Parenting & Family Quote by Michael Chabon

Chabon turns nostalgia into something almost chemical: a rush triggered not by a grand revelation but by the “old paper smell” escaping a box. That sensory hook is doing the heavy lifting. Smell is the least polite sense; it bypasses our curated narratives and yanks up whatever we thought we’d outgrown. By making memory “pour out,” he frames the past as a physical substance, not an idea. The comics aren’t just artifacts; they’re a storage device for a self.

The phrasing is quietly haunted. “One remaining box” carries the implication of loss and attrition: the rest is gone, thrown out, donated, burned off by adulthood’s constant editing. What’s left survives almost by accident, and that accident becomes sacred. Chabon’s real subject isn’t comics so much as the way “low” culture gets recoded over time. The thing you once hid, folded, or treated as disposable becomes, decades later, a reliquary.

There’s also a sly challenge to the adult myth of linear growth. He’s “struck” by a “childhood self” that “seemed to be contained in there,” as if identity is modular, stashed away, retrievable. It flatters the reader’s desire to believe the earlier self remains intact, waiting in a shoebox. Yet the word “seemed” keeps it honest: the past isn’t literally preserved, it’s reconstructed in the moment of contact. The comics function as a portal, but the time travel happens in his body first, then in his story.