Julia Sheehan, my wife, argued against it, “Hitler is not a spice. When you put Hitler in the soup. It becomes Hitler-soup.
I was appalled while in Bologna to see so many Ivy Leaguers treating their year abroad like nothing but an extended party, day and night. One Brown student told me he had not attended a class in a month.
It’s just that we prefer to remember the past as human triumph rather than human failure.
But doesn’t everybody see himself as the hero of his own biography? Don’t we all live in a self-contrived narrative bubble, where we describe ourselves to our best advantage?
We live with a glut of information. More information than ever before. And yet, we see so very little. The same human mechanisms that operated thousands of years ago still operate today. If we don’t wish to know something, if we prefer to believe something that’s false is true, there is little that prevents us from doing so. Invariably, we prefer fantasy to the truth.
My wife, Julia Sheehan, a textile historian, points out, “Clothing can seem timeless and classic when you buy it, but then ten years later you look at it, and it seems of a period.” Things that are “timeless and classic,” never are. We and the objects that we produce are hapless prisoners of time.
I wonder if it’s true in general: if one group, one music group, does a cover of a famous song, that if they do a pretty good job you think it’s pretty good, and if they get close, instead of thinking, “Boy, that’s really good,” you focus on what’s missing and think, “Gee, they shouldn’t have bothered, why don’t they do their own stuff?
The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids” was just published in England, and whose cover — Mum and Dad lounging with martinis while their well-trained toddler sits on the floor mixing up the next batch — illustrates his message that parents should just chill. Pay attention to your own needs, he writes, back off on your children and everyone will be happier and better adjusted.
