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A review by wanderingmole
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr
4.0
“In a sense, this year, our predicament has been the same as Rome's: to reconcile the new life with the old life, to tunnel an exit back into the future.”
“"Habitualization," a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, "devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things words, friends, apartments- as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry, like a good song, or sketch, or photograph, ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience-buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello become new all over again.”
“"Habitualization," a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, "devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things words, friends, apartments- as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry, like a good song, or sketch, or photograph, ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience-buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello become new all over again.”