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"For those committed to the New Art", Paul Greenhalgh (2000) has written, "history was a key tool for the creation of modernity." In the case of the Nordic nations and the development of art nouveau, "history at the service of modernity" meant turning back to Viking art, duly informed by the latest archaeological discoveries.
Sharing books was an alternative form of belonging that involved not fitting in but being misfits together.
In the twenty-first century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, which we incorporate into our present. Unlike the thinkers of the last fin de siècle, we neither mourn nor celebrate the end of history or the end of art. We have to chart a new road between unending development and nostalgia, find an alternative logic for the contradictions of contemporary culture. Instead of fast-changing prepositions—"post," "anti," "neo," "trans," and "sub"—that suggest an implacable movement forward, against, or beyond, I propose to go off: "off" as in "off the path," or way off, off-Broadway, off-brand, off the wall, and occasionally off-color. "Off-modern" is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress. It opens into the modernity of "what if," and not only postindustrial modernization as it was.
The modern nostalgic realizes that "the goal of the odyssey is a rendez-vouz with oneself." For Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, Ulysses returns home only to look back at his journey. In the alcove of his fair queen he becomes nostalgic for his nomadic self: "Where is that man who in the days and nights of exile erred around the world like a dog and said that Nobody was his name?" Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at once.
Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials
DID NOT FINISH
