The other day I was rifling through the language-related drawers of my mind trying to find a term for my recent loss of interest in cooking. I used to love to cook, but somehow the pandemic, which pushed cooking from optional joy to quotidian chore, has snuffed that pleasure out. If there is a word for this unfortunate occurrence, I don’t know it, and I began wondering if I could coin one.
The notion of dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to one, a pigeon on the ground free to move in two and an eagle in the air enjoying three.
But as we’ll see, finding an explicit definition for the concept of dimension and pushing its boundaries has proved exceptionally difficult for mathematicians. It’s taken hundreds of years of thought experiments and imaginative comparisons to arrive at our current rigorous understanding of the concept.
More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.
The formal dining room, long considered a symbol of wealth and privilege, has been the subject of much debate over the past 30 years. Some declared it dead, a relic of a bygone era when families sat down together each night for a home-cooked meal. Others clung to it as a place to welcome friends and family for holiday meals. All the while, American families turned toward eating in more informal spaces in the kitchen or — gasp — in front of the TV or on the go.
Then the pandemic hit and families who still had dining rooms began reclaiming that space for home offices or classrooms as people worked, learned and did most of their recreation from home. That put the formal dining room in the spotlight, and now people are pondering the new role it might play in our homes and lives.
The Japanese American novelist Ruth Ozeki is an animator. I don’t mean that she produces graphic novels or manga or anime, although her work does have the fairy-tale feel of some anime movies. I mean that she endows objects and animals with anima, the breath of life. Adept at magical realist fiction, Ozeki ensouls the world. Everything in her universe, down to a windowpane and a widget, has a psyche and a certain amount of agency and can communicate, if only with the few human beings granted the power to understand them.