![]() ![]() As Svetlana Boym has written, nostalgia was first understood not as an emotional longing, but as a medical affliction that alienated its sufferer from the present. In her novels, Hazzard exhibited an uncanny capacity for dissecting the ways people become anchored by, even frozen in, the past. ![]() ![]() ![]() The surprise, too, was that Hazzard was angled forward, toward the future, a temporal aspect often absent from her fictions, which are deeply entrenched in and attendant to feelings and events lost to time. Her comments that night were unanticipated reminders of a once agile, deeply political mind. “I have felt increasingly in recent years,” she began, “that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element now, that we’re waiting for something terrible to happen.” Hazzard died in 2016, but I confess I wonder what she’d make of our precarious present, the more and more inescapable sense that, should there be a future, chaos will be its prevailing mode. At her last public appearance in September 2012, the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard-visibly beset by escalating physical frailties and the mental disorientations of dementia-surprised the audience with a set of brief remarks. ![]()
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