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When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations.
Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table.
The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others have not dared imagine. These are the visionaries — the only people who have ever changed this world.
These dynamics come alive with uncommon sweetness and charm in Miss Leoparda (public library) by Natalia Shaloshvili, translated into English by Lena Traer.
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We meet Miss Leoparda asleep in her tree after another day of driving the packed community bus — something she does with gusto and a sense of purpose, delighted to provide a commons for all the animals going about their different daily tasks.
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But this mobile idyll comes to a halt when one day “something unusual” passes by Miss Leoparda’s bus and speeds off into the distance — “a little black car coughing up clouds of smoke.”
Never having seen something so fast, all the animals fall under the spell of its expedience.
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And so, the next morning, there is an empty seat on the bus. Day by day, more seats open up as more animals are seduced by this sleek private chamber of alienation and exhaust, more and more cars filling the street, until one day Miss Leoparda finds herself alone on the bus.
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Abandoned amid the chaos of cars “coughing and spitting and passing each other” in a ruckus of arguments, Miss Leoparda grows visibly dispirited — but not defeated.
The animals, ensnared by their new addiction, begin demanding more space for their cars. And then the unthinkable happens: Miss Leoparda watches helplessly as her tree is cut down and carried away. (It is astonishing what infinities of emotion Shaloshvili can render with so few dabs of color and almost no defined lines.)
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Shaken with disbelief but knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she picks up one of the broken branches and plants it in a pot, then goes to sleep in the only home she has left — her bus — knowing she might have to wait a long time for a new tree to grow.
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And then one day, as the city has turned to one great traffic jam swarmed by exhaust and quarrels, a leaf finally appears on the branch, and with it an idea — that flash of creative defiance in a mind, that inspired remaking of the world’s givens into the unimagined.
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A new wave of amazement washes over the other animals and bicycles begin to punctuate the traffic.
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Soon, the city is aspin with spokes and smiles, and I too — a lifelong bicyclist and tree-lover in a world of cars and concrete — smile as I reach the end of this simple, charming parable about the most difficult of choices for us creatures of momentum and mimicry: to find a new way askance from the status quo. “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” wrote James Baldwin, who knew that although we don’t choose our lives, we can always choose to plant the new tree and build the new table.
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Complement Miss Leoparda with Kamau & Zuzu Find a Way — a kindred parable of prevailing over limited options with courage and creativity, which was among my favorite books in its year — then revisit this delightfully defiant 19-century manifesto for the bicycle as an instrument of freedom.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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