Tag: memory
Repairing the Rents of History
The real challenge is to make the wisdom of the past live in the present. Such work is analogous to sprouting a seed, playing a song, cooking and enjoying a family recipe.
Scenes of Arrival, Stories of Home
Here are three novels about three places in the world. Each conveys not just a perfunctory setting but a web of topography, livelihoods, pastimes, and lore. And in each the experience of arriving at that place endures in memory and self-understanding.
In Our Memory Lock’d: Memorial Day and the Need to Remember
One of the arts of statesmanship is the use of language, of rhetoric, to reshape the architecture of people’s souls and orient them towards political truths.
The Uses of Nostalgia
Nostalgia's got a bad rap, but, in addition to being nearly inescapable, it has indispensable benefits, provided it’s kept within reasonable limits.
October, Momma, and Memory
It is a reminder that our own personal winter is coming. When you are daily reminded of your own bones by pains in your joints, seeing a skeleton dangling from someone’s front porch makes it all real.
A Product of Speed
Nostalgia is, therefore, an index of alienation, communal decrepitude, and, at high levels, cultural patricide.
Against Pessimism
Alexandria, VA My last post has led some to conclude that I am a pessimist. Even Ross Douthat, among the most perceptive commentators...
Two Degrees of Separation
Henry County, Kentucky. Last week here we buried our 97-year-old neighbor, a woman named Thelma Chilton Moody Clark. Until this spring she had never...
The Long Run
Alexandria, VA It has become a commonplace to observe that the thought of John Maynard Keynes is back in fashion. Keynes argued strenuously on...