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memory 15

Holden Caulfield and the Ducks of Central Park

Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old “hero” of The Catcher in the Rye, goes to the park mentally or physically on seven separate occasions in the course of the relatively short novel.

Erich Maria Remarque’s Grief

He decides to write about his experience. Two earlier novels were dismal affairs. But now in 1927, over the course of a few months, he fills each page with pain…

The Maps of Our Lives Point Homeward

Older and wiser, I have long learned that for all the times I wanted to visit far-away places, there is no place like home.
February 6, 2025

Scenes From a Stolen Childhood: A Review of Kinderszenen

Only in Israel, I think in retrospect, would twelve-year-olds be this intimately familiar with the history of the Holocaust, the violence and suffering of oppression in the Warsaw Ghetto, and…

The Hidden Sorrow of Mother’s Day

Our mothers and our children will always be part of our lives, in life and death. Surprisingly, grief does not dominate our existence, it informs it.

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…

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…
December 27, 2021

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.
May 26, 2020

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…
October 10, 2011

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 in print and on internet, suggested that…
Patrick Deneen
January 6, 2010

The Final Word On Cell Phones

Rock Island, IL In the early days of FPR, and then again more recently, I was impertinent enough to write disparaging remarks about cell phones, which as everyone knows are…
Jason Peters
October 21, 2009

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 been sick, “and I don't know…
Katherine Dalton
September 17, 2009

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 behalf of government spending - including…
Patrick Deneen
March 16, 2009