For some reason this year, I’m thinking a lot about Charlie Brown.  I’ve always thought A Charlie Brown Christmas had a sort of profundity about it but I’ve never really picked it apart until lately.  The “Christmas has gotten too commercial” is the message everyone gets, but there’s something deeper going on.  So here’s the story..

 Charlie Brown is depressed, not really an uncommon reaction to the holidays, but ole Chuck is always pretty much depressed. He sees a therapist, and Lucy gives him a remedy that is existential and social — involvement.  Taking action is the answer.  There’s no inherent meaning, you must create your own through bonds of friendship with your fellow Peanuts.

 Well that approach fails miserably for Charlie Brown.  No one listens to his directions for the Christmas play and he’s mocked by his own dog.  Does it get any worse than that?  More depression ensues, but a new remedy pops up: a Christmas tree.  Involvement proves messy because it involves other people who may or may not understand and respect you, but perhaps you can find meaning by purchasing the ultimate symbol of the holiday.  So Charlies Brown and Linus go shopping for meaning, and the depression is temporarily held at bay.

But their purported mission is to buy a tree that will serve as a prop for their play.  Charlie Brown isn’t shopping for a tree, he’s shopping for meaning, and Linus sees the train wreck before it happens.  Charlie Brown may have hit on something when he says of the smallest tree on the lot, “I think it needs me.”  He is motivated to help the helpless.  But what follows is predictable.  In the eyes of the world, his tree is a disaster.  Depression comes rushing back in.  “Can’t anyone tell me what Christmas is all about?” he screams.

So then we get Linus’s security blanket answer with his retelling of the biblical Christmas story.  Religion answers the question by saying that meaning is inherent because of man’s relationship to God.  Charlie Brown tries to adopt the Linus approach, but sounds like he’s trying to talk himself into something.  He soon re-encounters the tree he wanted to help, and in trying to help it, he hurts it.  The depression returns, his every action in the world seems to backfire, and Charlie Brown is right back where he started.

We tend to replay the most important moments in our lives, our worst as well as our best.  We experience them over and over, grasping for an elusive detail, considering what we might have done differently, and arouse an echo of the original delight, hurt, embarrassment, or confusion.  We reword our responses and imagine results that never happened.  These are the memories that follow us around.

The art that matters lives in our heads in a similar way.  We ponder it, dwell on it, are reminded of it at unpredictable times.  Most of us are exposed to many works of art that are considered great in the eyes of the world, but if you want to know which are the great ones to you, they’re the ones that make you stare off into space.

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightening) when I was three..” 

— Nabokov, Lolita

I love writing that compacts loads of meaning into a small package, like this line from the beginning of Lolita.  This is great in so many ways, first, by how efficiently the parenthetical explanation satisfies the reader’s curiosity about the accident.  “Picnic, lightening” draws that picture with two words.  Consider how less detailed the picture would be if he had instead simply said that she was “struck by lightening.”  Look at how subtly “picnic, lightening” tells a story, where “struck by lightening” is totally impersonal and one dimensional.  No detailed picture comes to mind, it’s a fact, not story.  With “picnic, lightening,” we can see a blanket, spread out on the grass, an overturned wicker basket among the scattered remains of lunch and a young, dead mother sprawled on the blanket as rain begins to fall.   

There is also something disturbingly dismissive in this explanation of the death of his own mother.  Read the sentence again.  Why do we get that impression?

If the sentence (which is actually an independent clause in a compound sentence) had been constructed differently, we would perhaps conclude that the brief summation was avoidance by someone still troubled by the loss, a short-hand way to disclose what happened, while making it clear the speaker did not want to dwell on it. In that case, it might have been written: “my mother died when I was three in a freak accident (picnic, lightening).”  It’s easy to hear a sort of solemnity in this phrasing, a determination to move on from further discussion.   

But the way Nabokov does present it makes the narrator sound shallow and unfeeling.  The two key aspects of the sentence that invite this interpretation are: 1)the description of his mother as “very photogenic,” and 2)that the parenthetical details are sandwiched in the middle of the sentence.  By starting with “my very photogenic mother,” he highlights an almost completely irrelevant aspect of who she was.  He allots two words to how she died, “picnic, lightening,” and two to describing her, “very photogenic.”  He feels no more connection to this person than to someone he’s seen in a magazine.  There is no hint of any feelings of kinship, no natural curiosity that would have led him to learn more about his lost mother than what he has observed in photographs. 

The syntax — the arrangement of the sentence — also tells us something about the narrator. By not ending the sentence with the quick description of her freak accident, it is made to seem even more offhand and trivial to the speaker, a quick aside.  To illustrate the importance of syntax in this case, consider an exaggerated example:  

“I had breakfast with John, who was killed later that day, and the eggs were delicious.”

Our narrator is a little more subtle, but the two word summation still sounds like a comic quip, hardly worth mentioning, as he continues to narrate events from his life. 

In a single, incredibly clever sentence, we’re told how his mother died and how irrelevant the fact is to the son.  We’re left with virtually no picture of who she was in life but a story of how she died, and a realization of how unimportant she was to the narrator, which shapes how we read his story.

