THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 65
lies to adversaries in configurations even
more complex than their affairs. The
women were no sisterhood, denigrating
one another in creative combinations
and for reasons even Wulf ’s sympathetic
narrative does not help to distinguish
from the purest snobbery.
Is it any surprise that the command-
ments of Romanticism eventually cur-
dled into cliché? Today, self-expression
is urged on people who seldom ask them-
selves what in their selves is worth ex-
pressing. Nor can we trust those who
most ardently urge it. “Bring your whole
self to work,” the office posters say, even
as the friendly folks from H.R. assem-
ble a diversity-and-inclusion seminar
designed to remold those whole selves.
Earlier this summer, I found myself
the accidental host of a large party. I
had impulsively opened up my flat to
the friends of a friend whose shindig at
a nearby pub had been abruptly cut short
when the place closed early. More peo-
ple showed up than I was expecting, and
all of them, I felt, were taller, thinner,
better read, and better spoken than I
would ever be. I spent the next two hours
listening tensely for broken glass and
angry neighbors. Perhaps taken in by
my vegan-leather jacket, a woman with
impossibly fine cheekbones—she was
called something like Fenella—shouted
to me over the noise, “It’s just so Lon-
don, isn’t it? Doing a line in a complete
stranger’s bathroom!” I confirmed that
it was indeed very London. She offered
me a sniff, elegantly miming with her
credit card. “Just watch out for the re-
ally square guy who lives here,” she
added. I promised, as I politely declined,
that I wouldn’t tell him.
I had never felt less like a Roman-
tic. Surveying my empty flat a few hours
later, reassured that no glass had been
broken and no silver stolen, I made my-
self a cup of herbal tea and settled under
my fresh linen sheets to read a few, help-
fully soporific pages of Fichte. It then
occurred to me that, in a critical respect,
we were both being Romantics, Fenella
and I. It was just that the particular way
of being human that was my way, that
had been my way since I was a teen-age
bumpkin in a polyester blazer, was the
way of an uptight, teetotal square. The
dramatic lives of the Jena Set offer one
model of what a Romantic existence
might be. There are others.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Sacred Nature, by Karen Armstrong (Knopf ). An urgent plea
opens this nuanced exploration, by a veteran writer on religion,
of our relationship to nature: if ecological disaster is to be
avoided, Armstrong writes, “we need to recover the veneration
of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia.”
What follows is a tour of how various spiritual traditions con-
ceive of nature, with a focus on a common thread: an under-
standing of the natural world as a unified whole shot through
by “an immanent sacred force.” This concept, prominent in
Eastern thought, was also a feature of Western monotheist tra-
ditions before we began treating nature as “a mere resource.”
“While it is essential to cut carbon emissions,” Armstrong
writes, we also need to overhaul “our whole belief system.”Lady Justice, by Dahlia Lithwick (Penguin Press). In a richly
layered set of profiles, a noted legal correspondent chronicles
efforts by female lawyers to bolster democracy during the
Trump Presidency. Some figures are familiar (the voting-rights
champion Stacey Abrams), others less so (a co-founder of an
organization that helps refugees seeking asylum). For all these
women—and for Lithwick, who writes about her own sexual
harassment by a former federal judge—law isn’t an “unassail-
able cathedral” but a “fragile arrangement of norms, sugges-
tions, and rules.” Constitutional progress often takes a slow,
zigzagging path rather than a linear one, and it is this, Lith-
wick muses, that “allows it to preserve histories that might
otherwise be erased.”The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt (New Direc-
tions). An orphaned heiress, Marguerite, is kidnapped as an
infant and raised in a Moroccan riad, where she is taught to
appreciate exquisite tailoring, beautiful manners, classical
music, tennis. Years later, the captors, having spent her for-
tune, disappear, and Marguerite, now seventeen, is writing a
memoir about her ordeal and weathering a media maelstrom.
Chapters from the work in progress alternate with exchanges
between Marguerite and her increasingly exasperated New
York editor, who wants a tell-all blockbuster. DeWitt offers
a paean to the lost art of connoisseurship, and also a critique
of the way that commercial exploitation flattens anything it
does not understand.Poūkahangatus, by Tayi Tibble (Knopf ). This collection’s title
poem, which describes itself as “An Essay About Indigenous
Hair Dos and Don’ts,” mixes mythological and pop-cultural
references with ruminations on female beauty, power, and inheri-
tance: Medusa makes an appearance, as does Disney’s “Pocahon-
tas.” Elsewhere, the poet, a Māori New Zealander, uses the film
“Twilight” as a lens through which to examine racialized and
gendered tensions of adolescence. Tibble’s smart, sexy, slang-stud-
ded verse is fanciful and dramatic, revelling in the pains and
the pleasures of contemporary young womanhood yet under-
girded by an acute sense of history. Her voice remains sure-
footed across many registers, and the book, at its best, functions
as an atlas for learning to explore the world on one’s own terms.