Read Prague for Free Online Page B

holding only the photo of the crying baby. He was surprised that he was not greatly surprised. He tickled the chin of the child in the photo and rocked the bundle lovingly, though he wondered if his actions would make the woman love him less or more. He was nervous to look at her lest he discover that all was not still well in his life, but finally he could not put off the moment any longer. He looked up, ready to kiss her, but she had left.
     
    WHATEVER    SAFETY    PRECAUTIONS    MARK    PAYTON    HAD TAKEN    IN    GRADUATE
     
    school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient.
     
    "Extraordinary creativity in research methodology" was a professor's assessment of Payton's doctoral work. The excitable professor had been referring to Mark's scholarly visits to museum gift shops, art-house and revival movie theaters, travel agencies, postcard and poster manufacturers, the airless and depressing conventions of collectors of sundry valuable and valueless oddities, and antique stores, among other outlets of nostalgia. There was not an antique shop in Toronto or Montreal that had not received the peculiar letter, requesting highly specific information: ". . . categorized records of old orders and sales, organized by year . . . shifts in popularity of certain items/eras as listed below ... sudden spikes in demand for particular styles ... paintings organized by subject, rather than artist... the enclosed checklist comparing sales of specified items in ten-year intervals ..." The letters were followed by visits from a pale, overweight, jarringly eager red-haired student with a slight tic in his left eyelid.
     
    In this fieldwork, Mark had grown familiar with all the major Canadian species of antiquarian: rude, barely literate pawnbrokers who seemed to hate their buyers, their sellers, and their business but who wore old-fashioned visors and vests that were marks of nostalgia in themselves; reflexively, calibratedly untruthful jewelers with wrinkles around only one eye, a professional hazard from hours and weeks and years of squinting through loupes; furniture refin-ishers, as chummy as used-car salesmen, who spoke in broad accents about the Second Umpire and Louie Cans; matrons with two hundred years of regal and fanciful china patterns archived in their memories, driving from their heads the names of their own husbands, children, grandchildren; buxom, middle-aged

     
     
    divorcees who had invested their savings and alimony payments in a long-held dream but a bad idea and so ended up running discomfortingly clean but bizarrely stocked shops with names like The Den of Antiquity, Ancient Chinese Secret, Bea's Hive, and Mother's Attic; dust-covered booksellers, their skin like vellum paper, their eyes compensating for the aridity of their shops with excessive wetness; statue specialists, little round men distinguishable from the plaster Cupids that made up their stock only by their waistcoats and their ability to walk and speak.
     
    The questions Mark asked of this core sampling of history merchants brought him overflowing data, which filled notebooks and computer diskettes by the hogshead, by the peck, by the avoirdupois ounce.
     
    To quantify nostalgia, to graph it backward into the misty and sweet-smelling past, to enumerate its causes and its expressions and its costs, to determine the nature of societies and personalities most affected by the disorder—these were Mark Payton's obsessions, and he wove academic laurels from their leaves. He strained to establish laws as measurable and irrefutable as the laws of physics or meteorology. He strove, for example, to determine whether there was, within a given population, a ratio, p/c, that could predict the relationship between individuals with a "strong" or "very strong" leaning to Personal Nostalgia (i.e., nostalgia for events within one's own past) and those with a commensurate leaning to Collective Nostalgia (i.e.,