Verbatim
Real Life is a reliable go-to for smart personal essays thinking through the forces and technologies that stress us all out as we try to live in this general moment – rolling into 2018, they’re shifting to weekly themes and collecting all the features, in full, in a nice weekly Tinyletter. You like emails, so you should give it a go. This week, they kick off the themes with “Too Much News”, which… yep. Here’s Elisa Gabbert on our desire to read news as narrative.
It’s strange how our memories get so rooted in place. When I was a kid, I understood the assassination of JFK to be the single moment of my parents’ lives that was so significant they were supposed to remember where they were when it happened. But I have so many moments like that, just from the past year, often in the same few hundred square feet: I was on the couch during the debates. I was on the couch when we watched the election results. (I had been at a friend’s house, a party of sorts, until I couldn’t stand it and came home.) I was at my desk the next morning, on Valium and crying, when I saw tweets about Hillary’s concession speech. (I could not stand to watch it.) I was at my desk during Obama’s last press conference. I was in the armchair when the dossier came out. At my desk for Indictment Day.
My memories of these comparatively trivial moments, in the prickliness of their detail, have the quality of memories of large-scale disaster. I think about them the way I think about 9/11 or the Challenger explosion, both of which I experienced from afar, on TV. Horrifying, but removed — not traumatic in the way that a car crash is traumatic, or that 9/11 would have been if I had lived in New York at the time. What nags me about these memories, these unhappy memories, is that I think that I think of them fondly.
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