CULTURE

The Art of the Flâneur

The qualities of the flâneur are not achieved overnight, if they can ever be today. But if the historical flâneur is missing from the physical streets of Paris, he’s increasingly present in spirit, as a metaphor for the kind of unrushed, intellectually rich and creative life we long for. And we can channel the spirit if we try. Paris showers its special magic on those who submit most fully to its siren call. That’s the mission of today’s flâneur and his contemporary partner, the flâneuse.

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Recovering the Spirit of Play

This issue of Reinventing Home explores the role of play as our nation—and the world—emerges from a great pandemic. Our message: After two years in lockdown, we need joy, delight, and a dose of make-believe in order to feel whole again.

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The Story of a Happy Home

In the last few years, we’ve learned a lot more about the writer and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé, friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, colleague of Freud. There’s a new bio-pic that focuses on her independent spirit, and now the first English translation of her novel, Das Haus, by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger. A recent annotated edition, titled Anneliese’s House, will soon be released in paperback. In the meantime, the book is gaining the attention of literary critics, feminists, and followers of depth psychology.

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The Hare with Amber Eyes

Close on the heels of an exhibition in 2020 about the Ephrussi family at the Jewish Museum Vienna, the Jewish Museum in New York was confronted with a question: “Why tell a story that has already been told?” The answer is simple. Some stories are so compelling that they merit endless recounting. Edmund de Waal’s family tale, The Hare with Amber Eyes, is one of fortunes made and plundered, of homes made and lost, of disaster, dispersal, and reunion.

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In Praise of Dust

Dust lackadaisically spreads itself around the house as if it owned the place. As soon as the cloth has cleared the surface, a new cluster appears and thumbs its nose at us. With that first whisk of the feather duster, we whisper “Gotcha!” then moments later, we are pursuing these creatures as they dart around the room, engaged in that age-old game of hide-and-seek. Sometimes I wonder, is dust acting on a grudge, or expressing its own kind of constancy and devotion? Dust may be our silent partner in a lifelong courtship—and on the scales of Fate, what remains of all our good intentions.

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This Analog Life

This is the age of Kindle, cloud storage, and the app-for-everything. We’ve said goodbye to personal libraries and printed books, to cabinets and accordion files, to calculators and accounting ledgers. But is our understanding of the world—and even our sense of self— diminished as we lose our paper trail? The Berkeley artist Ann Arnold recently joined me in considering the advantages of the analog life. Here are our a few of our observations about old-fashioned ways of storing and accessing information.

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Aging at Home – Then and Now

What’s our history of caring for the sick and dying at home and how do we manage these responsibilities today? How can we make the home a stage set for the last third of life? In this podcast we talk with Peggy Flynn, founder of The Good Death Institute and author of The Caregiving Zone, a radically honest—and indispensable—book about the challenges faced both by caregivers and by everyone who plans to grow old at home.

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Sluts, Hussies, and Bad Housekeeping

In the 1500s, the word slut referred to an untidy person. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer used the term to describe an unkempt lord but, by the 18th century, it was used to denote a slovenly or salacious female. Hussy, short for huswife, was similarly transformed. Originally referring to a serving wench, the word came to mean “a woman of casual and improper behavior.”

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Savoring the Essay

The test of a great essayist from Montaigne to Mark Twain, from Emerson to Virginia Woolf, is the ability to entertain a steady procession of ideas, some of them inflammatory, some entertaining, some downright contradictory, before deciding which will play a central role.

As Emerson notes, “The best part…of every mind is not that which (the writer) knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him. His firm recorded knowledge soon loses all interest for him, but this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”

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