Here at The Common we think a lot about “place,” but that’s not quite the same as thinking about where you’re from, something Sonya Chung recently mulled over in her column for “In House.” I find myself thinking about that topic pretty often, ever since moving to Western Massachusetts for graduate school two years ago. Growing up in New Jersey, twenty-five miles outside of Manhattan, New York City cast a long shadow. “The city” was as much a part of my identity as summer trips down the shore. My father, along with a majority of people in my town, commuted to work in the city every day. He would come home with his coat smelling distinctly like an NJ Transit train car: part newsprint, part stale air.
Essays
The Poet in Rome: Richard Wilbur in Postwar Italy
October 1, 2012
Essays, Issue 04, Issue 04 Essays
By ROBERT BAGG
I.
Richard Wilbur first visited Rome with the American Fifth
Army that liberated the city, just behind the fleeing Germans, on 5 June 1944.
By 10:00 p.m., his division, the 36th Texans, in trucks, in jeeps, and on mobile artillery, followed the tanks of the First Armored Division into the southern outskirts of Rome, where it paused, expecting to camp and rest within Cinecittà—then, as now, the sprawling center of Italy’s movie industry. Ever the explorer, Wilbur wandered into an abandoned viewing room and found, already loaded into an editing machine, a costume drama set in the Roman Empire. He turned the hand crank and watched a Fascist version of ancient history until his disgust overcame his curiosity. Around midnight, the 36th received an order to cross the city, mount the Gianicolo (Rome’s westernmost hill), and be ready to chase the Germans into Tuscany. But Wilbur’s signal company interpreted the order loosely, slept in, and didn’t cross Rome until the next day, setting up their Message Center inside the Vatican gardens.
Time Shadows
September 27, 2012
Essays
A few months ago, while walking home from the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I noticed a change in the sidewalk — four of the white cement paving stones had been replaced with darker, bluish-gray stones.There had been a lot of construction in the area, and at first I thought they were simply new stones, not yet faded to match the surrounding sidewalk. But when I got closer, I saw they formed an artwork, engraved with the silhouette of a young, leafless sapling. The etching was meant to approximate the shadow of a nearby street tree, although that tree, now in full leaf and several feet taller, was throwing its noticeably longer shadow in the opposite direction.
Elsewhere, in Jordan
Journey to the Center of the Earth
September 20, 2012
Essays
By V. HANSMANN
“Push it ahead of you.”
With my fingertips, I shove my hardhat in front of me, while I thrust my body forward with my toes. A hundred yards of solid planet hang above me. Though dank anxiety brews in my core, my extremities are working flawlessly, independent of my consciousness. Be still, monkey mind. Now would be a supremely impractical time to have an out-of-body experience.
Writing in Place with Robert Earle
September 17, 2012
Essays
My writing room is on the second floor of our house in Arlington, Virginia. Sometimes I write on a computer located in a double-wide closet where I have a built-in desk and bookshelves. At other times I write at a desk overlooking our back yard; from there I see a small stone Buddha, a split rail fence between us and the neighbor, and a swath of trees that descends along Donaldson Run across Military Road to the Potomac River a mile from here.
Annals of Mobility: An Introduction
First day of class: after a writing exercise that helps break the ice – 10 minutes of “put someone you don’t know very well in a situation of physical duress, and write the scene in first person” (a few students share out loud, while we listen and then comment)—I ask the students to go around the room and say their name, major, and “where they’re from.” I use air quotes, and they all laugh, knowingly. We all understand that the question is fraught, and complex. In this room of twelve (including me), a college classroom in New York City, only two offer a simple answer to the question: I am from Dallas, Texas. I am from Atlanta, Georgia. Third and fourth generation, respectively. Two out of twelve.
From the 17th Floor: First Impressions
September 13, 2012
Essays
These days, you arrive in a new place from a great height. Brief glimpse of patterned land, sometimes sea, then trundling along skyways until finding your way down to the ground and the transport available there. Eventually, you make your way to the heart of the place, where you can approach it from eye level.
Everyone Eats Potatoes
September 11, 2012
Essays
Photo by Carol H. Goldstein
My father was not a farmer. His great grandparents—fleeing the increasingly violent antisemitism of the Russian empire during the late nineteenth century—left Minsk and settled in rural Indiana. They opened a general store in a town so isolated that the few Jews who lived there worshipped on Sunday. The family moved to Indianapolis, where his father and uncles opened a hardware store. As a child, the closest my father came to nature was the thin line of trees separating his house from the neighbor’s.
Road Trips & Head Trips
“In House” is a weekly column featuring trawlings and reflections from our editors.
It’s the end of the summer and we’re all digesting a season of vacations. Here’s a sampling of reflections from around the web, from armchair dreamers to day trippers to professional travel writers:
At Killing the Buddha, Ben Brazil reflects on the pleasures and pitfalls of searching for larger meaning in the serendipitous moments that occur while traveling: “Travel as a spiritual practice, can distort at least as much as it reveals, and not only because its magic involves wealth and privilege.”
