Texts for a new time: Adrian Shirk's "Heaven Is A Place On Earth"
A book about the history of the American utopian movement
Texts for a new time is a space where I share recommendations. Mostly book recommendations, with a few other media occasionally sprinkled in — like apps, music, films, even toys. In each edition you’ll find the things I read or discovered that made me say “THIS.”
I say “THIS” when I am so excited about something I want everyone to know it immediately. When I see it as a cultural linchpin: a perfect, perfectly timed, perfectly crafted thing that answers some question we were all asking, without realizing it. A thing that, in the face of ambiguity, brings forward humanity’s potential.
Today’s text for a new time is a book by Adrian Shirk: Heaven Is A Place on Earth, published by Counterpoint Press in March 2022.
It is hard to write about Adrian Shirk’s book because I admire her work so much, and the writing-apprentice in me feels drawn to imitate her method, her craft, right now. That would mean looking at real events of my own life in relation to utopia; contemplating the patterns underlying them; weaving them into a poetic gesture.
I am not ready for such a high-wire dance. But I am grateful to have beheld it in this beautiful book. In the gentlest way, Adrian Shirk uses her own life as a substrate for my insight, and hopefully in time, my transformation.
And if you have also dreamed of a “better” world, have fancied yourself the constructor of that world, have sensed that there is some future community that will be the answer to all your yearning — this book may give you some sense of broader context, deeper kindredness with fellow utopians, and more discernment about the nature of this impulse and pitfalls it can bring.
To me, this book poses these questions to utopians:
How do we disentangle megalomania from earnest yearning for fellowship? How do we become aware of imperialist pathologies that might be subtly asserting themselves through us?
How do we engage with and broaden limited frames for heaven, or paradise, or utopia that we have inherited from our culture? How can we become the relatives we wish to be — when we barely know what we’re looking for?
How do we become more at ease with the ephemeral — more rooted in the knowledge that the magic, inclusive space of improvisation can be utopia, that utopia is and always will be an improvisation?
I am dancing into these answers one day at a time. I’m grateful for all my experiments, past, present and future. Thank you to Christina Pappas for this inspired book recommendation.