Let’s start things off this morning with a couple of items on memory. In The Guardian Anthony Quinn reviews Gillian Tindall’s collection of essays on how objects carry and conceal the past: “Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the ‘unconsidered trifles’ of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal. ‘Most objects, like all people, disappear in the end,’ she writes at the start of The Pulse Glass, an excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance. And yet not everything crumbles to dust; some bits and pieces defy the odds by surviving, and it is Tindall’s delight – albeit of a measured and low-key sort – to describe their escape from ‘the quiet darkness of forgetting’.”

And in Lapham’s Quarterly, Ed Park considers how bits of text on paper can suddenly recreate the past, if only briefly and obscurely: “Moving house now, for the first time in twelve years, I’m forced to confront a torrent of paper. Not just old articles I’ve written—in some cases preserved in situ with the surrounding section of the magazine or tabloid, sometimes available in duplicate—but the notes behind the articles, and notes for notes’ sake, the journals and jottings, the correspondence in the days when I’d work through a booklet of twenty stamps in a month rather than a year. There are manuscripts of novels never published, drafts of aborted short stories. I have more than one folder labeled ‘Failure.’ Trying to figure out which things spark joy, I toss some redundancies, but after a few hours I just throw everything in a bag or a box and okay it for transfer to my next home. Part of this constant salvage is to be the archivist of my own life, the possible future scholar of whatever I’ve published. But mostly it’s to hold those earlier selves in amber, for just a little while longer. Each scrap of pale ink conjures the memory of the writing of it at first, and then the immediate surroundings, like a flashlight tossed into a pond. I haven’t thought of that office building in Seoul in years. But now I can see the faces of the lawyers, hear the army of giggling secretaries. I’m looking down from the mezzanine to the polished lobby floor, where old ladies tool around in buggies that buff the tiles every morning and every night.”

In other news: Roger Catlin reviews an exhibit of 120 rarely seen Hokusai works: “Katsushika Hokusai was in his 70s by the time he created his best-known image, the majestic The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Often known simply as The Great Wave, the popular print not only embodied Japanese art, but influenced a generation of artists in Europe, from Van Gogh to Monet. Yet it was one of an estimated 30,000 images from Hokusai, who was so frenzied an artist that at one point he signed his work ‘Gakyō Rōji,’ which translates to ‘the old man mad about painting.’ That’s the title, too, of a new exhibition now on view at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.”

Singing Shakespeare: “The process of adapting a play into an opera is a little like forcing the original text to drink a concoction out of Alice in Wonderland: some aspects of it will shrink or evaporate, others are magnified to unrecognizable dimensions, and the whole thing falls through music’s rabbit hole into a parallel world where very different laws apply . . . Giuseppe Verdi’s last two operas, the Shakespearean diptych of Otello and Falstaff, together constitute my favorite case study in what happens when a play is made to stand up and sing.”

Charles McGrath reviews Daisy Dunn’s life of Pliny the Younger and the Elder: “If only Daisy Dunn’s book had been around back when I was an aspiring classicist. There were actually two Roman writers named Pliny — the Elder and the Younger, as they were known; an uncle and his nephew — and I could never keep them straight, let alone understand why they were worth studying. Dunn makes a persuasive case for both. Her ostensible subject is the Younger, about whom more is known, but she toggles back and forth between the two, and, perhaps without her intending it, the uncle even steals the show for a while. How do you compete with someone so intrepid that he dies while trying to inspect an active volcano?”

Essay of the Day:

In Plough, Tara Isabella Burton writes about walking alone in cities:

“I do not enjoy walking in cities. As a semi-retired travel writer, I often find that people assume I enjoy my job. What could be more pleasurable, after all, than strolling along the Rue Lepic in Paris, or along Via Governo Vecchio in Rome, taking in the sights and panoramas and street cafés with all the gentle aestheticism of an old Baedecker guidebook?

“But, when I have done my job well, I have been miserable. Not because cities are bad for the soul, but because they are too punishingly good. I was a travel writer, after all, because I did not like myself when I was at home. I did not want to be my ordinary self, but to be the self I could be in relation to an imagined otherness: to be the sort of person who climbed mountains in the Caucasus, or clambered on ruins in Rome. Existing in new cities was supposed to be a kind of escape from who I was. Instead, it was an eternal, if ever-shifting, mirror of who I could not help but be. I found I was not the panama-hatted adventurers I’d read about imposing my word and will on the world like planting a flagpole. Instead, I was astoundingly vulnerable.

“I have walked alone in New York and in Taormina, in Tbilisi and in Yerevan. I have read D. H. Lawrence at a trattoria in Sicily and cried without meaning to and sat huddled against myself on rickety Italian trains as teenage boys talked over me in dialect. I have looked fruitlessly for a nail salon in Trieste and found so many ugly side-streets among the beautiful ones they show you on postcards that I, at last, surrendered and took the bus back to my hotel.

“I have walked alone and I have felt lonely, in a profound and soul-wrenching way, not because the city is a rootless place but because it is a teeming one. I start thinking about the last time I was in that city, and who was with me, and whether I loved them, and then I start thinking about the book I read, the last time I was here, and at which café, and how the waiter smiled, and then I start thinking about the people in the books I have read in the cafés in the city, who are also of the city – the rulers and courtiers and writers and courtesans and Caesars who in their own lives walked down these streets and sat at similar cafés and saw similar smiles, and may or may not have been in love, and when you are walking alone in a city there is nothing to interrupt this train of terrible thought but somebody abruptly bumping into you, and this, too, enters into the equation. I feel so terribly lonely, thinking these thoughts, and also so terribly weak, because there is not one of these thoughts that does not seem to abruptly bump into me from outside.

“There are so many people, in a city, and so many of them are not me, and so much has happened here, and so much has happened here to me, but so much more has happened here to everybody else. The city challenges us to contend with our comparative smallness. The city reminds us that we are not all that is.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Ice fishing

Poem: George Green, “Hood Weeps Inside His Tent at Tupelo”

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