In 1977 a 7-year-old girl was visiting her grandmother’s home in Anacostia. Walter E. Washington was in office as D.C.’s first elected mayor since 1871. Metro tunnels were still being laid; many residents were waiting for the Green Line to reach the Southeast Washington neighborhood. Disillusioned Vietnam War veterans had just returned to a hostile reception. The little girl and her grandmother had the lush garden in the backyard to themselves: just them amid supersized vines and vegetables.
For the girl, that visit and others into her teenage years were special. The grandmother talked about ownership, about controlling your destiny. “You must always think about which direction you’re going,” she told the girl. She shared the notion that you can steer life like a ship. Yet she recounted little of her own life, leaving many questions unanswered.
Fractals are all around us — in a fern’s feathery leaves or our own branching blood vessels. Their geometry has applications in fields including economics, medicine, and physics. Frame also sees them as a useful metaphor for visualizing and understanding grief.
Frame’s new book, “Geometry of Grief: Reflections on Mathematics, Loss, and Life,” suggests that thinking about fractals — and thinking geometrically, in general — can help us process life’s most difficult moments.
So Deep Nostalgia made me wonder: Why do we continue to pursue such efforts when the results inevitably creep us out? Why do we constantly retread the past, (re)animating dead loved ones, even when it can be painful?
Basically, why do we keep doing this to ourselves, and is this really about nostalgia?
“Shh….Listen!” Benny Oh says at the beginning of Ruth Ozeki’s new novel. “That’s my Book, and it’s talking to you.” His Book is not the only one; Benny hears the voices of all kinds of inanimate objects: fluorescent lights, coffee beans, paper cups, “the chatter of cash registers filled with all those arrogant metal coins that think they’re actually worth something.” It began the year he was 12, the Book informs us, the year his father died in a freak accident. Together, sometimes in amusing counterpoint, the Book and Benny chronicle his journey during the fraught year 2016, when he turns 14. Their tale of sorrow, danger and tentative redemption serves as the springboard for extended meditations on the interdependence of all beings, the magic of books, the disastrous ecological and spiritual effects of unchecked consumerism and more.
More than a crisis, a phenomenon is how
scholars describe the bubonic
craze that made the Dutch
desire, more than
anything, a tulip