It amazes me what can be communicated in so few words by a skillful writer.  The poet Billy Collins honored Nabokov’s genius by naming one of his books of poetry “Picnic, Lightening.”  Much of poetry is a striving to distill meaning into the fewest possible words and it’s pretty hard to beat this two-word poem of Nabokov’s.    

There are all kinds of books in the world.  Some can help you learn new things.  Some are the ones that get labeled “literature,” and most of the rest are about vampires.

We are all forced to read some literature in English class:  Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Hemingway, Shakespeare.  Why would anyone choose to read one of those books?

Here’s my 2 minute answer.

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Since its release earlier this month, the Pokemon Go app has been downloaded more than 30 million times.  In public places you can see people walking erratically, excitedly, staring at their phones.  The last time there was such broad, youthful enthusiasm for a shared experience was July nine years ago when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit bookstores and sold 15 million copies the first week.  There was a general buzz in the air then wherever you went.  You almost knew just looking at someone if they were in on the excitement– our world suddenly segmented into excited wizards and oblivious muggles.

Part of the appeal of Rowling’s fantasy realm is that it isn’t set in an imaginary place or distant time, not in Earthsea or Middle-earth.  You don’t get to it through a wardrobe or looking glass.  The wizarding world is our world, but only wizards know it exists.  There is something intriguing about that.  Invent a make-believe world and you have free rein to mold its reality to whatever the plot requires.  But if Harry Potter is going to board a magic train at King’s Cross Station, London, Rowling must hide its platform between two other real ones.

Now comes Pokemon Go, bringing its action into our world.  The game planners at Nintendo could’ve spun out a Pokemon game app like all the others, something contained in the tiny screen of a smart phone.  They instead made the phone a lens through which gamers could see the world with the game elements superimposed.  In Pokemon Go, you are the game piece and the world is the board.  The Pokemon you catch are all around us.  This is one key to the game’s appeal.  My backyard has always simply been my backyard, but now I might find something interesting there, there or anywhere.

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An alien learning about life on earth from my family’s photos would think that it’s always Christmas, except for brief intervals of road trip.

We didn’t take a lot of pictures when I was growing up, which was fairly typical in the ’70s.  Film, flash cubes and photo processing all cost money.  Cameras were just cameras, not phones.  You didn’t photograph normal life.  An occasion was required to bring out the Kodak: visiting relatives, a big birthday party, a first day of school or a first lost tooth.  And vacations: kids standing in front of a scenic overlook or beside a monument, the first view of the ocean or the entrance to a park, taken out the car window.  Christmas mornings were always photographed, the tree, kids playing with new toys, full stockings hanging from the mantle.

Our photos were efforts to capture an experience as it rushed by.  So much planning and preparation for moments that pass too quickly, but a photo stops time in a sense, or at least tries to leave a trail we can follow back to that moment later.

But what I experience looking back on many of these photos now would surprise the ones taking those pictures at the time.  It is largely the peripheral objects that spark that pleasant feeling of nostalgia: a lamp, a piece of furniture, a bedspread, the car we had at the time, a clock on the wall.  I’m drawn to the mundane bits and pieces of everyday life from those bygone days, much more than the gift I’m playing with in the foreground.  We thought we were capturing a fleeting moment against an unchanging backdrop, but the backdrop was fleeting, too, though more slowly.  Those objects were part of my childhood for much longer and stir more memories now than the toy I loved for a month.

To most of the women in my life, clean is a specific thing, like a snow shovel or a doorknob; to most of us men it is more like an abstract concept, truth or honor, something aspired to, sure, but not something that can ever be fully achieved.

In cartographic terms, the women see a political map: cities, states, countries.  Clean is a particular place.  It has borders, unambiguous demarcation.

Men see a topographical map.  Clean is a loose geographic designation: a forest, an ocean, a mountain range (one most of us will never climb).  This is why we argue about clean; we’re not looking at the same map.  We’re not even looking at the same kind of map.  A woman says, “I thought we were going to Des Moines?”  and the man says, “but this is the prairie.”  “This is definitely not Des Moines.  It isn’t even Iowa.”  “No, this really is the prairie!  Look at all of that grassland.”  etc.

Our country is reeling from the pain and frustration of injustice.  We’ve seen the videos and read the news stories of young black men shot dead by police officers with what too often seems too little provocation.  And then begins a predictable process, culminating in no charges against the officers while those close or sympathetic to the dead are left reeling with confusion and anger.

The collective accretion of outrage has morphed into a movement.  People are gathering, raising their voices demanding to be heard above the deafening lull of everyday life, because indignation without action is acceptance.  We’ve seen protests and demonstrations, civil disobedience, and sometimes violence.  Some of the efforts have been clumsy and unhelpful, but there’s no exact procedure for social change.  A movement must crawl before it can march.

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To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities.

Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, August 2014

Correction: An earlier version of this post compared Juno to a football field, when in fact it is the size of a basketball court. We’re bad at sports.

NASA’s Juno probe enters orbit around Jupiter, Washington Post online, July 5, 2016