She dug through files at his desk, on his computer, and stacked in boxes in the basement. She even found two slim sets of typed pages on a bookshelf in her office. “They were right here and I never knew,” she says. “But it was comforting, too, that they were right here and he trusted me with his work. Maybe he was giving them to me. Maybe he wanted me to find them.”
As Marshall read through his files, some going back to the Harvard class where they met, she realized Harney hadn’t just been writing; he’d been taking what she calls “seed pearls” and crafting them into deeply moving poems, sometimes gestating them for years. These were striking, lyrical works, mostly set in Boston and Naples, Italy, where Harney had traveled every year during the previous decade to write. “Each time I was stunned,” she says. “I’d read the poem and think about all that I didn’t know about Scott.”
Nostalgia has an air of total irreconcilability. There is the feeling the word describes, of course: a fundamentally impossible yearning, a longing to go back even as we are driven ceaselessly forward, pushed further away from our desire even as we sit contemplating it. But it’s the actual feeling, too, that ceaselessly resists any attempt to give it shape or sense. If we say we feel nostalgic, in general or about something in particular, it rarely needs an explanation, and there likely isn’t a good one anyway: Why should it be the smell of our grandmother’s cookies or the feel of a particular sweater or the sight of a certain tree in a certain playground, and not something else, that sends us searching backward? Why is it welling up now, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday? Why haven’t I felt this way for a long time? Why does it matter? And that assumes it even occurs to us to interrogate this sudden rush: one of nostalgia’s more persistent qualities is its ability to elide reason, to be felt deeply without prompting any further inquiry.
It’s this strange aura of elusive profundity that makes nostalgia seem less like some sort of modern condition and more like a universal feeling that took us some time to put our finger on. If feelings in general are internal experiences that demand expression whether or not we have the means for it, our inability to actually do anything with nostalgia might be what kept it ineffable for so long. Most kinds of longing can be settled in one way or another, if not necessarily to the satisfaction of the yearner. Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. Maybe it resisted definition for so long because naming it doesn’t help resolve anything anyway.
We know from legends and fairytales that dragons can be tricked. Ness shows that although monsters exist in every world, there are many more who wish to overcome them; and that even in the smoking ruins of civilisation, there is room for hope.
I've lived in Paris for 16 years and I've never read Buford. So I first feared Dirt might be yet another expat tale of moving to France en famille, with all its tedious clichés.
I should have known better. Buford is a longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine and author of Heat, a best-selling depiction of the city's restaurant scene. He is knowledgeable, quick and funny — and Dirt is a work of cultural, historical and gastronomical depth that reads like an action memoir.
Conceived well before the coronavirus hijacked our lives, “Sick Souls, Healthy Minds” offers us a lifeline at this moment. Many of us, forced into a state of suspended animation, now have time to think. As we tell each other what to watch, what to cook, what to read and what exercises to do, John Kaag invites us to ask, together with America’s greatest philosopher, William James, what makes life worth living.
When we can leave our cocoons, browsers are likely to find Kaag’s book in the self-help section of their local bookstore. Yet readers lured by its subtitle, “How William James Can Save Your Life,” will soon find themselves wrestling with philosophy, psychology and religious studies, though not in scholars’ bone-dry prose. Instead Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a twice-divorced, self-described social misfit, lets readers into his own attempts to stave off depression when he felt the walls of his life closing in.
“Weird” is Khazan’s attempt to find herself — in the psychological and sociological literature she regularly covers for the Atlantic, and in the narratives of other people who feel they don’t fit. On her wide-ranging tour of the former realm, she examines research on norms, conformity, ostracism, prejudice, loneliness and “impostor syndrome” — a voluminous catalogue of the ways humans create groups that include some and exclude others.
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,