{"id":74016,"date":"2014-07-16T15:34:30","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T19:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74016"},"modified":"2014-07-16T15:55:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T19:55:00","slug":"tragic-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/16\/tragic-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Tragic Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Axes<\/a>

Axes from The Shining<\/i> at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Eric Chan, via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn\u2019t real. I know that, and I also know that if I\u2019m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle. \u2015Stephen King<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The rain is pouring up here in Maine: King country. The weather is regenerative and generous, but awfully forbidding, too. Someone hearty told me that this weather is, in fact, the best time to take walks up here\u2014certain vivid mosses have been known to appear. But this is the sort of individual who enjoys icy five A.M. swims, and I did not want to admit that my study of bryology never really extended beyond carpeting bowers for the occasional fairy, and that said experiments generally resulted in pulling up large hunks of moss, moving them, and then being surprised when they died. In short, I am still indoors. And for good measure, we watched The Shining<\/em>. I remembered it having been much scarier.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia:<\/p>\n

\n

Cabin fever is an idiomatic term, first recorded in 1918, for a claustrophobic reaction that takes place when a person or group is isolated and\/or shut in a small space, with nothing to do for an extended period. Cabin fever describes the extreme irritability and restlessness a person may feel in these situations.<\/p>\n

A person may experience cabin fever in a situation such as being in a simple country vacation cottage. When experiencing cabin fever, a person may tend to sleep, have distrust of anyone they are with, and an urge to go outside even in the rain, snow, dark or hail. The phrase is also used humorously to indicate simple boredom from being home alone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I would expand on this definition, though I\u2019m still in the early stages of cabin fever. I\u2019d say that it can also lead afflicted individuals\u2014individuals, that is, who have finished all the books they\u2019ve brought\u2014to read numerous late-seventies novels featuring insouciant, sexually liberated heroines, who engage in casual screwing (this is the preferred terminology) and say \u201cChrist\u201d a lot. Cabin fever sometimes manifests in numerous terrible attempts at colored-pencil portraiture that make your companions look sort of like Harry Truman. In some cases, there have been instances recorded of butterscotch brownies made without a recipe <\/em>and bras hand washed in shampoo, because.<\/p>\n

Cabin fever, as we know, is a leading catalyst to murder. We live in the post\u2013Scary Movie<\/em> world; we are jaded to the mechanisms of easy fear. Nevertheless, a small, innocent part of me is willfully alive to the possibilities of horror movie outcomes; although not particularly inclined to it myself, I feel pleasantly murderable. Indeed, if one might be said to encourage such things (not in a London Fields<\/em> sort of way, I mean), I\u2019d say everything is set in motion: a remote cabin, plenty of woods, and the general arrogant high spirits of an outsider who\u2019s kind of asking for it. I\u2019m not eager<\/em> for it, but it seems to me better to be mentally prepared. And besides, I would quite like the New York Post<\/em> to call me a \u201ctragic beauty,\u201d or maybe even a \u201cbrainy beauty\u201d because I wear glasses\u2014the beauty bar for the tragic is generously low.<\/p>\n

We have joked about it. There were some men working with chainsaws nearby the other day, before the fine weather broke. We could hear the whir of the chainsaws coming closer and closer as we huddled inside.\u00a0 And of course, it wasn\u2019t even scary; it was too much of a clich\u00e9. And the men were very nice. I don\u2019t think they saw that I was, secretly, a tragic beauty, just waiting to be recognized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn\u2019t real. I know that, and I also know that if I\u2019m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle. \u2015Stephen King The rain is pouring up here in Maine: King country. The weather is regenerative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[14630,14631,14629,959,1826,4110],"class_list":["post-74016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-bad-books","tag-boredom","tag-cabin-fever","tag-maine","tag-murder","tag-stephen-king"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTragic Beauty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on Stephen Cabin and the early stages of cabin fever.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/16\/tragic-beauty\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tragic Beauty by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 16, 2014 \u2013 The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn\u2019t real. 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