Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary

257 Pages·2016·2.874 MB·English

by  Joseph A. Amato

Everyday Life

Everyday Life
How the Ordinary
Became Extraordinary
Joseph A. Amato
REAKTION BOOKS
To those loyal to gifts given and
generous in crafting their own lives
.
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2016
Copyright © Joseph A. Amato 2016
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 663 6
Permission to quote from the poems ‘Hands’, ‘Prairie Storm’ and
‘The Routine is What We Remember’ granted by Dana R. Yost
Contents
Introduction: Writing Daily and Everyday Life 7
1 Bodies and Things 13
2 In a Place at a Time, with Changing Orders
and Rising Spires 36
3 Many Times Make Many Minds 56
4 Of Things and Selves I Sing 82
5 The Mechanizing of Work and Thought, and the
Acceleration of Life and Individuality 108
6 Inventing Our Ways and Designing Our Days 133
7 Compounding Minds 163
Conclusion: The Poet’s Field 192
References 207
Acknowledgements 240
Index 246

Introduction
Writing Daily and Everyday Life
And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it
and it is in us?
Benedetto Croce
Countless peoples, places and periods have won and still call out for
an everyday history of their own. Such histories can be character-
ized by a scarcity or abundance of evidence. Reconstructing the
early days of deep history, to use a recent term, depends principally
on archaeological artefacts and anthropological cases and analogies
to modern and contemporary times, whereas, beginning in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, written and visual evidence
literally overflows and drives historians with the full use of the social
sciences to select themes and narrative. Everyday histories, or daily
histories (a synonym throughout this work), have focused, espe-
cially in classical and medieval times, on all classes: royalty,
aristocracy, courts, warriors and also craftspeople, artists and reli-
gious leaders, including members of monasteries, religious orders
and heretics – to choose a single example like the dualistic Cathars
of thirteenth-century Languedoc.1 Increasingly in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries historians, differentiated into social, eco-
nomic and cultural fields, have focused on the foundations, ways
and beliefs of urban and rural peoples: those at the top, the bottom
and along the fringe of society; the working class, the bourgeoisie
and the diverse underclasses who constitute the landless and home-
less. Multiple theories and disciplines generated in conjunction with
the social sciences account for new subjects, methodologies and
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everyday life
insights in the writing and discussion of the content and value of
everyday life.
This work, chronological in development, will seek the bound-
aries of thinking and writing about everyday history. It will seek to
examine the making of everyday life across a trajectory from the
material and social to the mental and cultural, reaching to modern
times with the accelerating move from the industrial and democratic
to the primacy of abundance, consumption, design and invention,
and individual choice, consciousness and imagination. At some
point, beyond history and the social sciences, as I suggest in the
Conclusion, inner explorations of daily life increasingly belong to
the penetration of literature and poetry.
Neither a survey nor a guide, Everyday Life is, above all, a reflect-
ive work on the elements that compose everyday life. It is mediated
through two essential forms of historical writing. First, it derives
from my writing of intellectual, cultural and social histories cover-
ing long trajectories on subjects including the small, walking and,
most recently, surfaces. Second, and more pertinently, my interest in
everyday life grows out of numerous works I have written on fam-
ily history and local and regional history. As I attributed a distinct
value to them as a means to explore places and times and as product-
ive paths to knowledge, so too have I here sought to make everyday
history a means to enter the past and gain what the best histories
provide – self-knowledge.
AwAKENEd By NOSTAlgIA
My writing on family, local and regional history carries with it a
sense of urgency and moral imperative: to secure, if only in word
and understanding, home and family in heart and hearth and to
save the uniqueness of place as a reservoir of variety in a time when
the local, rural and traditional lose out to the encroachment and
encapsulation of national and global forces.
With great exaggeration, the local southwestern Minnesota
writer, conservationist and newspaper editor Paul Gruchow (1947–
2004) gets at the truth of the autobiographical foundation of history
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Writing daily and everyday life
in saying, in the Introduction to Grass Roots, ‘All history is ultimately
local and personal. To tell what we remember, and keep on telling it,
is to keep the past alive in the present.’ And he adds, to know a place
is to inhabit it, which ‘means literally to have made a habit of it . . . to
wear it like a familiar garment . . . What is strange to us – unfamiliar
– can never be home.’2
John Berger elaborates on ‘home’, an old Norse word meaning
village. ‘Originally home meant the center of the world – not in a
geographical, but in an ontological sense.’ Home, Berger draws from
the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, ‘was the place from which
the world could be founded’. Finally, ‘without a home at the center of
the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being . . .
everything was fragmentation.’3 And without home as an anchor in
place, I would add, the everyday loses its assured coherence.
Gruchow gets at a second truth about the centring and anchor-
ing powers of home by affirming the validity of nostalgia. A Greek
compound word, nostalgia, combines nóstos, meaning homecoming,
a Homeric word, and álgos, meaning pain and ache. (It was coined in
the seventeenth century to describe the illness suffered by Swiss sol-
diers longing for home.) Gruchow has it that home, the ever-sought
centre, ‘is a place in time – and that we cannot know where we are now
unless we can remember where we have come from’.4
Out of nostalgia I wrote the long poem ‘Buddy Afloat’. It is
dedicated to an uncle who in the shadow of their torpedoed and
slow-to-sink transport ship, the Bliss, kept a dead friend afloat a
whole night in the autumn seas of 1942 off North Africa – and then
kept him and that night buoyant with a lifetime of memory. Of this
I wrote these closing lines:
I keep the dead
Together and afloat,
In the dispersing seas of time.
I do this
With the buoying grace of memory
And the treading kick of word and story.
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