"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 8
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Harold Bloom
16 min read
Directly mentioned as a literary critic Stephen was encouraged to read by his teacher. Bloom's theories on the 'anxiety of influence' and the Western Canon are central to understanding the intellectual aspirations of the protagonist and his generation's relationship to literary tradition.
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The Criterion Collection
15 min read
Stephen's obsession with 'Criterion movies' and filmmakers like Fellini, Bergman, Godard, and Antonioni represents his autodidactic cultural education. Understanding the Criterion Collection's role in film preservation and curation illuminates the character's artistic aspirations.
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Flâneur
13 min read
Stephen explicitly lists 'flaneur' among his desired activities. This 19th-century concept of the urban wanderer-observer, developed by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, perfectly captures his romanticized vision of intellectual leisure and his resistance to practical work.
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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
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2010
Stephen unchained his bike from the fence that wrapped around to his building on Genesee Street in Syracuse, New York. Kicked away the stand and, standing up and resting on the handles, started to pedal uphill towards campus and the University Library, which were less than a mile as the crow flies away. It was the first week of school of his senior year.
He loved September and October in Syracuse before the unavoidable opulence of a long snowy season; and he was dimly, and intentionally so, aware that the kind of freedom he had now was not permanent (which his father’s persistent questions over the summer about what he planned to do only underscored); so there was a dissonance in the feeling that life was good (and it was) and anxiety that couldn’t be this way forever, or for very long.
Stephen wanted to watch Criterion movies, read poetry, philosophy, fiction, travel, flaneur; he didn’t want ...
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