Review, Phosphorescence by Julia Baird

If ever there were a book for a moment, this could be it.

Author Julia Baird. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen

If ever there were a book for a moment, this could be it.

Julia Baird is a well-known journalist who writes for The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times as well as hosting the daily ABC current affairs program, The Drum.

She is also a trained historian — she has a doctorate in the subject — and wrote, among other things, a magisterial yet lively biography of Queen Victoria, which was published to international accolades in 2016.

She has struggled with three operations for a rare abdominal cancer in recent years. And yet, whatever demons she might have been taming at home, she has always remained chipper in the public domain and continued to work unless she was physically unable.

Baird’s new book is a meditation-cum-memoir with a lengthy title, Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder & Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark. It is about all manner of things: love and loss, family and friendship, illness and the fear of death, grief and joy, and the spiritually nourishing benefits of the natural world.

The dark world she mentions must refer to her brushes with death. She couldn’t have known when she began that by the time the book came out the world would be plunged into a frightening global pandemic, such as we haven’t seen since the end of World War I.

A thread that runs lightly through the book is her own ongoing intoxication with a natural phenomenon: phosphorescence. Her description of first swimming through it, diving under it, and watching it limn her body in the darkness before dawn on Sydney’s North Shore, is giddy with excitement.

She begins her introduction by listing its sources: fireflies, ghost mushrooms, glow-worms, flashlight fish and more. She writes a brief but fascinating outline of historical attitudes to it. Aristotle puzzled over it. The Japanese thought fireflies were the souls of dead Samurai. Sailors thought phosphorescent blooms on the sea were fire. The 17th-century French Jesuit, Guy Tachard, thought it was luminous spirits caused by the sun impregnating the sea by day, uniting after dark to rise violently out of the ­waters.

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From there Baird segues into more human mysteries: heartbreak, physical pain, proximity to death, grief. She relates a conversation she had with her counsellor about a heartbreak that left her unable to sleep or eat or regain her balance, let alone her confidence. He told her about a counsellor of his who responded violently to a similar plaint when he was young.

“It is now that everything that you have been given in your life matters; this is what you draw on,” his counsellor told him after whacking him. “Your parents, your friends, your work, your books, everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned … ”

“What is the point of all you have learned,” Baird paraphrases, “if you can’t employ it when you are floundering in a nadir? Haven’t all those lessons, and loves, been pooled in a reservoir you can draw on?”

Her book addresses that reservoir. She lists the results of her quest for happiness, as well as awe, what Emily Dickinson called “the light within”:

First, pay attention. Second, do not underestimate the soothing power of the ordinary. Third, seek awe, and nature, daily. Fourth … well, so many things: show kindness; practise grace; eschew vanity; be bold, embrace friends, family, faith and doubt imperfection and mess; and live deliberately.

In other words, how to nurture ourselves as well as our friends.

The chapters embrace the whole of human experience, dense with erudition, emotion and honesty. It is a rare concatenation of traits in a person and reading her words is like spending an evening with a wonderful friend, with unlimited time and a glass of good wine in hand.

Baird has seen a lot and she only turns 50 this year. She backpacked all over the world when she was young. She lived wildly, even while retaining and savouring her Christian faith. She was raised evangelical but with adulthood settled into Anglicanism, which she argues with vigorously, most especially on the position of women, even while it remains the rock on which she bases her life.

She talks about cuttlefish and storm chasers. She revisits the friendships of her youth, including one woman she went backpacking with, whom she had absolutely no idea was gay until she came out.

That discussion includes a mini-history of women cross-dressing. Take Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake by the English. The transcript of her show trial shows the fact she dressed as a man — partly for convenience as she led her army and partly to stave off repeated attempts at rape — was among the charges laid by the church fathers. Baird includes a description of how men’s clothes were layered in those days.

“Imagine being burned alive because you didn’t want to be raped. Or being cast as an evil witch because you were raped,” she writes in summation and refers to Medusa, who was ugly with rage and had snakes for hair, who could turn men to stone with a glance.

“But we forget, or are not told, that, as Ovid recounted, she had once been a beautiful maiden who was raped in the temple of Athena by the god of the sea, Poseidon. And for this, she was cursed and turned into a monster. Punished for being a victim.”

There is political passion in her writing and there is grace. Elsewhere she meditates on letters she would write to her young son and daughter, about who to be and how to encounter the world. Her examples can be offbeat.

She urges her daughter to, among many other things, demand respect, use her brain, find friends with true hearts — and remember Joseph Stalin. Stalin, she warns, was a romantic poet, with intense eyes and a handsome face before he became a dictator and murdered millions, “the kind of boy you might find yourself kissing in the back corner of a bar, oblivious to … clocks and caution”.

And so she rambles eloquently on. A beautiful and rallying read in our isolation while all we might have for company is a book.

Miriam Cosic is a journalist and author.

Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder & the Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark

By Julia Baird. Fourth Estate, 310pp, $32.99 (HB)