“Gabbert’s voice is calm, playfully engaging and clear—a voice for our anxious, wired times, if ever there was one . . . Each diligently researched essay seems to evolve organically and if she doomscrolls her way down a rabbit hole, you know it will lead somewhere not just pertinent, but poetic and philosophical too.”

—The Guardian

“As a philosopher of disaster—imminent, recurring, and far-flung—Gabbert knows there’s no time to waste . . . This work lays bare the intractable chasm between what we fear and what we understand.”

—Rachel Vorona Cote, The Nation

“How did she so clearly see what was coming for us? One answer is that she has read and thought a lot about disaster and human perception, the themes that tie her essays together. Another is that she’s good at finding angles readers might not otherwise see. Like a restless photographer, she’ll stretch herself to find another and then another shot. She’ll zoom way in and way out.”

—The Washington Post

Select Praise for The Word Pretty

A New York Times Editors’ Choice

“Like any good magpie, Gabbert keeps the delightful facts coming, and often leads into them the way she might at a dinner party . . . In just three or four paragraphs, she brilliantly parses something you might have felt about dozens of memoirs without ever putting it quite this way.”

—John Williams, The New York Times Book Review

“An assemblage of layers, Gabbert’s book acquires density and heft through its strategy of accumulation, creating a rich work of literary reflection that invites the reader to explore the works under consideration, as well as the wider world, from multiple, perpetually fresh perspectives.”

—Melynda Fuller, Los Angeles Review of Books

“All the individual essays feel meaningfully connected, like the balls on the pool table. Although the pattern they form may appear to be random, the leave has been cleverly chosen, and the shot goes in.”

—Michalle Gould, Chicago Review of Books

ALSO BY ELISA GABBERT

The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays

The Word Pretty

L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems

The Self Unstable

The French Exit

Title Page

I lived in the present, which was

that part of the future you could see.

LOUISE GLÜCK,

from “Landscape”

Prelude

Every year, when the lindens bloom, I think of the year when the lindens didn’t bloom.

This year, so far, the lindens haven’t bloomed.

I think of the year when the lindens didn’t bloom.

An idea almost comes, or it comes in disguise—it’s the same old thought, but today it is startling.

The way you fail to see, or recognize yourself, in a mirror at strange angles.

Thoughts almost arrive.

The way an owl swoops between two black trees, only at dusk, the dusk of evening—

Morning, of course, has its own foreshortened, clandestine dusk.

Dusk of morning. The light unblue.

Original thought was the mere idea, idea with no shadow.