E-Book Overview
Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on. This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don’t write that book as a linear progression—you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially,active, investigation. Or at least you do if you’re as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello. Whatisa mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from the childhood tables of “arts and crafts” to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us. The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative. “I’m one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood,” Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you’re one of Mary Cappello’s people; you owe it to yourself to crackLife Breaks Inand see for sure.
E-Book Content
life breaks in
by the same author Night Bloom Awkward: A Detour Called Back Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them
life breaks in ( a mood almanack )
mary cappello
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Mary Cappello All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
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isbn-13: 978-0-226-35606-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-35623-5 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226356235.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cappello, Mary, author. Title: Life breaks in : a mood almanack / Mary Cappello. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016014264 | isbn 9780226356068 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226356235 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Mood (Psychology) | Emotions—Psychological aspects. | Emotions—Social aspects. Classification: lcc bf521 .c36 2016 | ddc 152.4—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2016014264 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Mrs. Leach, Ridge Avenue Elementary School, who set the mood for arts and crafts
How it would interest me if this diary were ever to become a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing; but then I should have to speak of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in.—Virginia Woolf
Almanack perhaps (i) a variant (with specific semantic development) of classical Arabic muna¯k place where a camel kneels, station on a journey, halt at the end of a ¯ day’s travel, hence (in extended use) place of residence; The assumed semantic development from the concrete classical Arabic senses of the verbal noun to the sense ‘calendar’ has a parallel in the semantic development of climate n.1; in fact, muna¯k, mana¯k is the usual modern stan¯ ¯ dard Arabic word for ‘climate.’ Compare Occitan almanac (1548 as †almanatz), C