In my twenties the question was never “What do I want to read?” but rather “Who do I want to be?”—and bookstores were shrines I pilgrimaged to for answers. I didn’t have much money and had to be intentional in my selections. I’d pull a book from the shelf and study its cover, smell its pages, wander into the weather of its first lines and imagine the storms to come—imagine a wiser, wilder me for having been swept away by them. It’s something I still feel in my forties. I’m still dazzled by possibilities when I walk into a bookstore.
But it’s not the same.
Now when I wander the aisles, it’s not just some future self I imagine but a past one. There aren’t just books to read but books I’ve already read. Lives I’ve lived. Hopes abandoned. Dreams deferred. The bookstore is still a shrine but more and more what I find aren’t answers to questions but my own unwritten histories.
What happens to a song lyric when it lands on the page? It becomes oddly silent but also not silent. Ghosts of its usual rhythms lie at the beginnings and ends of its lines. The blank space around it seems weirdly disconcerting, like white noise.
This happens, of course, because a song lyric isn’t poetry. A poem exists between pages of paper, bound by its own internal logic. A lyric arrives from the wider world, laden with decades of meaning and remembered melody, and is unmoored violently and suddenly from its bearings. It is also presented for the reader’s eye – which implies an act of choice – not the listener’s ear. The ear could have heard an unforgettable lyric quite by chance on an otherwise ordinary morning. This serendipity disappears in print, although we still hunt for magic within these new leaves.
Jane Kenyon writes in her poem “Having It Out with Melancholy” about feeling melancholy ever since she was a little girl, a sad baby who couldn’t even be saved by “the yellow / wooden beads that slid and spun / along a spindle on [her] crib.” “I was already yours,” she writes, “the anti-urge, / the mutilator of souls.” One of the most famous lines of the poem is: “Unholy ghost, / you are certain to come again.” She goes on to write, “There is nothing I can do / against your coming. / When I awake, I am still with thee.” Frighteningly, like the Holy Ghost, melancholy inhabited Kenyon, insidious, its vengeance to consume eternal. I first read the poem in college but forgot the writer and title, for years only remembering someone else’s words describing my own experience—the feeling of something alien inhabiting my body and tugging me under. Discovering the poem again years later felt like a comforting relief.
I was already drunk on a sense of abundance by the time we sat down for lunch with my mother at the California Pizza Kitchen, choosing it because it seemed fancy and my father was leaving work in the middle of the day to meet us. We studied the menu giddily, and when we were encouraged to each order our own pizza, we all had our own reasons to go for it. That’s when I felt the first pull of something like love for America, not the one I’d seen on TV, not the one I’d come to expect from the dubbed episodes of “Fresh Prince” and “90210” that we watched in rural France, but the one that stretched out before me now, greasy and messy and garnished with fresh cilantro.
“The Moviegoer” isn’t really about movies, and yet the title remains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It’s apt because it moves the novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region’s most storied city, isn’t about history or legacy, isn’t about place at all: it’s about how we see things—a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world.
9 to 5 reemerges into a work culture in which little has changed. As Fonda told Vanity Fair, “‘I’m sorry to say the situation is worse today,’ particularly in terms of the harassment that people in the workplace face. ‘Today, a lot of the workforce [is] hired by an outside company, so if there’s a problem, who do you complain to? Who do you fight with?’” Add to this list of worthwhile questions: where did this chronic job insecurity come from?
Louis Hyman, a professor of economic history at Cornell University, offers an answer. In his latest book, (Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary*, he attempts to explain the origins of what is often called the “gig economy,” the “sharing economy,” or “platform capitalism,” exemplified by companies like Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, and Upwork.
But this sort of wandering speculation is precisely what Benjamin finds so productive in sleeplessness, and such straying is always preferable to a refusal to transgress. In her willingness to embrace the same sort of liminality in her work that she champions in the menopausal state and the insomniac condition, Benjamin boldly points the way toward new and productive ways of living.
Americans supposedly have little patience for expertise these days — except, it seems, when it comes to parenting experts, who continue to churn out guides as quickly as their audience can consume them. This appetite for counsel inevitably reflects deeper, often unspoken middle-class aspirations and anxieties; as the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips once observed, the appeal of such books goes beyond the immediate need to deal with a sullen teenager or a sleepless newborn. “Our obsession with child development and with so-called parenting skills,” he wrote, “has become a code for our forlorn attempt to find a sanity for ourselves.”
Jennifer Traig apparently agrees. In “Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting,” she takes solace in how useless, contradictory and downright harmful so much advice has historically been. “The things we take for granted as normal and natural strike parents in other parts of the world as absurd and dangerous,” she writes, in this brisk survey of child-rearing tips through the ages.