He Looks Tired, Like Someone Walked On

I Write Fiction Longhand. That's Not So Much About Rejecting Technology As Being Unable To Write Fiction On A Computer For Some Reason. I Don't Think I Would Write It On A Typewriter Either. I Write In A Very Blind Gut Instinctive Way. It Just Doesn't Feel Right. There's A Physical Connection. And Then In Nonfiction That's Not The Case At All. I Can't Even Imagine Writing Nonfiction By Hand.

When The Clock Stops On A Life, All Things Emanating From It Become Precious, Finite, And Cordoned Off For Preservation. Each Aspect Of The Dead Person Is Removed From The Flux Of The Everyday, Which, Of Course, Is Where We Miss Him Most. The Quarantine Around Death Makes It Feel Unlucky And Wrong--a Freakish Incursion--and The Dead, Thus Quarantined, Come To Seem More Dead Than They Already Are.... Borrowing From The Dead Is A Way Of Keeping Them Engaged In Life's Daily Transactions--in Other Words, Alive.

And It May Be That A Crowd At A Particular Moment Of History Creates The Object To Justify Its Gathering, As It Did At The First Human Be-in And Monterey Pop And Woodstock. Or It May Be That Two Generations Of War And Surveillance Had Left People Craving The Embodiment Of Their Own Unease In The Form Of A Lone, Unsteady Man On A Slide Guitar.

Rebecca Was An Academic Star. Her New Book Was On The Phenomenon Of Word Casings, A Term She'd Invented For Words That No Longer Had Meaning Outside Quotation Marks. English Was Full Of These Empty Words--"friend" And "real" And "story" And "change"--words That Had Been Shucked Of Their Meanings And Reduced To Husks. Some, Like "identity" And "search" And "cloud," Had Clearly Been Drained Of Life By Their Web Usage. With Others, The Reasons Were More Complex; How Had "american" Become An Ironic Term? How Had "democracy" Come To Be Used In An Arch, Mocking Way?

The Answers Were Maddeningly Absent—it Was Like Trying To Remember A Song That You Knew Made You Feel A Certain Way, Without A Title, Artist, Or Even A Few Bars To Bring It Back.