Prague by Arthur Phillips Read Free Book Online

nostalgia for eras or styles or places that were outside of one's personal experience). In other words, if you were likely to be affected by recollections of your Hungarian grandmother's sour cherry soup served in the Herend bowl with the ladybug at the bottom, were you more or less likely to feel fondness for movies that treated with tender, nearly eroticized affection the life of English aristocrats in their country houses prior to the First World War? Payton felt certain he could arrive at a predictable ratio p/m, the relationship between a strong tendency to Personal Nostalgia and the possession of an objectively good Memory. Either hypothesis (that the relationship was direct, or that it was inverse) seemed feasible to him. Finally, the ratio c/h, the relationship of an individual's propensity to Collective Nostalgia and his or her actual Historical Knowledge of the place-era for which he or she felt this nostalgia, was theoretically determinable, and here the scholar strongly suspected an inverse proportion: The less you knew about life in those country houses, the more you wished you had lived there.
     
    His research produced more questions than answers, but he had been
     
    forced by finicky academia to restrain his noisy and intrusive curiosity for the sake of a degree; his dissertation was necessarily limited to issues of methodology and quantifiable measurement in Vacillations of Collective Popular Retrospective Urges in Urban Anglophone Canada, 1980-1988. But now he was free to answer everything. The work that had brought him to Europe would sate the ravenous why that lurked behind his tangible discoveries.
     
    Why, according to one of Mark's surveys, did fully 48 percent of the entering freshman girls at McGill University bring with them from home a framed copy of Robert Doisneau's photograph The Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, an icon of interwar Paris (cataloged Nostalgipathic Place-Era #163). Another 29 percent of the girls bought the print within six months of matriculation.
     
    Why, according to publicly available sales data from the publishers, did prints of that beloved poster vastly outsell Alfred Eisenstadt's thematically indistinguishable VJ Day Kiss, Times Square, even in Paris, where a measurable level of cross-cultural envy should have hoisted the American past Doisneau? Or, conversely, if you didn't buy that, then why didn't familiarity and ethnic pride nudge Eisenstadt's numbers over the Frenchman's in New York sales?
     
    Why was there a sudden upsurge from 1984 to 1986 in orders placed with Ontario's specialty furniture manufacturers for Victorian daybeds, a popularity far too large to be attributed solely to the period films that appeared in a crinkly crinoline rush from 1982 to 1985?
     
    Why did the years immediately following World War One show a drop-off in all manner of antique sales in Toronto except for military equipment and pictures?
     
    Why was the videocassette of the film Casablanca rented three times more often in Quebecois video stores than in Ontarian outlets, even after statistical corrections for VCR-owning populations and the number of available dubbed copies were made?
     
    Why did the past (and, more often than not in Canada's case, someone else's past) do this to us?
     
    Like a dying man railing against an unfair God, Mark kept asking, "Why?" And every academic question was merely a restatement of a more pressing personal one, one he had been asking nearly as long as he could remember thinking, one he was embarrassed to ask even as he kept asking it despite himself, one he would only share with a friend while drunk or laughing: Why am I unhappy in the era and the place I was given?
     
    It did not take a very long acquaintanceship before Charles labeled Mark "sad beyond help, unfit even for commodities trading." Scott, in turn, had identified the Canadian as "prematurely elderly."
     
    MARK WAS VAGUELY EXPECTING SOME HUNGARIANIZED VERSION OF ONE OF
     
    his familiar Canadian