December 2019

Victim of Changes?

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Forty years ago tonight, I was sitting up with my mom watching New Year’s celebrations on TV. I’m not sure what I was doing up, being such a young tyke, but I remember asking what was going on as the ball was dropping and people were loudly counting down. “They’re getting ready for it to be 1980,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be 1980!” I replied. I’m not sure what the calendrical difference could have possibly meant to me at that point in my life, but it seems clear that the innate conservative insight had already blossomed in me: change is to be dreaded.

I’ve seen a lot of people playing a “beginning of the decade/end of the decade” game on social media this week. For me, on December 31st, 2009, I remember discovering a treasure trove of various electronic music artists to use my iTunes gift cards on, just listening to one great algorithmic recommendation after another. It was a welcome bright spot right at the end of a difficult year, especially with having lost two dogs to cancer just weeks earlier. It was an especially snowy winter; we had gotten over two feet of snow a week before Christmas, and we would get two feet more over the next couple months, which made my driving job extremely hazardous and nerve-wracking. All that music I downloaded around New Year’s made it a bit more bearable.

Little did I know, as I sat there sampling songs, that within two weeks, I would meet the Lady of the House. All right, I suppose not all change is terrible. And sometimes, in a limited context, progress is even possible. Happy New Year.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

By in battling personal entropy, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake No Comments

Tom Chivers:

Guyenet’s argument is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. First, it’s not that some foods are more fattening because of how they affect our bodies — they’re more fattening because of how they affect our brains. And second, it’s not a particular food group; it’s not fat or carbs or sugar. It’s that we have become extraordinarily good at developing foods which are hard to resist, are full of calories, and which don’t fill us up. Essentially, through the simple workings of market capitalism, the food industry has been steadily optimising for the most obesogenic, “hyper-palatable” foods it is possible to make.

…Luckily, says Guyenet, there is a way around it. But it’s a bit bleak. The problem is not fat, or carbs, or sugar. It’s not ultra-processed foods or crisps or sweets. It’s the fact that all this tasty stuff is being combined in increasingly tasty ways; the problem is that tasty food is really hard to stop eating. “What do we do,” asked Scott Alexander in his excellent review of Guyenet’s book, “when the enemy is deliciousness itself?”

The sub-heading tells us that “Capitalism is cooking up food designed to short-circuit our brains.” Speaking of willpower, I will demonstrate restraint by avoiding the easy joke about how non-capitalist societies have indeed done very well at limiting excess (or even minimal) caloric intake among their citizens. Instead, I’ll just note that it appears Guyenet will be to obesity what Nicholas Carr was to the decline of reading in a digital age: a purveyor of convenient excuses. No, no, you see, I would eat better and exercise, just like I would have read more books, if only “the system” hadn’t rewired my brain, corroded my agency, and made me a slave inside my own body. The good that I would, I do not…

There’s a Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, in which the Buddha, responding to someone pestering him with irrelevant metaphysical questions, says:

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

Speculating about the nature of the soul and the afterlife versus simply doing your best to live an honorable life, or endlessly analyzing the origin of obesity rather than practicing moderation in diet and exercise — the Buddha was describing the countless ways we rationalize, procrastinate and stall rather than simply do what we know we need to do to make our lives a little bit easier or more pleasant. We demand that the world itself be changed before we exercise our own agency, an absurdity that should reduce us to helpless laughter at our own foolishness. “But…but…how can I be expected to avoid temptation? Why can’t some benevolent, omnipotent overlord simply remove all temptation from my grasp instead?” We may invoke the jargon of neuroscience and economic radicalism these days to pretend that we’re explaining things more thoroughly, but the dilemma is the same as it ever was: we never work as hard as when we’re trying to avoid necessary, boring work. As Neil Postman wrote, “Like moral theology, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.”

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Jun. 11, 2016.]

Yahdon Israel:

He asked if the books were for class. I told him they weren’t. He asked if I was selling them. I told him I wasn’t. He asked why I had so many.

