In Search of Lost Time

You know by now, I think, that books are (almost) everywhere in our big old house. But there are a lot of magazines too: new ones, yes, and old ones as well. Some of the latter I’ve had to get rid of over the years (painful, that). Still, many remain. (Will there be magazines in heaven? I firmly believe so.)

Just yesterday, while sitting at my work station (the old recliner that once belonged to the father of my dear friend Gary Gnidovic, which he kindly passed on to me), I noticed that a leaning sheaf of not-too-old mags (the September 21, 2023, issue of the New York Review of Books, for instance) also included a much older one, which—when I extracted it—turned out to be the first issue of Ruminator Review, as the renamed Hungry Mind Review was called, retaining the spacious format I loved. (That new name? Ugh.) It was dated Spring 2000, and the mere sight of the cover affected me the way the drug JJ-180 affects Dr. Eric Sweetscent, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s novel Now Wait for Last Year: I was time-traveling, back to the start of our current century, which feels like much more than twenty-four years ago.

How did this “back issue” (to put it mildly) end up within reach of my right hand? Troublingly, I have no idea. I must have come across it in the basement (discovering it in a stack, no doubt, while searching for something else), then decided to bring it upstairs; after that, presumably, it got lost in the shuffle. One of my first thoughts, as I looked over the cover of the issue, was a memory of an idea I had some time ago: I wished that someone would run a regular feature in which a writer would take up a “back issue” from this or that mag and “report” on it, so to speak, ponder it in Proustian fashion.

This first issue of Ruminator Review (issue no. 53 counting the run of Hungry Mind Review), published in St. Paul, Minnesota, included a special section on “Generations” as well as a miscellany of other pieces. The front cover features an impressive list highlighting some of the contributors—Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, Geoff Dyer, Gerald Early, Lise Funderburg, Bill Holm, Garrison Keillor, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Straight, Michael Tortorello, David L. Ulin, and Jane Vanderburgh, “Plus an interview with Robert Hass.” Editor Bart Schneider introduced the issue.

Did I feel waves of nostalgia as I was turning the pages? Guilty as charged. This issue of Ruminator Review was published when “print” was still thriving, even as the “digital” realm expanded at an ever-increasing pace. In Wheaton, Illinois, we had Barnes & Noble and Borders in close proximity; both featured excellent magazine sections as well as books aplenty. (Barnes & Noble stocked the mag I edited, Books & Culture.) Wendy and I visited them both routinely, and often ran into friends there, stopping before or after at Starbucks.

Please don’t suppose that I am idealizing the past (recent but decisively gone) or scorning the present. What I felt above all while turning the pages of the Ruminator Review was the mysterious reality of time. Even an artifact as recent as this stray issue of a defunct magazine is separated from us as if by a great gulf. To recover an adequate grasp of the turn of the present century, say, is a challenge for people who were already “grown up” back then, let alone for those who weren’t.

I wonder if the print edition of First Things could include a short feature (in every issue) that would zero in on a particular year—sometimes many centuries distant, sometimes “the day before yesterday.” Of course there could be no definitive episode, say, that would evoke the year 652 or 1233 or 1957, but this would nevertheless offer a taste.

These ruminations were certainly inspired (in part at least) by the special section on “Generations” in the not-really-so-old but also “ancient” magazine that set me thinking. In the unlikely event that you track that issue down yourself, be sure not to miss the brilliant contribution by Geoff Dyer. The entire section is worth your time, but his sardonic piece was my favorite.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books.

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Image: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali; Mike Steele, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.