Edvard Munch, "Winter Landscape, Thüringen," 1906. Kunstmuseum Bergen.
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Garnet and rose quartz necklaces by Marie-Hélène de Taillac, via
Twist.
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Guglielmo Veronesi, “Perla” chair, ca. 1952. Via
Commune Design.
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Calendar watch made in 1650 by Thomas Alcock that indicates "the time of tides (presumably at London bridge), mean solar time, the age of the moon in its monthly cycle, and the day of the month." Alcock lost a similar watch in 1661 and advertised for it in the February 1661 issue of
Kingdoms Intelligencer. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Child's creamware cup, ca. 1830s, via
oldasadam.
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In interviews collected in the book Starting Point: 1979-1996, Miyazaki referred to a universal “yearning for a lost world” he refused to call nostalgia, since even children experience it. We long not for what we remember, but what we’ve never experienced at all, only sensed beneath reality’s surface.
Alissa Wilkinson, "'
The Boy and the Heron' Review: Hayao Miyazaki Has a Question for You." NYT, 11/21/2023.
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We seemed to be developing a brittle incapacity to accept, let alone honor, the tender, tragic feeling that had always lain beneath the ordinary person’s experience of nostalgia. In his once famous essay “Old China,” Charles Lamb located nostalgia in “the hope that youth brings” and which time extinguishes. What we are always most nostalgic for is, in fact, the future, the one we imagined only to see it turn into the past. The actress Helen Hayes used to tell a story of how her young prospective husband poured some peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” Years later, when he was actually able to give her a little bag of emeralds, he did so saying, “I wish they were peanuts”—which, with whatever excess of sweetness, about sums it up. Nostalgia is built into us ...
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I subscribe to Vittles online magazine, because reading evocative writing about food I’m too lazy and incompetent to prepare or seek out is one of my favourite hobbies, and because I always learn something. In a recent edition, I discovered a captivating Korean suffix. “There are no thoughts, just meong, the suffix in Korean used for activities of staring into stillness, like bull meong—staring into the fire,” wrote the author, Songsoo Kim, in a beautiful article with recipes about preparing a feast that I would dearly love to eat, but absolutely will not cook.
As a black belt starer into stillness—it’s my other favourite hobby—this spoke to me deeply. I asked Kim about it and she explained meong (also written mung) is colloquially used to describe zoning out, but without a negative connotation. This, she explained, was 'an organic linguistic development, as more and more people started mentioning how staring at the fire at campsites or fireplaces together is rather healing.' There are also forest, foliage and water versions of quiet, empty staring and cafes where you can 'hit mung.' 'It’s a moment we all need,' Kim said.
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A turtle staggered from the waves, wearily dug a shallow hole, and commenced to drop her lovely eggs. Amber had no wish to witness this; she could no longer bear to watch struggling nature. She shut her eyes, feeling that the very act of not looking was helping the turtle out in some way.
Joy Williams, "The Beach House." The New Yorker, 1/15/2024.
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I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world—not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong.
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Mitchell is one of a new breed of biologists who espouse a complex-systems perspective as an antidote to reductionism. He aims to reclaim from the philosophers words like purpose, reason, and meaning, which scientists often avoid as being unquantifiable. He mostly eschews jargon. This is a plainspoken book. It gets mildly technical in matters of biology and neuroscience, but it builds an argument that is methodical and crisp, and it cuts through years of disputation like a knife through cotton candy. This is what you are, Mitchell asserts: “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: you are an agent.”
If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.
The “how” is just as important as the “what,” if not more so. It turns out that the how actually is the what—or at least cannot be separated from it. They share one nervous system, and that oneness is what allows style to matter.
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Guy Davenport ... credited his critical acumen to a childhood spent treasure hunting. Sundays after church, his dad took him to scour fields throughout the South for arrowheads:
What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums … The search was the thing, the pleasure of looking … My sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons.
That’s vintage Davenport. Effortlessly, unabashedly learned; tender beneath its professorial carapace; vaguely excessive. John Jeremiah Sullivan ... writes, “He once defined ‘despair’ as the sensation that you’ve run out of ideas.” I wonder how that sensation registered to “the man who noticed that ‘in all of Balthus’ one finds no clocks.”
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