“Because I’m reading them.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why carry them all? Why not just get a Nook or a Kindle?”

A trap, Yahdon! Don’t answer that!
His premise is flawed. The logic is pat.
Resist the urge to justify;
Instead, reply with Bartleby,

“I would prefer not to.”

Turn the tables, flip the script,
No, flip the tables, scatter wide
the coins of realm, and thus equipped
with self-respect, retort with pride,

“What sort of man are you?”

Why truckle like a serf to please
the monarchs of our modern age?
Convenience and Efficiency
still lock their subjects in a cage

with no aesthetic view.

Why trickle like a stream pursuing
least resistance to the sea?
One of us should be reviewing
options, but it isn’t me.

****

I read Israel’s essay several days ago, but not much of it stayed with me. Like so many other near-identical essays praising the book-as-object, I agree with the sentiment, but I found myself harboring a vague thought in the back of my mind: wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if someone just presented an attitude of haughty disdain, rather than feeling forced to justify themselves? What if someone were to simply say, “Because go to hell, I don’t want a Kindle, that’s why, and what’s wrong with you that you even think like that?” I felt a little Nietzschean rage against all those Socratic interlocutors who demand that we justify our passions rationally, that we genuflect at the altar of utilitarian functionalism. It’s simply assumed that technological progress is an unquestionable good, that faster, smaller, sleeker, easier is a moral imperative. Well, no. We should already know that books are a Good Thing. A full bookcase is a thing of beauty. You should be forced to defend your thoughtless assumption that even the tiniest extra effort that can be avoided should be.

And for who knows what reason, I had the impulse to express all this in verse instead of prose.

As for the poem itself, I clearly didn’t trouble myself greatly over rules of form, and I hope you won’t either. Originally, I thought I might aim for a classic sonnet, but the first two standalone lines forced their way in, and no matter how I pleaded with them to leave, no matter how I begged them to consider reshaping themselves, they insisted that this is how they were meant to be, and this is where they were meant to be. Eventually, I gave up and just built the rest of the poem around their recalcitrance. I obviously never bothered to stick to a clear rhyme scheme either. Frankly, I just choose to focus on the positives, such as the fact that I managed to keep it in iambic tetrameter while telling a coherent story.

Carpe Tempus

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Erik Robinson:

Over the past few years, I have begun to keep track of what I have read through the course of each year by placing every finished book onto a separate “completed” bookshelf. Some years are better than others, but I have been averaging about 100 books a year. Compared to the prodigious rate at which some people read, this may not be impressive; compared to my aspirations for reading when I buy five books on Friday night and dream that I could finish them all by Sunday, it falls far short. And yet, even at the rate of 100 a year, I will look at the shelf and realize that I don’t even remember reading some of the books on there.

Maybe this is sheer careless reading or inattentiveness, but maybe it is true of life more generally. Some reading has stayed with me through years, but I have forgotten the great bulk of everything I have ever read. It is a sad reflection, made sadder when I realize that the same is true of my life more generally. Most of my experiences and feelings have also slipped away from my memory, but at least I can go back and re-read a book – those parts of my life are lost forever.

What a wonderful post. Funny enough, I thought it was going to inspire me to write a little bit about books and reading, but now that I’m sitting here at the keyboard, I find my thoughts going in a different direction entirely.

For most of my adult life, I’ve played a little game with myself around Christmastime. I try to retain at least a few vivid memories of each Christmas and “recite” them in chronological order, starting from the earliest I can remember at around age five or six. I don’t mean I literally deliver a meandering soliloquy out loud; I just mean I attempt to set aside some uninterrupted time to concentrate and systematically reflect on one Christmas after another, to keep the embers of memory glowing. Why? Well, aside from the surface-level answer that it’s my favorite time of year and memories are plentiful, there’s the fact that, in a way, I’m attempting to pause the flow of time, to gather all those Christmases Past and relive them now, all at once, to join the Webster’s Dictionary I got from my dad for Christmas of 1982 together with the Christmas morning I spent watching the sunrise with my dog on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1996 and the Christmas of 2003 when I spoke to my grandmother for the last time, and so on. A world in a grain of sand; eternity in an hour; a lifetime of disparate experiences gathered under one arbitrary temporal roof to celebrate together. It’s like I’ve constructed a Simonidean memory palace, one decorated with strings of electric lights and fragrant with the scents of pine, peppermint, holly, and sage, with choral versions of carols playing on an endless loop in the background.

