At the trailhead outside Kalga, a village of guesthouses and orchards where the road fades to footpath, Alexander handed Gapon his iPhone and asked him to take his picture to mark the “beginning of a spiritual journey.” The men hugged, and Alexander walked up the path into the forest. It was August 22, 2016.
Four days earlier, Alexander had blogged about his plan to meditate, practice yoga, and learn from the sadhu during this journey. The final line read, “I should return mid September or so. If I’m not back by then, don’t look for me ;).”
Alexander didn’t return. Somewhere in the high reaches of the Parvati Valley, he disappeared.
Countless history books and program notes would have us believe that Dvorak suddenly awakened a national musical consciousness soon after his arrival in the United States in 1892 and that the “New World” Symphony was an attempt to show naïve American composers how to build a distinctive style using what Dvorak called “Negro melodies.” Leonard Bernstein claimed at a 1958 New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert that composers in the United States at the end of the 19th century began to “feel funny about not writing American-sounding music. And it took a foreigner to point this out to them.”
A great story. But it’s not true.
Space for oneself, or a lack thereof, likely became a salient issue for couples from the ’70s on, according to Coontz. “That was a period when expectations of intimacy were actually getting larger,” she says. “This is the time when we first begin to think that men and women should be really good friends as opposed to just two gender-role stereotypes.” This creates the possibility for a deeper, more meaningful relationship, but when people start expecting their partner to fill more of their needs, they may find themselves feeling too close, too interdependent.
Wherever the phrase came from, once it was out there, it likely fueled its own acceleration. “Language gives you tools,” says Kiesling, “and tools often make you do things in particular ways that you wouldn’t otherwise do.” Once needing some space was a commonly understood term, it stands to reason that a person wanting some time away from her partner, or to put the brakes on a relationship, would likely ask for “space” rather than finding another way to convey her meaning.
Recently, I conducted my own tests to see if Lewis’ values really make Scrabble more fair. In short, Lewis was wrong. His values don’t reduce the element of luck in Scrabble. The tests also show, however, that traditional tile scoring isn’t more fair than random tile values. If we want to make Scrabble scoring more indicative of skill, we’ve been looking at the wrong part of the game for years.
In a rare and bold turn, the novelist, poet, and literary critic Christine Brooke-Rose dedicates her final book of criticism — Invisible Author (2002) — entirely to her own body of work, beginning it with a question: “Have you ever tried to do something very difficult as well as you can, over a long period, and found that nobody notices?” It is a rhetorical question. Her career is defined, she says, by writing difficult texts under self-imposed constraints — for example, omitting subject pronouns or restricting her novels to particular tenses — with little attention.
Because of this difficulty, her reader, she thinks, finds her work “unfamiliar” — if not impenetrable — and so “dismisses it, the pleasure of recognition being generally stronger than the pleasure or puzzlement of discovery.” The distinction describes a stark difference between the kinds of readers there mainly are — readers who dismiss or ignore difficult fiction — and the kinds of readers she wants — those who not only read difficult fiction, but also derive pleasure from that difficulty.