trap here now, realize I’m stuck. I’m a few years old, I’m sitting on the windowsill, and I’m looking out onto the chilled courtyard” (2). You’ll notice a repetition here. From there, she discusses the how “lights in the school’s kitchen are extinguished; everyone has left. All the doors are closed, the hatches down, shades lowered” (2). The sense of confinement is palpable and she notes, “I’d like to leave, but there’s nowhere to go. My own presence is the only thing with a distinct outline now, an outline that quivers and undulates, and in so doing, hurts. All of a sudden I know: there’s nothing for it now, here I am” (2). The moment is presented almost as a reverse-birth. It’s a return to the darkness and confinement. What’s interesting is how the moment contrasts with the later sections of the book: it is in the stillness that she finds herself conscious of herself, although it is given that touch of irony: “there’s nothing for it now” (2), as if finding herself is something she wanted to avoid all along—again, that fear of stasis in one’s identity.

Elsewhere, Tokarczuk’s narrator draws a clear parallel between her identity and the nature of the project upon which she has embarked: “My set of symptoms revolves around being drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken” (17). These adjectives could easily be applied to the narrator or the novel project underway: the vignettes are never quite cohesive enough for a full story. She continues: “I’m interested in whatever shape this may take, mistakes in the making of the thing, dead ends. What was supposed to develop but for some reason didn’t; or vice versa, what outstretched the design. Anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big, overgrown or incomplete, monstrous and disgusting” (17). Again, there’s an expansiveness of space and a sense of confinement that is resisted. She continues in the description of these ‘monstrous’ tales, commenting on “shapes that don’t heed, that grow exponentially, brim over, bud, or on the contrary, that scale back to the single unit” (17). It’s perhaps in this passage that the critique of discrete mathematics becomes most obvious. All those systems which rigidify are no longer acceptable: “I’m not interested in the patterns so scrutinized by statistics that everyone celebrates with a familiar, satisfied smile on their faces” (17). She explains, “My weakness is for teratology and for freaks. I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature. A sudden fluke disclosure. An embarrassing oops, the seam of one’s underwear from beneath a perfectly pleated skirt. The hideous metal skeleton that suddenly pops out from the velvet upholstery; the eruption of a spring from within a cushioned armchair that shamelessly debunks any illusion of softness” (17). For what it’s worth, I find this passage extraordinarily resonant. It’s a beautiful passage that turns an eye to the unusual and unfamiliar, to those tiny sites of story that are so rarely elevated to an almost divine status.

To that end, I’d refer readers to the vignette titled “Sanitary Pads.” She comments on the wrappers for sanitary pads, which are provided with “entertaining little facts” (102). Among those facts are the following:

    The word ‘lethologica’ describes the state of unable to recall the word you’re looking for.

    Ropography is a painting term for the attention the artist pays to trifles and details.

    Rhyparography is the painting of decaying and disgusting things.

    Scissors were invented by Leonardo da Vinci. (102)

I, too, find these facts instructive and interesting. Particularly from a linguistic stand-point, I really appreciate the way that we have invented words for such particular experiences and sensations. This fine attention to sanitary pads continues in the paragraph which follows:

In the bathroom, where I unwrapped the entire box of these pads with their curious teachings, it hit me like a revelation that this way yet another part of the project of the great encyclopedia now coming into being, the encyclopedia that would encompass all things. So I went back to the pharmacy and scoured the shelves in search of the name of this strange company that had determined to unite necessity with usefulness. For what sense could it ever possibly make to wrap pads in paper that had flowers and strawberries on it? Paper was created to be the bearer of ideas. Paper packaging is wasteful and should be banned. But if you really do have to package something, then you ought to be able to do it only in novels and poems, and always in such a way that what is contained and what contains it have some connection. (102)

Tokarczuk’s narrator focuses on the things that are not meant to be noticed. But look at the reverence which she imbues to sanitary pads. It becomes a sort of quest to find the company that unites necessity and usefulness. I can’t help but think about how New Critics see form and content as inseparable, the heresy implied by paraphrase, and so on. Form and function are here united and treated with a kind of philosophical weight evocative of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. The suggestion that all packaging has to be in novels and poems is a delightful turn that feels irreverent in its own way.

The passage continues with some additional facts, which I include here for your own interest and because you can read it essentially like a found list poem:

    Starting at the age of thirty, humans begin to slowly shrink.

    Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than from plane crashes.