Most of my life has of course been forgotten, and that’s as it should be. The past can be a gorgon if we stare too deeply into it. As Lewis Hyde said in his excellent book A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past, “a pure, triumphant memory will mean an end to emerging life and a fixing of time, everything stuck just where it is (stuck, we might say, in those eternal, unchanging forms).” Nothing can renew itself if it isn’t allowed to disappear. In this case, though, I can’t resist the urge to thwart that natural cycle. If, when my life is over, I should find myself as a shade in Hades, being commanded to drink from the waters of Lethe, I’d like to think that I could find a way to pull some sort of trick to keep the memories of December 25th safe from the water’s obliterating effects, whether to smuggle them with me into the next life, or just to keep them for cheerful company in the netherworld.

Stocking Stuffed

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From the Lady of the House’s sister:

After so many, many years, I think I’m finally convincing people that no, really, I don’t need surprises for Christmas; it’s perfectly fine to give me books that I’ve asked for. I won’t be disappointed! I won’t be bored! Just, please, give me the books!

The Watts book was perfect for a gift — it had been hanging around on the mid-tier of my wishlist for months, but never seemed able to force its way to the front of the line. There always seemed to be something else more desirable when it came time to buy. The Wasserman book might turn out to be more frustrating than I initially realized, but, oh well, forewarned is forearmed.

The glasses weren’t a Christmas gift; I got those a few months ago. Yes, I held out valiantly in my battle with Father Time, but this was the year for buying my first pair of readers. On a whim, I tried on a pair while standing near the checkout in the grocery store and was astonished at how clear the text looked on my prescription bag. The Lady of the House says they make me look “distinguished,” which I’m pretty sure is a euphemistic synonym for “old.”

Merry Christmas to all of you, and thanks for choosing to waste your valuable time reading here!

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published July 16, 2014.]

Leon Wieseltier:

I am not on Twitter. I am not a snob about it. Some of my best friends tweet. Nor do I believe that my absence from the lists makes me pure; I suffer from other forms of digital narcosis. But the interminable hectoring of Twitter, its infinite discharge of emotion and promotion, holds no attraction for me. It is a medium of communication in which nothing intellectually or linguistically substantial can be accomplished. I refuse to operate mentally at its speed: I have already been sufficiently accelerated, thank you. And I hate the din.

And with that showily dismissive, hand-dusting flourish (as well as what appears to be a veiled confession of an addiction to deviant forms of pornography), his bona fides as a man of the digital people reinforced, Wieseltier proceeds to inform us that he nonetheless simply cannot abide an ersatz intellectual like Alain de Botton being dismissive of Twitter, or digital interconnectedness in general, however mildly. You see, de Botton has a new book out in which he voices the, uh, less-than-startling notion that we might do well to take “Twitter Sabbaths,” along with other anodyne suggestions for calmer digital living:

“We need, on occasion, to be able to go to a quieter place…”

“We should at times forego the Twitter feed…”

On occasion! At times! Goodness gracious, summon the constabulary and get this madman off the street!

