Small Comforts

Jeffrey Hammond

Description

A reflection on the amusements and anxieties of growing older"With its brutal honesty, self-deprecating humor, and hard-earned insights, Jeffrey Hammond's Small Comforts is a stunning personal journey that begins with childhood dreams and adolescent fantasies and culminates in career anxieties and the inevitable midlife crisis. Small Comforts is a portrait of the artist who is no longer a young man and now must find the courage to face what he has created and what he has failed to create in the smithy of his soul." -Richard "Pete" PetersonSmall Comforts quietly probes the mysteries of an ordinary life when reviewed at middle age. Essayist Jeff Hammond, a midcareer academic who examines a variety of lifelong obsessions, frustrates any expectation that life's fogs dissipate as we age. At stake here is the need for those of us who have reached a "certain age" to look at who we have become with courage, honesty, and humor.Beneath the discoveries of a sometimes bewildered narrator lurks that strange sense of liberation that can brighten the process of getting older. Hammond's diverse musings on time and its effects will prompt an oddly calming discovery that many problems usually identified as "midlife" issues have actually been with us since childhood.In the narrator's seriocomic self-effacement, Small Comforts embodies midlife retrospection with humor and tender nostalgia and is certain to appeal to the ever-growing middle-aged population.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612775975
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Small Comforts

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Small Comforts

Essays at Middle Age

Jeffrey Hammond

he Kent State University Press Kent, Oio

©  by Jeffrey Hammond All rigts reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number   ---- Manufactured in te United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  Hammond, Jeffrey  Small comforts : essays at middle age / Jeffrey Hammond  p cm   ---- (pbk : alk paper) ∞   Middle-aged persons—Miscellanea   Middle age—Miscellanea   Aging—Miscellanea  I Title     —dc  

Britis Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available

    

    

For Norma, of course

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

he Wisdom of Sea Monkeys 

A Room of My Own 

Egypt Land 

Bad Scouts and Nervous Indians 

Milton at te Bat 

I Want to Jump, But I’m Afraid I’ll Fall 

Reference Works 

Bruses wit Greatness 

Middle-Aged Marxist 

Nigt Moves 

Wat Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? 

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Yeats once framed a generational contrast tat sould irritate anyone wo as reaced wat used to be called “a certain age” “Respectable bald eads,” e wrote, “Edit and annotate te lines / hat young men, tossing on teir beds, / Rymed out in love’s despair / To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear” If tese lines sound disillusioned and even bitter, we migt recall tat Yeats wrote tem wen e was fifty, an age wen many of us start compensating for old illusions—usually by developing newer, more sustainable illusions  his book offers te familiar essay as one suc compensation At fifty-eigt I can attest tat if poetry is te natural genre of te young, te essay is tailor-made for te not-so-young, for tose of us wo are, as Yeats says elsewere in te poem, “forgetful” of our sins and want to recall tem more clearly he ur-essayist Montaigne bears tis out: after all, e began writing wen e was nearing forty I began some five years later tan e did, wen I was rapidly becoming Yeats’s balding annotator of verse, a mid-career academic wose specialty was seventeent-century New England poetry My immediate motives were practical Hoping tat informal writing migt elp me stay sane wile cairing an Englis de- partment, I sougt relief by asking myself Montaigne’s question: “Wat do I know?” Along te way I became convinced tat te familiar essay is a wonderful veicle for addressing te odd mix of amusement and fear tat accompanies te recognition tat one is no longer young  Wen it comes to getting older, of course, we’re all in tis togeter I ope tat tis book convinces oters of te comforts, owever small, to

ix