Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks FOR THE PAST DECADE, when introducing a new issue I've followed a simple rule, more or less strictly. Even though I do believe that all art emerges from history, just as all consciousness is ultimately biology (and also that we're more or less equally far from understanding the specific pathways that lead to either), for the intros, I've always ruled out references to what's happening now. Publication is a material process and it takes time, so the now I'm writing in will not be the now of your reading. In this moment, my now, spring has officially sprung only days ago, and yet this issue in your hands, in your now, cannot possibly be opened earlier than mid-June, a few days before summer. The reason I mention this rule, as by now you will have understood, is to break it. Thing is, this time it's different. Time itself is different, frozen in some sense, yet standing on the edge of a precipice. There is no chance at all, in this moment, that what happens in March will be forgotten by June. That's not how global pandemics work. In such moments, as Fran Leibowitz memorably quipped, a day or so after 9/11, writers are luxury items. Or so it may seem. But perhaps we should take a longer view, and remember instead Boccaccio's Decameron, written in response to the great bubonic plague of 1347–51, also known as the Black Death, responsible for culling at least 30 percent, and perhaps as much as 60 percent, of the human herd in Europe. [End Page 208] ________ The writer's hometown, Florence, would not return to its pre-plague population until the nineteenth century. In that unparalleled masterpiece of the storytelling art, the frame narrative—in which a band of intrepid young souls flee the city and plague to hide out in a villa in the hills near Fiesole—has no obvious or even indirect connection to the stories it contains. Instead, what the Decameron offers is delight, respite—and travel to worlds and times far from horrors so present they needed no mention. In this our Summer issue, though we cannot promise that the living will be easy, or that our motley crew of contributors here weave a rich, uniform tapestry of tales to equal the Tuscan master, we will take you to a host of faraway places, and introduce you to perspectives and people that Boccaccio himself could never have dreamed of. Surely the greatest joy of editing is finding pages that fly you somewhere you've never been, then offering that excursion to others. In 1794, during his arrest in Turin, the Savoyard soldier Xavier de Maistre wrote a celebrated work of the imagination, Voyage autour de ma chambre ("Voyage Around My Room"). In this moment, an unprecedented early spring when it seems unlikely that anyone anywhere on the planet is making summer travel plans, we have, and we've made them for you. [End Page 209] Copyright © 2020 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.