The ostensible thrust of Wieseltier’s “defense” is that de Botton’s meek advice is actually subversive encouragement to the “haute bourgeoisie” to be derelict in their duty of being well-informed citizens of the world. A good editor might have pointed out that this might appear quite a foolish tack to take, seeing as how Wieseltier had just got done harrumphing about how nothing intellectually substantial could possibly be encountered on social media anyway. Couldn’t this, however inadvertently, be good advice for anyone who wants to be genuinely informed? But he and TNR in general have never bothered to hide their disdain for de Botton or the type of shallow dunces who read him (none of whom are even likely to know how to casually drop a term like “haute bourgeoisie,” I mean, ugh), so I think it’s safe to say that this conceit, like the self-aggrandizing opening paragraph, is merely a way for Wieseltier to signal his superiority (and, by extension, that of the average TNR reader) under the guise of a broader humanitarian instinct. Too bad he’s so clumsy and artless about it. Aren’t highfalutin snobs supposed to be naturally good at this?

What You Know That Just Ain’t So

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Kevin Williamson:

Everybody is after that feeling: the flat-Earthers, the Q-Anon dopes who have got themselves so torqued up that the feebs are worried about them as a terrorism threat, the Bernie Sanders partisans whispering darkly about the “rigged” economy and the shadowy billionaires acting behind the scenes, who control the media, the corporations, the government . . . The social exclusion and isolation that comes from joining a mystery cult isn’t a terrible price to pay but one of the main benefits, the mechanism by which the cult imbues its members with a sense of new identity. They speak about flat-Earth belief as something that follows a conversion experience and sadly note the apostasy of one high-profile social-media advocate who recently left their community. Which is to say: One conspiracy theory is very like another.

Speaking of flat-Earthers, in Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, Alec Ryrie wrote about the intellectual character of skeptics in general:

To wonder nowadays whether the earth really is moving, and whether five centuries’ worth of accumulated astronomy is a hoax, you do not need to be a drunkard or a fool. You need to be suspicious: ready to believe you are being lied to. And it helps if you are not very well educated. If you are woven too tightly into our civilisation’s web of knowledge, you will not be able to kick against it. To see this at work, I recommend visiting the websites of modern flat-earther organisations which, in their stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age, are the closest thing our own world has to medieval atheists. Of course, whether you are a modern flat-earther or a medieval atheist, the lack of deep engagement with the dominant intellectual systems of your age which makes your doubts possible also blunts their power. You may have some slogans and some hunches, but you will be unable to refute astronomers who come at you with their orbits and laws of motion, or theologians wielding essences and ontologies. You can only reply with the perennial mulish wisdom of the sceptic who is told to admire the stitching on the emperors clothes: I just don’t see it.

My brother called me out of the blue on my birthday a couple months ago. To my additional surprise, he proceeded to talk my ear off for six hours. It was a good time, though slightly surreal, as we’ve never been particularly close as adults. Anyway, among the many topics that came up was conspiratorial thinking. He asked me what I thought about the JFK assassination. I said I really didn’t have an opinion about it. He pressed a bit as to whether I found the official story plausible. I replied that I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if someone produced definitive evidence tomorrow that it was all a gigantic cover-up, but that it was just one rabbit hole I had no interest in investigating. Life is too short to dabble in X-Files paranoia, there are too many enjoyable things to do, and what would I do with any conclusions I drew anyway? In general, I told him, I think the common denominator of conspiratorial thinking is that it overvalues intention and undervalues accidents, side effects, and unintended consequences. Events are too often assumed to have turned out precisely as they were planned, and I think humans can only dream of having that level of control over countless variables.

My mom has always had a propensity for accepting outlandish beliefs. Everything from JFK to alien abductions to “ancient astronauts” to miracle health quackery to New Age gobbledygook in general. I long ago decided that what she really loved was the thrill of believing and sharing the good word. It’s easy to speculate that, as a lapsed Catholic baby-boomer, she responded to the crisis of authority common to her generation by adopting a reflexive skepticism that “they” control everything and don’t want us to know the truth. She may not have that clichéd God-shaped hole in her heart, but she does seem to enjoy looking for something to believe in. I count myself lucky that I didn’t unthinkingly follow in her footsteps. I remember reading a book that claimed Kurt Cobain was murdered instead of committing suicide and finding it plausible enough to wonder about, but a few years later, when I was in my libertarian/anarchist phase, I was already rolling my eyes at those who insisted that the Oklahoma City bombing was some sort of set-up by the feds/Jews/Illuminati/whomever. I was convinced by the conclusion of an article I read following Princess Diana’s death, which suggested, in response to the speculation that she was murdered, that what all these conspiracies tended to have in common was a desperate need to believe that someone, somewhere, is in control of things. It would be far scarier, the author wrote, to accept that sometimes, maybe even often times, reality is what happens despite all our best-laid plans. Shortly after that, I saw the same arguments from Oklahoma City being recycled for the 9/11 attacks, and I nodded sagely: some people find it strangely comforting to imagine living under a tyrannical, omnipotent government or demiurge.

