Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning by Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden (review)

Abstract

I their beautifully illustrated manifesto, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden seek to “lift the cotton wool and peek at some real things” (4). Following Virginia Woolf’s idea that “moments of being are experiences on a purely sensual level,” the authors provoke the reader to think deeply about how to dispense with the veils of ideology that shutter dark times and to collaborate in imagining better futures. The book offers something completely new and wonderful: an object worthy of an afternoon engaged in careful reading and looking, followed by rethinking and relooking. The images are stunning. Small, nearly miniature figures fly, swim, float, and wander across a spectacular and entertaining array of page layouts. While a few pages rely on standard graphic novel paneling, most offer fresh imagery and design elements. The most notable aspect is the largess that illustrator Corden creates through vast swaths of color, flying books used as surfboards, spiraling libraries, and the like, all creating the feeling that gravity (in both senses of the term) could be played with, harnessed, and reformatted. Many swatches of color might have been sky, water, or something else—who knows? who cares? They work as a sort of in-between suggestion of space that enable the reader to soar alongside the authors. The sumptuous color palette presses stunning, bright lights and dark darks into constant tension. Illumination is a central theme that cuts across the text and illustrations. Illumination, the book claims, is a key goal of anthropology; and the thick, golden, glowing thread that leads the main characters—Waterston and