Review: 'The Traces,' by Mairead Small Staid

For eight months in the late 1990s, I worked for an English-language newspaper in Prague, while eagerly exploring every cobblestone with a lightheartedness that is unrecognizable now. In the nearly quarter- century since, I've remained restless, seeking that which I once had in abundance: optimism, avidity and, especially, happiness.

Such longings are not unique, I know, though I've often questioned how widespread they are. It is difficult to overstate the recognition and relatability I felt reading Mairead Small Staid's exceptional book-length essay "The Traces," about her own exploration of the happiness she felt at a particular time, in a particular place. For Staid, those particulars were the fall of 2008, when she was 20 years old and studying abroad in Florence, Italy. During that semester, her mind "felt on fire," Staid writes, and she was awed: "I wonder at my own wonder. At my own happiness, which is near constant — I wonder at this constancy."

"The Traces" is not some egocentric attempt at recapturing the flower of faded youth, however, but an intellectually rigorous rebuttal to such brooding quests. Before Italy, and immediately after, Staid was decidedly unhappy, dealing with manic depression "in its mildest form." Ties between depression and creativity are often embraced by artists as a burdensome blessing, and Staid admits to drinking the romantic Kool-Aid herself in the past.

"And I've succumbed, too, to the banal, embarrassing, and ancient belief that there's something interesting about madness and its attendant suffering, something far more fascinating — to art, to psychology — than health or happiness, dull old happiness, the province of pastel self-help books and treacly idioms."

To counter such tendencies, she draws on her contemporaneous notebooks as well as artistic and literary luminaries, starting with Italo Calvino, whose "Invisible Cities" animates her disquisition throughout, inspires a dizzying eight-city travelogue, and lends chapter titles to the collection.

She digs into da Vinci and Michelangelo, Dante and Cesare Pavese. And she traces eudaimonics — the art or theory of happiness — from its Aristotelian roots through Montaigne and Camus to Anne Carson. Eros, which Carson explains relies on a "desire for that which is missing," dovetails seamlessly with both Staid's present yearning for her past happiness and her past yearning for a classmate in Florence. Because of his girlfriend back in America, the two are unable to act on their mutual feelings, unable to meet in the "ways we might prefer," so they circle ever closer as her "heart performs its thundering two-step — Touch me, touch me, touch me."

Staid perceptively and evocatively captures the appeal of living in Florence, a city I have returned to repeatedly in my travels, and the emptiness of leaving it behind, a condition that has been called "la malattia del duomo," the sickness of the cathedral, referring to Brunelleschi's famous dome that dominates the skyline "like the eyes of a painting, following its watcher everywhere she goes."

There are no talismans here, no universal answers, but Staid's journey is the destination, even with its conflicted conclusions: "I want the suspended beginning — of travel, of eros — and I want home, want the relationship sustained." So do I, and for me, "The Traces" is a place I will revisit often.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

The Traces

By: Mairead Small Staid.

Publisher: A Strange Object, 252 pages, $17.95.