Underlying this rich literary tradition are fundamental questions of universal interest about the fate of the dead, the porousness of the boundary separating their world from ours, and the social obligations that the living had to provide for the deceased in their need. This attention to the memory of the dead and the responsibility of the living for their care was not unique to ancient polytheism or medieval Christianity. In fact, Western ghost stories shine most brightly as tools for teaching when they are read in tandem with tales of the returning dead from other religious cultures. In Buddhist and Taoist traditions, for example, the neglect of ancestors or misdeeds in life could give rise to “hungry ghosts.” These fearful spirits abided in the underworld, but they walked the earth during the seventh month of the Chinese calendar. In anticipation of their arrival, communities celebrated the Hungry Ghost Festival to provide symbolic sustenance not only to honor their own ghostly ancestors but also to ward off the ill will of the unknown phantoms in their midst. Like their Western analogues, the practice of the care of the hungry ghosts in Chinese culture is grounded on the hope that when we die, we, too, can rely on the living for help as we face the consequences of our mortal actions in the world to come.
I didn’t merely want to write about Hanging Out. I wanted to enact it—to meet the challenge Liming offers her readers. Take risks, she writes. Create opportunities to spend unproductive, unstructured time doing nothing with other people. That’s why I asked Liming, a complete stranger, if I could fly up to Vermont and hang out for a day. Because she is down to hang, she said sure. So, after dinner, when her husband, Dave Haeselin, asked if I wanted to come over to their house and continue the hang, I said, “Yeah, I can stay out a little later.”
How paleontologists define what species are, or are not, megafauna depends on what sort of creatures we’re talking about, and sometimes which expert we’re talking to. Herbivores are generally considered megafauna when they reach more than 2,200 pounds, and carnivores when they’re over 220 pounds. (So, the beavers, with their plant-based diet, don’t quite qualify, but they were impressively large all the same.) And up until relatively recently, there were many more such species. It wasn’t just that there were saber-toothed cats larger than Amur tigers prowling the Pleistocene grasslands, but also that Earth’s ecosystems would often host two or three species of large saber-toothed cat in one place, along with several giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, giant camels, and more. Then, most of them vanished. Of about 50 megaherbivore species present toward the end of the ice age, 41 went extinct. Experts are still debating why, but the emerging picture is that shifts in climate and in hunting by humans combined to make it impossible for the giant, ancient plant-munchers to survive. Big carnivores didn’t fare much better. Out of 15 megafauna carnivores, only about 6 survived—beasts, like black bears and jaguars, that persist in pockets of their former ranges.
If you eat a midday meal, do you call it lunch? What about luncheon, nuncheon, noonshine, or nunch? Perhaps you pause for refreshment toward the end of the morning and call this light repast elevenses (from eleven, as in eleven o’clock a.m.). If you skipped breakfast, your meal might be brunch (a portmanteau, or blended, word made from breakfast and lunch). Or maybe you call a midday meal dinner (and an evening meal supper, from Old French super, “to sup, take liquids by sipping”).
Chances are, you don’t say noonshine unless you’re a big Jane Austen fan. Noonshine, meaning “noon light,” has been around since the seventeenth century, but Austen appears to have been the first to apply it to a midday meal. Her particular use of noonshine, however, didn’t catch on with the general public. But Austen, like others in the early nineteenth century, also called a midday meal nuncheon (from Middle English noon and shenche, “a cupful, a drink”). Nuncheon and its shortened form nunch, meaning “light refreshment” or “drink,” had been around for centuries before Austen used it, and nuncheon lives on in regional varieties of English in the United States and the United Kingdom.
I watch the closing credits of every movie I see. I learned from my parents, who would always sit in the dark theater watching the names scroll down the screen while the ushers trickled in and the rest of the audience collected their belongings. Their ritual confused me as a kid: “Muppet Treasure Island” was over; Kermit and his friends were reunited; and the villain had his comeuppance. But my parents were still in their seats, eyes on the screen. What more were they expecting?
As the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman writes in his new book, “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” the Academy Awards can be described as a “game,” a “fashion show,” a “horse race” and even “an orgy of self-congratulation by rich and famous people who think too highly of themselves.” But, Schulman contends, the real key to understanding the awards comes down to power: “who has it, who’s straining to keep it, who’s invading the golden citadel to snatch it.” More than a mere journey through Academy Awards history, his book is a trip through Hollywood’s power struggles.
What Lloyd wants us to recognise is just how individualised mourning is and to understand that the grieving process never really ends – it just morphs. “You don’t get over it… There’s a peace but there’s not an ending.” Wise words and much like the book as a whole, a reminder that death touches every family, and we’re better off dealing with it together than alone.