I work hard to resist sentimental impulses and indulgence in nostalgia. Ours is a sentimental age, and at the same time an angry, unforgiving age. One strain of sentimentality especially prevalent among the aging is a rueful, self-pitying lament for what no longer exists. This might include manners, linguistic turns, obsolete technologies, movies “when they were still good.” The world we grow up in tends to become the only world, indelibly pressed into our sensibilities. Deviation from the template is second-best at best. I’m sympathetic but understand how tiresome this sounds to younger people. Part of maturing is accepting that which seems shoddy or meretricious, a falling off from previous perfection.  My niece’s daughter turns two this week. Hannah tells me she loves to “read,” so when I arrive in Cleveland on Wednesday I want to make a birthday present of books. I’m giving her the copy of David Wiesner’s Tuesday (1991), a wordless picture book loved sequentially by all three of my sons, and read – or, rather, spontaneously narrated -- a thousand times by me. Most of the dust jacket is missing – evidence of its popularity.   I wanted to include a couple of new books. I haven’t set foot in one of the retail chain bookstores in many years. Books represent the only sort of shopping I’ve ever enjoyed. So I entered a Barnes and Nobles located just a few miles away, with the customary sense of anticipation I feel whenever entering a book collection. I phrase it that way because I get a similar tingle when entering a library. I’m always hopeful when it comes to books.   I would estimate that fifty percent of the visible stock didn’t qualify as “book” or even “reading material.” I’m not naïve. I’ve shopped at Barnes and Noble before. I remember in Albany, N.Y., in the early nineties, when a B&N opened just blocks away from a Borders (R.I.P.). If one store didn’t have what I wanted, I would drive to the other. On Sunday, the Barnes and Noble recalled an unholy merger of grade-school classroom and tourist trap – coffee mugs, tote bags, stuffed animals and other toys. Merchandise.   I rode the escalator to the second floor where the children’s book section is located. A clerk was standing at the computer, entering data for the heaps of board books stacked on her counter. I asked where I could find books by writers – favorites of my sons decades ago -- whose names I had written down. All were unfamiliar to her. She never made eye contact. As I read the names, she entered them into the digital catalogue. Nothing showed up. I thanked her and explored the shelves myself, and eventually found two books I thought a little girl I don’t know very well might enjoy. I felt the way I feel when leaving a shoe store.

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By the time he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the world’s most eminent and polymathic naturalist (the word scientist was yet to be coined). Napoleon hated him for his impassioned anticolonial and abolitionist views. Goethe cherished him as his greatest thinking partner, whose briefest company and conversation felt like “having lived several years.” Thoreau thought his very eyes “natural telescopes & microscopes.” Whitman declared himself a “kosmos” after the title of Humboldt’s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily… read article

I first encountered the word palimpsest more than half a century ago in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds and found it immediately useful. Here’s the OED’s strict, non-figurative definition:  “A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”   In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig. I think of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. More central to my thinking is the figurative use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. In a literal sense, I carry around mental maps of every place in five states where I have lived. The earliest date from my childhood in suburban Cleveland. In that immediate turf I can get around just fine but in subsequent decades, freeways have been constructed and buildings and other landmarks have been torn down. Trees have sprouted and others cut down. I know from previous visits that Cleveland is half-charted territory, and I can’t always trust my memory of the geography.  When I visit next week for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, I’ll rely on my niece and nephew as navigators.   I haven’t lived in Cleveland and environs since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983. I'm flying there Wednesday. It’s prudent to recall that memory is a function of the imagination. Cops know this when they interview witnesses to crimes. The mind fills in the blanks, consciously or otherwise. It pays to be skeptical of our memories, no matter how fond we are of them. Also, the unconscious is timeless. It’s still 1961 in there, and 1998. Thomas De Quincey understood. He first published in Blackwood’s Magazine an essay that became part of Suspiria de Profundis, a collection left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859 but intended as a sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.   “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader, is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying among the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies.”

The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life. This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it… read article