Of Loos and Language

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.

“Knackered?”

The word — meaning more than tired, beat — transported me to the England of my youth, a place of hissing gas fires, metered hot water, contempt for “the Continent,” schoolboys in corduroy shorts, crows over the rubbish dumps, skinheads on the tube, Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, soggy leaves and solid fog.

Aging is like that. The memories pile up. More things are done for the last time than the first. It doesn’t take much to be transported.

Yes, I was knackered — and suddenly nostalgic for the churning clouds of London, the damp mustiness of pre-prosperous England, and the mist hovering in an Oxford dawn.

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