The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.
Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s and 1970s—and yes, that included the new year. Celebrations and midnight kisses on December 31, of course. Countdowns, no. How, then, did countdowns go from almost nonexistent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year’s end and another’s beginning?
After seeing the letters, I couldn’t shake this question. What if Eliot’s illness hadn’t kept him home, what if he’d eagerly accepted the invitation and shown up at the Woolfs’ house in Sussex for the weekend, as he had several times before? Would his presence at Monk’s House — sometimes an irritant, always an interest — have mattered if Woolf’s most recent depression were as strong as during her previous suicide attempts in 1913–’15? Or what if Eliot had quit smoking, which exacerbated his bronchitis, or ignored his doctor’s advice and headed to Sussex anyway?
In Britain, food writing by “minority groups” – and here I’m talking about Indians, because that’s my own background – almost always gives a central role to those “heirloom family recipes” handed down the generations from mother or grandmother. When I started writing about food 20 years ago, an editor even joked that I would have to “invent a grandmother”. It was already a cliche a generation ago, but now this problematic pursuit of “authenticity” through appeals to a mythic matriarch is simply done to death.
Maybe the masterpiece is the decade itself, so ambiguous and ironic. Schnabl also leaves enough room for an old romantic like me to believe that the masterpiece is love. She keeps us guessing right until the end when, in a genius move, she changes the question entirely.
Sun on my face and the train slips
into the tunnel. Dim reflection confronts.