"I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth"
About this Quote
Thorn’s line turns a mundane decision - whether to show up at an elementary school reunion - into a quietly brutal verdict on nostalgia. The key move is “running in background”: memory as an operating system, not a scrapbook. He isn’t choosing freely so much as noticing old processes quietly chewing through his present. That phrasing carries a historian’s sensibility: the past is never past; it’s infrastructure.
The reunion itself is staged as a trap. He “contemplated” attendance, then immediately undercuts it with “although I certainly anticipated that I would not,” a self-correction that reveals how little romance he grants the exercise. A PS 99 reunion isn’t about youth returning; it’s about bodies tallying time. “It smelled like death, not youth” is deliberately physical and unsentimental, swapping the soft-focus language of “reconnecting” for something animal and inevitable. Smell is the sense most tied to involuntary memory; by using it, Thorn suggests that the strongest thing the reunion might summon isn’t friendship but mortality.
Subtextually, this is an argument against the cultural script that reunions are restorative. Thorn reads them as institutionalized nostalgia, where people gather to perform continuity while privately auditing loss: who’s missing, who’s changed, who’s next. For a historian, that’s the bitter joke - the event marketed as celebration is, in practice, an encounter with the archive of one’s own life, and the archive doesn’t flatter. The sentence works because it refuses consolation; it treats sentimentality as a kind of denial, and replaces it with sensory truth.
The reunion itself is staged as a trap. He “contemplated” attendance, then immediately undercuts it with “although I certainly anticipated that I would not,” a self-correction that reveals how little romance he grants the exercise. A PS 99 reunion isn’t about youth returning; it’s about bodies tallying time. “It smelled like death, not youth” is deliberately physical and unsentimental, swapping the soft-focus language of “reconnecting” for something animal and inevitable. Smell is the sense most tied to involuntary memory; by using it, Thorn suggests that the strongest thing the reunion might summon isn’t friendship but mortality.
Subtextually, this is an argument against the cultural script that reunions are restorative. Thorn reads them as institutionalized nostalgia, where people gather to perform continuity while privately auditing loss: who’s missing, who’s changed, who’s next. For a historian, that’s the bitter joke - the event marketed as celebration is, in practice, an encounter with the archive of one’s own life, and the archive doesn’t flatter. The sentence works because it refuses consolation; it treats sentimentality as a kind of denial, and replaces it with sensory truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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