The Daily

Our Daily Correspondent

Stuff and Nonsense

August 6, 2014 | by





Allergies are a relatively modern malady, the product of industrialization, urban living, and deforestation. Almost any diet craze worth its salt will claim a diminution of symptoms as one of its benefits. If the subject interests you, try Gregg Mitman’s excellent Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. It’s a colorful read—the allergy industry is mind boggling—but also a sobering one, as discussions of pollution and urban planning are inextricably linked with cynical questions of politics and marginalization. (And quite often, the lifelong health effects are very far from benign.)

As a child, I had no patience with my parents’ allergies—their constant sniffling, their inability to smell and taste certain things, their chronic sense of being unwell without ever really seeming sick. When I got older, I suddenly appreciated why they’d had boxes of aloe-soft tissues in every room in the house. I even understood why they moved to Arizona—although that still strikes me as a drastic step.

They, whoever “they” are, say it is a bad year for allergies, but it always seems to be a bad year for allergies. I even forget which the bad seasons are supposed to be, since pollen and ragweed and rotting leaves all seem awful in their own unique ways.

E. B. White, again, has the right idea. As usual, he is magnanimous without mawkishness:

Webster, even though he knew very little about the cause of hay fever, must have found, just as I find, in this strange sensitivity to male dust and earth’s fertile attitude a compensatory feeling—a special identification with life’s high mystery that in some measure indemnifies us for the violence and humiliation of our comic distress that makes up for the unfulfillment of our most cherished dream.