All posts tagged: Essays

Even Here

October 18, 2012

By NAILA MOREIRA

The wrinkled Brazilian landscape passes below me, brownish green through the haze.  Every so often the disordered mountain ridges grow crisp and straight, in parallel, like ribs.

Then the land flattens, consumed by endless trees to the horizon.  As jungle overtakes the soil, no variety strikes the eye except for rivers:  one, two, three, four, five veins of muddy brown lifeblood, traversing the sleeping green chest of the Amazon.

Beside me sits my traveling companion, my mother, who was born and raised in Brazil.  For the first time in many years we’ve managed to match our schedules to travel here together from the U.S.  She’s eager to show me parts of Brazil I’ve never known.

Above this seemingly interminable forest, who would believe the rate of Brazil’s growth – skyscrapers sprouting, small villages exploding into cities, cars crowding the highways – into the 6th largest economy of the world?

Even Here
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Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood

October 15, 2012 ,

By SONYA CHUNG

Click here to read more about “Annals of Mobility,” a monthly column here at The Common.

Of Wes Anderson and his latest film Moonrise Kingdom, Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the New York Review of Books:

To make a world where everything looks newly made is part of the great adventurousness of his work […] It is perhaps the only setting in which Sam and Suzy could begin to articulate their goal:  ‘to go on adventures and not get stuck in one place.’ 

Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood
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From the 17th Floor: To the Abraj and Back

October 12, 2012

 

I’d had grander plans for the day, of course, plans that involved walking through Bur Dubai, the old city, and the souks in Deira and visiting the beautiful Jumeirah Mosque, but the mosque tour was early, at 9:45, and nearly a 40 minute cab ride away… and then there was the heat. Even sitting in the shade in early morning, I was sweating.

No, we would not be setting foot on city sidewalks today. This was a blow to my touristic romanticism, my plan to experience the places where some semblance remained of the daily life that had characterized Dubai before the race to the top. Before the spectacular towers, malls, and hotels upon which superlatives are pinned.

From the 17th Floor: To the Abraj and Back
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From the Stone House: On Belonging

October 11, 2012

By MARTHA COOLEY

As the crow flies, Montereggio is perhaps a dozen kilometers from Castiglione del Terziere, my Italian home for a year.  But Lunigiana—this northern part of Tuscany, between the Emilian plain and the Mediterranean Sea—is so hilly that I never know how many dizzying switchbacks a road might boast, thus how long it’ll take to get from A to B.  (Or how many times en route our car will have to edge past another coming at it.  Sometimes both vehicles must fold in their side-mirrors like wings so as to squeeze by.)   

From the Stone House: On Belonging
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Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders

October 8, 2012 ,

By HANNAH GERSEN

 

I don’t think I understood the idea of a “love-hate relationship” until I moved to New York City. Over the years I have become one of those obnoxious people who talk constantly of leaving New York while at the same time shutting down all possible escape routes. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that this flavor of self-delusion is not unique to New York City, but perhaps it happens in greater numbers here, simply because New York is host to so many outsiders — outsiders who eventually become insiders.

Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders
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Where I Write

Where I Write

October 2, 2012

By NICOLA WALDRON

Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.

I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).

Where I Write
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A View from the Cheap Seats

October 1, 2012 ,

By ELIZABETH BYRNE

 

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.

A View from the Cheap Seats
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The Land Up North

The Land Up North

October 1, 2012 ,

By NICOLA WALDRON

We bought it to build a dream on, to propagate. He wanted to plant fruit trees and dig a pond; I imagined a center for healing, where women would come to believe again in possibility. We would build writing sheds, one for each of us, and a ring of rustic cabins for the women. In the mornings, we would come together, then go our separate ways. We’d meet up for dinner, 
to watch the shadows grow.

The Land Up North
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The Poet in Rome: Richard Wilbur in Postwar Italy

The Poet in Rome: Richard Wilbur in Postwar Italy

October 1, 2012 , ,

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.

The Poet in Rome: Richard Wilbur in Postwar Italy
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Time Shadows

September 27, 2012

By HANNAH GERSEN

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.

Time Shadows
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