Category: Memory
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More like a particle or more like a wave
The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin described her encounter with a camchatma brown bear in the Siberian wilderness as: “A meeting, an implosion of boundaries, a melding of forms.” The moments she spent within the bear’s jaws, she writes, were “intimate beyond anything I could have imagined.” The experience cost Martin much of her face. A…
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Put the circle back
I was in New York this week; I had gone for a run along the Hudson, a run in which I surprised myself by holding onto a sub-8 minute pace for eight miles, double the distance I’d done since my aborted half-marathon training last fall; I was hobbling into the dim lobby of the hotel,…
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It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead.
Brady said we ought to keep a journal of this time, so when people ask, ten or thirty or fifty years from now, “what was it like,” we’ll be able to say: it was like [x]. Assume a susceptibility rate of y, and a transmission rate of n. Solve for x. It was like the…
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How to Save a Lie
What would you do if your son was at home/ Crying alone/ On the bathroom floor/ ‘Cause he’s hungry and the only way to feed him is to/ Sleep with a man for a little bit of money? Our eighth grade art class had been tasked with creating CD jackets to songs or albums we…
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This Is Not Simone de Beauvoir
an (non) Actor’s Lament “He stole my scarab beetle!” I mumbled. “No, no, no. Again, stronger please.” Each shake of Professor C’s shaggy head was rife with that combination of exasperation and despair so particular to the French. “He STOLE my scarab beetle!” Professor C sighed. I was supposed to be furious, yes? So, where…