In their most recent conversation, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter talked about a new book/film which claims that the official narrative surrounding the Trayvon Martin case of 2012 is a hoax. Loury and McWhorter are, while open to correction, fairly convinced that there is something to it, despite the filmmaker’s disreputability. (He has previously claimed that Barack Obama’s real father is someone other than who it’s purported to be, a claim which neither Loury or McWhorter are inclined to accept.)  As with most such cultural events, I don’t know and largely don’t care. Only two people know for certain what happened that night, and one of them is dead. There is no certainty, only varying degrees of plausibility, and again, what am I, one of the Hardy Boys or the Three Investigators? (Tell me at least some of you remember those books.) What use is there in me pretending to be an amateur sleuth and getting invested in this sort of thing?

No, what I found fascinating are the meta-issues surrounding the topic, the epistemology. How do we know what we know? How much of what we know is just an official narrative put forth to serve an agenda of which we’re unaware? How much are we interested in truth for truth’s sake, and how much are we simply looking to signal by our declarations of belief where we stand in relation to our peers and how much they can trust and depend on us? As individuals, most of us barely know anything. The division of labor and our systematized structures of cumulative knowledge have simply made it easier for us to know where to look for an answer if needed. My lamps and vacuum cleaner might as well be magic for all I know, but if forced to, I could figure out how to ask the questions to get the information I need to explain how they actually work. Much of our knowledge, in practice, exists in common. As Burke said, our private stocks of reason are small, and we do better to avail ourselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages. When you start passing around intellectual greenbacks like “Trayvon Martin’s lawyer perpetrated a hoax,” or “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” people look upon that as unkindly as they would upon counterfeiting or stock swindling. You’re devaluing the currency that we all depend on. Without that trust, we have nothing. We can live with untruths, but we can’t live without something approaching a general consensus about fundamental aspects of reality. Besides, even if you’re right, it’s not like anyone is going to thank you for exposing their deceit or correcting their ignorance. How many of us care enough about truth to risk our reputations on a lonely crusade? How many of us could be persuaded with minimal effort to lie for the sake of a “higher” truth?

And in this particular case, as Loury and McWhorter wonder, what does it mean if it’s true that the official narrative was a lie? Where were the investigative journalists? Were they all just woke cheerleaders? Why didn’t the defense attorneys catch any of these discrepancies? How can it be that we have to get the truth of the matter from a suspiciously partisan source? If the integrity of all the official authorities is compromised and we have to depend on a Cretan liar for information, how can we know anything reliably? “Whenever I hear a fact reported and my first question is, ‘Well, who’s saying that before I’m prepared to believe that it’s true?’ rather than ‘What’s the evidence for that?’, it feels to me like we’re in trouble!” Loury is correct, but I have no idea what the solution is. I can feel my own intellectual horizons contracting somewhat, as I’m forced to live in something like Keats’s negative capability, surrounded by uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, with facts and reason out of reach. It’s a humbling discipline to refrain from the innate urge to follow a logical scent like a bloodhound, to run certainty to ground, and instead, just shrug and attempt to maintain a sanguine equilibrium despite the constant fluctuations in the intellectual weather.

