Growing up, thriller author Megan Miranda spent time at her grandparent's house in the Poconos. There wasn't any cell service — it was just her and her family out there in the woods, cut off from society. "During the day, it would be this grand adventure," recalls Miranda. "But at night I would just stare out into the darkness thinking, 'what is out there?' "
So began Miranda's long obsession with the duality of nature — at once, a beautiful serene place, and also, with just a slight change of perspective, a terrifying one.
As we ponder world-historical events on a ten-, 20- or 50-year timeline – the long-term effects of Brexit; the resettling of the status quo in European security; even the climate crisis – it’s somehow easy to miss changes that are potentially even more lasting and fundamental. This apparently inconsequential story strikes me as an epiphenomenon of one of them. That is: gradually and without all that much fanfare, a whole generation of digital natives have come to adulthood in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it.
The story goes like this: before Sir Grant, my great-grandfather, was a thrice-knighted imperial officer, he was a young rugby student studying Classics at Oxford. It would have been around 1890 that him and Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, better known as Oscar Wilde’s lover, became friendly. When Bosie became the new editor of an Oxford literary magazine, he began publishing a roster of exclusively gay writers, who were also his friends and lovers: people like Wilde, John Addington Symonds, and Robbie Ross.
Scandalized, my great-grandfather published an article against Bosie’s editorship. The takedown was mostly a slam against Wilde, whom he dubbed “Ossian Savage” saying his “greatest misfortune was his face.” (A rather camp criticism in my estimation.) Bosie took great offense, he and Grant argued, but within a few months they were back to being friends.
Today, the book is Rupert Everett’s “To the End of the World,” the actor’s characteristically waspish diary of the making of his directorial debut, “The Happy Prince,” a film in which he also cast himself in the lead role of Oscar Wilde. It is not yet 9 a.m., and I find myself alone in the rear carriage with “something sensational to read in the train.” I am not merely glad to be alive; I am jubilant.
For obvious reasons, over the last couple of years there hasn’t been much opportunity to do my favorite thing in the world. Today I am doing it en route to London, where I am going to do my second favorite thing in the world: sit in a darkened room all day with strangers — and a few friends — watching old films and television programs.
For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions aren’t simply natural upwellings from our psyche—they’re constructions we inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier researchers who sought to identify a small set of “hard-wired” emotions, which were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once accepted that, as she writes, “people’s emotional lives are different, but emotions themselves are the same.” Her research initially looked for the differences elsewhere: in the language of emotion, in the forms and the intensity of its expression, in its social meaning.
Josh, when living
your best life you are a floodgate,
the last restraint between
us open mouths and feelings
we had never had or have had since.