    If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you’ll be able to see the stars even during the day.

    Did you know that your birthday is shared by nine million people around the world?

    The shortest war in history was waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes.

    If the earth’s axis were titled just one degree more, the planet would be uninhabitable, because the regions around the equator would be too hot and the poles too cold.

    Due to the earth’s rotation, throwing something westward will send it flying farther than if it’s going east.

    The average human body contains enough sulfur to kill a dog.

    A rachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the palate.

        But the one I was most struck by was this:

        The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

        (102-103)

This love of the bizarre, miniscule factoid is consistent with Tokarczuk’s flights to more strange territories. The whole scene has an almost Walter Benjaminian flare to it; his Arcades Project similarly gathering ephemera and immortalizing them in text form. Tokarczuk goes one further, allowing the sanitary pads section to permeate into other vignettes, receiving reference elsewhere with small echoes. It is its own reversal that the sanitary pads bleed into the other chapters.

It becomes, at least to some extent, an obsession of the narrator’s. In her own words, though: “Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad” (207). There is a touch of madness throughout Flights: an associational form of writing that brings us to new areas as we chase an echo. Yet, as previously mentioned, these echoes are unending. There’s never a final point where we can say that we chased an echo enough to reach its origin. 

Perhaps a more apt metaphor is Tokarczuk’s own. While on a flight, a man opens the window looking for some sense of place, contrasting with the animation on the screen:

From time to time he raised the shade to see if somewhere on the horizon in the distance a white glow wasn’t visible by now, glimmer of a new day, new possibilities. But there was nothing. The screens were off, the film had ended. Every so often they would show a map, and on it the small shape of the plane as it traversed at a turtle’s pace a distance not indicated on the map. And it even seemed that the map had been designed by Zeno the Cartographer---every distance is infinite in itself, each point launching a new space that cannot be surmounted, and of course, any movement an illusion, all of us traveling in place. (130)

The allusion to Zeno is a reference to the philosophical idea of an arrow being fired. It travels distance by half, then by half, then by half, and can be subdivided to the extent that it never actually reaches its target. It’s an apt allusion, specifically because we never reach the target of our travels, so as we follow our obsessions we never quite ‘hit’ where we can rest. Perpetual motion. Elsewhere, Tokarczuk references pilgrimages as a “striving toward—and reaching—a holy place [that] would bestow holiness upon us, cleans us of our sins” (173). She wonders whether this is true of unholy, sinful, sad, vacant, joyful, and fruitful places too. Can we always be in a state of travelling toward? Essentially, the answer appears to be yes—we can never not be.

This is one of the lengthiest reviews I’ve written in quite a while because Tokarczuk offers us a set of such rich insight and contemplation that it demands response. I think it’s pretty clear why she would warrant the Nobel Prize. I’ll briefly address two remaining passages from my notes. In one, she describes people “glid[ing] towards their spots as though on tethers, heading somewhere in the suburbs, to a tenth floor, where they can pull the covers over their heads and fall into a sleep made up of scraps of day and night. And in reality in the morning that sleep does not dissolve—those scraps form collages, splotches; some configurations are clever, you could almost say premeditated” (236). It poses an interesting contrast to that sense of stasis the narrator experiences in the first few pages of the book, where the world closes in. Here, the world is absorbed at night. The “scraps of day and night” are put to a higher purpose, an artistic “collage,” as if our very consciousness were a canvas for reality. And I think Tokarczuk captures that sensation beautifully throughout Flights.

Now, finally, after much time spent reading, not reading, contemplating, reading, writing this review, not writing this review, and writing this review anew, we come to the conclusion. One of the characters in the book is described as hating traveling alone: “His gripe was: When he sees something out of the ordinary, something new and beautiful, he so wants to share it with someone that he becomes deeply unhappy if there’s no one around”  (165). Tokarczuk then has an offset line in a new paragraph: “I doubt he would make a good pilgrim” (165). As for me, I’m not sure whether or not I would make a good pilgrim. I do sometimes love traveling alone and finding that solitary reverence in beautiful things. Yet, I think that sharing something deeply beautiful can transcend that experience of reverence, and even elevate it. I suppose that’s why I’ve written such a lengthy review of Flights: it is something beautiful, something thoughtful, and something well worth exploring. So here I am, sharing it with all of you.

Happy reading! Hope that this book, or whatever you’re reading, takes you to new places—and I hope you never actually “get there”.