Funny enough, I’ve long held postmodern philosophers like Foucault responsible for the ad-hominem style of argument that Loury bemoans. Keith Windschuttle offered what seemed to me to be the definitive criticism of Foucault’s “genealogical” method of investigation, in which “any question about the facts of a statement is ignored and the focus is directed to the way what is said reflects the prevailing ‘discursive formation’ or how it is a form of knowledge that serves the power of the authorities concerned.” But recently, Alan Jacobs distinguished between intellectual archaeologists and genealogists, suggesting that the former are the ones who are interested in tracing the origin of ideas in order to find a source to blame, whereas the genealogists are interested in tracing the descent of an idea, its ramifications and modifications throughout history, to understand it more completely. Well, that seems…plausible. Is it true? Have I been unfair to Foucault? Does he deserve a closer look? But…it’s so satisfying to hate him! Can’t I just substitute a different reason to hate him and keep on going? Is Jacobs in the pocket of Big French Pseudo-Philosophy? He is bald, just like Foucault. You know, I never did entirely trust him, come to think of it…

Sigh. Negative capability is a real bitch.

Obiter Scripta, no. 77

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Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us may occasionally change our beliefs and our lives as a result of a chain of conscious reasoning, but not very often or very honestly. Our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them. Their default role is to tag along, explaining with perfect hindsight why things inevitably turned out as they did.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

It’s been said many times that humanity has suffered a series of shocks to its self-image thanks to Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, who demoted us from our position at the center of the universe, the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, and the command center of our own consciousness, respectively. Those of us who still read books for pleasure are constantly reminded that we’re like Amish who insist on riding our horses and buggies down the information superhighway as all the kids zip by us in their text messages at the speed of 5G, laughing at our quaint old habits. One could take this particular excerpt as another diminishment of the bibliophile self-image, but I prefer to think of the ideas and concepts I encounter in my reading as akin to melodies, not blueprints. Music doesn’t make me a “better” person; reading doesn’t make me smarter. Neither one is leading to anything in a progressive, cumulative sense; they’re just here to make the present moment a little bit brighter or tastier. Humming a sweet snippet of Tchaikovsky at Christmastime; reading an elegant expression of a feeling or an idea — these need no external justification.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Feb. 25, 2014.]

I saw my old car off to the scrapyard after it finally died last week. That mileage is all on the original engine. Allow me to get all old-folksy for a moment and aver that they don’t make ’em like that any more, no sir.

There’s a lot of things I won’t miss about it. As you can imagine, a car that’s traveled that much isn’t the most comfortable ride anymore. I hate bucket seats as a rule, especially since it takes more effort to haul my rheumatic joints up and out of them. Stickshifts are just an unnecessary pain in the ass. Cars in general never seem to have enough room to suit me, and I’m a pretty average-sized fellow, not particularly tall or wide. The rear windows wouldn’t go up all the way, leaving about a half-inch open. The automatic window motors would have cost over $200 apiece, though, whereas a strip of black duct tape across the opening only cost a couple dollars — easy choice. The glovebox latch had first broken loose, then mysteriously vanished, so it was held slightly ajar with a velcro strip. The AC stopped working a long time ago and would have needed to be completely replaced to bring it up to current standards anyway, but I never wanted to go to that much expense — getting from point A to B has always been my main concern. Still, the fan only blew hot air no matter how far the dial was turned toward the blue. A dark-colored car with hot air leaking out of the vents on an August day in the South — it was like riding around in a four-wheeled toaster.

Perhaps I’m just inclined to be a little bit mournful today anyway, but despite those gripes, I did feel genuinely sad to see it go. I’ve heard it said in many ways, and I agree, that significant changes in life make us a bit uneasy because they remind us of the inevitability of the most significant change of all. However easy it will be to replace my means of transportation as opposed to a loved one, there’s still a noticeable hole in my routine. Another chapter, however banal, has been brought to a close. Watching it rise onto the back of the tow truck was like plucking a string on a web, sending vibrations through all sorts of dormant memories — the places it had been, the passengers it had carried, and all the myriad associations attached to each. No, I won’t really miss the car, but I will take a moment to rue the separation.

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