Hello readers.
Recently I looked out the window and saw what looked like a dead skunk in the middle of the street. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I trotted out and discovered that the “skunk” was a pair of black sweatpants with a white stripe that had been reduced to two dimensions under passing vehicles. It was a stormy day and the pants must have been blown onto the street from a clothesline on the roof; the only other explanation – a partial striptease in the middle of an urban thoroughfare – seemed unlikely, but not impossible.
If you couldn’t guess the title of this newsletter, wind is a topic of lasting personal interest. Like many of life’s intriguing forces (love, hate, etc.), it is tangible but invisible. Visual artists tend to depict the effects of wind — on the oceana French flaga the man’s formidable beard – rather than the wind itself, presumably for this reason.
My favorite source of information is: windy.com, in which the phenomenon is represented as – how to say this? — schools of spermatozoa. The presentation is intuitive and well executed. On that website, you can check the weather forecast near you or explore notoriously windy places like Antarctica or Wichita. At the time of writing, Wichita enjoys southerly winds of six to 14 miles per hour, with gusts up to 20 mph
The first book below is a treasure trove of wind descriptions and nature metaphors. Perfect for fellow anemophiles.
—Molly
The first time I read “Elective Affinities” was in college, when it appeared on the syllabus of a class I quickly dropped. The teacher pronounced “Goethe” with enthusiastic violence, making it sound like a noise someone would make when using the toilet. I read the book on my own time and collected it for insights on marriage, fashion and virtue. (“People reveal their character most clearly through what they find ridiculous.”)
It wasn’t until I reread the book five years later that I saw what I’d missed—and, on the contrary, probably missed a lot of what I’d understood the first time around. The novel is about an aristocratic married couple, Charlotte and Eduard, who fall in love with other people. They work through their chasm by exchanging stiff philosophical dialogues about fate, domesticity, nature, freedom, transgression — you know, all the fun stuff. Aphorisms everywhere.
There is a piece in The American Scholar in which Alberto Manguel describes that Goethe never just narrates, but always injects theories into his prose, with those theories permeating each section “like the smell of fried onions.” It remains the only novel I’ve read that feels like the work of a scientist (author) guiding lab rats (characters) through a maze (plot). It was published in 1809 to widespread bewilderment.
Read if you want: Wittgenstein’s notebooksthe film “My dinner with André“Jay Appletons”The experience of the landscape”
Available from: Oxford University newspaper
“Modified States”, by Anita Brookner
Fiction, 1996
Alan is an obedient lawyer who marries a nice woman and then breaks his wedding vows with disastrous results. The object of Alan’s illicit desire is Sarah: a vain, distracted and ‘passive demonic’ woman. Brookner’s trick is to make Sarah wildly unappealing to the reader, but convincingly irresistible to Alan; once he starts complaining about the “wild smell” of her hair, we know it’s all over for this poor man.
What at first seems like a classic adultery plot turns into a calmer tale of humiliation and self-punishment. It is one of the great books on shame.
Brookner published her first novel at age 53 and when asked what prompted her to do so, she told a Paris Review Interviewer“I was wondering how it was done and the only way to find out seemed to be to try it.” She clearly cracked the code. This was her 16th novel.