Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss

When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations of his career was loss. Being a scholar of the preservation of knowledge, he realized, also made him an expert on its destruction. Since then, loss has seemed to him to pervade more and more of the world—in the form of extinctions and environmental crises, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and the devastation of the war in Gaza. His latest book, “Classicism and Other Phobias,” contends with loss in its own way, by asking if classics might be used to combat forces, like racism, that give rise to profound losses—whether, in his words, the study of ancient worlds can be used “for world-building.” Not long ago, he joined us to discuss some books that have informed his thinking. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

Radical Hope

by Jonathan Lear

This one was recommended to me a few years ago, before the pandemic, but I didn’t read it until last summer. Since then, I have truly struggled not to think about it—it is, without question, one of the bangers of my 2024 reading syllabus.

The book is organized around a statement by Plenty Coups, who was a longtime chief of the Crow Nation. Shortly before he died, he gave an interview where he said, “When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.” One of Lear’s goals is to tease out the significance of those last words, “nothing happened.” As he shows, this was not really meant as a factual statement, because many things did happen, and the Crow Nation was alert to those happenings. It was, though, a way to characterize the ontological rupture that took place when the Crow’s cultural lives and world views were seismically altered. The book draws on Crow history to think about how you can remain virtuous in the face of a future that will call into question the foundations of your understanding of the world. What Lear does by thinking alongside Plenty Coups is lay out the possibility of a way of living that commits to the idea that, no matter what comes, there will still be a good, and that good will still be worth striving for.

Opacities

by Sofia Samatar

I came across “Opacities” while wandering my local bookstore, Labyrinth Books. One of its longtime co-owners recently passed away, and that has made me determined to wander the aisles of Labyrinth as much as possible.

“Opacities” is a collection of letters from one practicing writer to another. Though we never learn their identities, we get the sense that the recipient is, like Samatar—and like me—a member of the community of minoritized writers in the United States. The book is scattered with incredible meditations on the challenges of being a writer like this, for whom the prospect of annihilating the self is never on the table, because, even if you might want to write beyond the confines of an identity that is imposed on you, you are often reminded quite forcefully of the constraints of that identity.

What struck me from the first pages, though, was also its celebration of friendship. Samatar uses the letter form to dig into the meatiness—and the occasional fraughtness—of friendship. And the book itself is a densely woven tapestry of snippets from other sources. To me, saying that work is a tissue of quotations or something like that is really one of the highest forms of praise, because it shows an awareness of others’ roles in how we learn and create our own work.

Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

This book is about the possibility that books can, instead of offering some kind of therapy, annihilate you—like, truly slam the door shut on the idea of delivering you into emotional equilibrium. A note that replays throughout the book is about reading’s relationship to sanity, for instance, in the way that people can be tempted to cast their lives as though they were plotted books.

I should disclose that this book is written by a friend of mine, with whom I co-taught a class while she was on the faculty here. One passage that really attacked me—I think that’s probably the best way of putting it—is around page 77, where Sarah talks about her very complex relationship with Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye.” She writes that she got interested in the idea that “everyone who is incurably obsessed with books has a so-called Life Ruiner,” which is the book that “sets you on the path to a life built by and around reading. To call it a Life Ruiner is not to say that a life of letters is necessarily ruination—but rather, to identify it as the book . . . that you never stop thinking about, and that makes you desperate to reach that frightening depth of experience with other books.”